Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Place, is aiming to create such networks around the globe. According to
his plan (called Better Plan), the procedure for the battery exchange is
that the car is driven over a pit, in which there is a robotic device that
extracts the exhausted battery and inserts a fresh one - all in a couple of
minutes, or the time it would take to fill up your car with petrol.
Road pricing
The practice of charging for road use in order to raise revenue and pay for
infrastructure is ancient. Some toll roads and turnpikes go back centuries,
and today governments levy taxes on vehicles and on petrol. But the idea
of charging in order to deter road use and to prevent congestion is recent.
The aim is to ration road use by price. For instance, road use could be
regulated by charging those who wished to drive on the busiest roads at
the busiest times of day more than those driving at night on empty high-
ways. One refinement to such models might be to let cleaner vehicles pay
less, or exempt them totally, and make dirtier ones pay more.
Singapore started congestion charging in 1975 and such schemes are
becoming more common in European cities, with two well-known exam-
ples in London and Stockholm: London's congestion charge is waived
for electric vehicles. The technology involved in city-centre congestion
charging is relatively simple, with cameras placed on the boundary of the
congestion zone to photograph vehicle licence plates. A much more con-
troversial idea is to extend this idea into national road-pricing schemes,
which no country- apart from the small city-state of Singapore-has yet
done.
National schemes would require satellite-based systems. Vehicles would
have to contain a satellite tracking-device that would determine which
roads were being driven along, for how far and at what time of day. This
information would then be sent to a central computer system, and the
appropriate charges levied against the driver. All these schemes, whether
city congestion-charging or national road-pricing, meet stiff resistance.
The Left often complains that congestion charging is regressive taxation
hitting the poor hardest, while the Right frequently objects on libertarian
grounds.
In the UK, the Labour government talked as recently as 2007 of intro-
ducing a national road-pricing scheme, as recommended by various
expert reports. But the idea has stirred strong opposition from people
who immediately placed a petition on the No. 10 Downing Street web-
site - the petitions facility being an innovation introduced by the same