It's hardly surprising that more than a million people have already signed up against road pricing. As they stand, the sketchy proposals to charge people for the distance they travel by car rather than for the amount of fuel they use or the size of the car they drive promise to be a political and social disaster.
The theory is fine and in accordance with the well-established "polluter pays" principle. It also makes common sense, and it would undoubtedly make people think twice about getting in the car. But I would not trust for a moment all these claims by environmement groups and ministers that the system introduced will be "fair" or environmentally "just".
The problem is that government and business have created a situation where people must now travel ever further to to work and to shop and to play. Families no longer live the round the corner from each other. Long distance travel is now no longer a choice but a necessity. We all travel twice as much as we did only 25 years ago. Few of us want to travel so much. and not many have the option.
In my experience, it is the poor and the middle classes who have to travel by car the most now. The rich have their groceries delivered, live next to their work, and can afford the pricey shops in the pricier specialist shops in town centres. This is the age of the car and it's almost impossible now to get to hospitals, supermarkets or banks without one.
The problem of congestion and pollution is indeed going to get worse, but only because the government policies are forcing people to travel further. When government says it wants people to travel less in their cars, then it must help them with public transport and alternatives.
Just promoting a futuristic police-style technology will never be welcomed. The Big Brother fears may well be unfounded but if you tell everyone that they can be tracked anywhere they go, then of course people will be angry.
The second problem is that what will start with a few motorway trials will be extended quickly to all trunk roads and then to minor roads. Before long the scheme will cover all Britain. This invests enormous extra powers in government.
For the first time it will be able to engineer rapid social change through fiscal means. If, say, it wants more people to live in the Thames Gateway area, it will be able to encourage them with cheap roads. It will be able to discourage people from going to some places and encourage them to go elsewhere.
The third problem is that no system will be remotely foolproof. This one will cost billions of pounds to set up, and will force everyone to pay for the technology. There will always be significant numbers of people - the old, the young or whoever - who will be penalised and be forced to move .
Already, more than one million people feel that the scheme is unfair. Could road pricing become Labour's poll tax? Possibly. Once a cause is identified, as here, then it's hard to shift opinions.
Unless government and the environment groups take people with it, it cannot possibly win this argument. It must make it easy for people to reduce car use, must explain far more fearfully why it wants to radically change the way we all think about travel, and it must produce some real studies to show what the environmental and social effects would be.
In the meantime, if government genuinely wants to cut transport emissions at a stroke with only a trivial incursion on personal liberty, all it needs do is reduce the speed limit on main roads. The Tyndall Centre for climate change reseaarch says that just enforcing the 70mph limit would reduce carbon dioxide emissions from road transport by 3%. A 10% cut would reduce it by more than 15%.
