[Adrian E]

For my sins I actually worked on a project under an old labour administration that was trialling road user charging. We ran a technology demonstrator (after track trials) with gantries, DSRC tags and beacons, back office with ANPR, even to the point of generating 'real' bills for real drivers (they were never sent out, obviously!).

Alongside intelligent speed adaptation (another project I was deeply involved with!) it was seen as very big brother, and when the public appetite for big government dropped off, so did the enthusiasm for these projects.

What really killed RUC was a transport minister stating that it would be revenue neutral. If you think about the costs involved in infrastructure (both physical and organisational) compared to the cost of running a website that you log in to once a year in order to cough up for VED, that would mean a MASSIVE hit to the public purse.

There were 2 things predominantly driving RUC - a drop in VED and fuel duty income due to more low VED cars/hybrids appearing, and congestion/air quality. Every time one of those things becomes a focus of debate, the old RUC chestnut reappears!

Something will need to change IF we ever get to the panacea by 2030 of which BoJo speaks, but has little power to influence, and fuel duty income falls substantially (it's interesting data to look at in terms of how quickly cars expire) but if we see anything before 2040 I'd be utterly amazed.

GPS simply isn't robust enough in terms of accuracy (the USA can turn the accuracy down whenever they feel like it for strategic reasons and/or if satellites are in short supply), we're no longer signed up to full fat Galileo either, and you need something to deal with those dropouts that occur in most urban environments as a result of 'canyons' formed by tall buildings (try using Google maps or similar after you've just walked out of a building in London or similarly built up city). It could be your odometer, but that's ripe for fraud. Blocking GPS signals requires some tin foil over the receiver (remembering that GPS is a broadbast signal from space, so it's power is VERY low!) and you can jam an entire area with a device the size of a shoe box (including the battery to power it)

Insurers do it because SOME data on driver behaviour for young drivers OUGHT to provide an indicator of their underlying risk. It's a different, but still risk-based, decision as to what to charge. There are plenty of examples of these black boxes snapping to the wrong road if you're driving along. If you are driving on a motorway next to a 30mph road and it decides you are actually on the 30mph road, it'll think you're doing over double the speed limit......

It's a minefield and we're nowhere near ready in technology terms