Don't be fooled by the Black Box!

If you're currently considering saving money on your car insurance by installing a "pay as you drive" black box, I urge you on behalf of all motorists to thing of the concequences before you do as you may be helping the government to change the way we drive, and not in a good way.

At least one insurance company is now offering a box for £50 which, when installed in your car, will allow your insurer to bill you by the mile instead of having to pay a fixed premium. In addition, if you are a young driver you will get a further discount if you promise not to drive at night and the same box will tell them if you do. The potential difference in your insurance cost might sound good now, but this box can also be used for other things.

What about road pricing? We've been hearing a lot about this recently and it's not the sort of thing they have in France where you pay at a toll-booth and in return get very good, very well maintained roads. What our govenment is talking about is scrapping road tax, reducing fuel tax, and then charging us by the mile based on when we drive and which roads we use. Good if you only do a few short journeys during the day, but if you use your car to get to work, take the kids to the nearest school (sometimes a long way if you're in rural areas!) or visiting family then prepare to pay through the nose.

You might be interested to find out that one of the companies involved in developing the black box for road pricing is also a major insurer. One of the companies bidding to get involved in road pricing is Norwich Union, for many years the one company who would insure just about anybody. Oddly enough Norwich Union now known as Aviva who also own the RAC, an organisation who in the past we have trusted to defend our rights as drivers. Is this a conflict of interest? Either way they stand to profit.

On to the black box itself. We're being told that the reason behind insuring your car through a black box is to save money and (given the young driver option) to improve road safety. We're then told that the reason behind road pricing is to reduce traffic levels and improve the environment. In the longer term there will be other uses for these black boxes. First they will be used to monitor our speeds so that speeding tickets can be issued without all the mucking about with cameras. When the number of tickets issued goes through the roof it will then be decided that the same boxes should be used to control our speed so that we can't break the speed limit.

But won't all this be good for road safety and the environment?

Simple answer, no. Speed limits in this country are already being set too low and road policing has moved away from skilled traffic officers to speed cameras. Regardless of what you're being told by the scamera partnerships around the UK the number of deaths and injuries on our roads is actually increasing. Deaths amongst road workers has gone up in the last 2 years, the same period in which motorway roadwork speed limits have been reduced from 50mph to 40mph and speed cameras have started to be used. At the same time the number of speeding tickets being issued (and the resultant income from fines!) has increased. In the years since speed limiters has been fitted in HGV's the number of crashes in those vehicles has gone up (the site at http://www.cybertrucker.co.uk/has some good information on this phenomenom). Through all of this though local authorities are still telling us that the answer is more cameras and more action to slow drivers down. As a concequence we're spending more time looking at our speedometers instead of the roads. Speedometers are often inaccurate by up to 10% so people tempers get frayed when people drive through speed cameras much lower than the speed limit actually requires. There is already bad enough misunderstanding of the speed limits are set in the UK (my TomTom SatNav lists many speed cameras incorrectly, probably because of poor reporting because of this misunderstanding). Unfortunatly drivers are going to cry out for speed limiters to avoid breaking speed limits!

Even if you believe all the climate change hype, these black boxes are going to do very little to help. It has been proven that the vehicles thought to be damaging the environment are actually cleaner than those which are supposed to help (anybody stuck behind a half empty bus belching black smoke will know this!). The people who will be penalised will be the hard-working public who will be forced off of the best roads onto country roads during peak periods putting traffic back into the villages who in the past campaigned for bypasses so that their children could safely cross the roads. Those who can afford the road charges will most likely be those who can also afford the big gas guzzlers. These people are the same ones who run the insurance companies and the others involved in road pricing. These people are rubbing their hands right now thinking of how they will have made our motorways emptier so they can get from A to B in less time while we all play sardines on the already creaking public transport system.