On Thu, 20 Nov 2003 11:06:41 +0000, (Dan
Holdsworth) wrote:

On Tue, 18 Nov 2003 19:46:09 -0000, Oliver Keating

was popularly supposed to have said:

[...]

The problem is that fuel duty is an incredibly crude lever, because the
"true cost" of your journey depends strongly on time of day and location,
only a satellite based congestion charging system could account for this.

Actually, a satelite-based system is one of the poorer options for this
sort of pricing. GPS satelites are USA-controlled systems. If, as has
happened in the past, the US military decide that their enemies are using
it, the US government has the option to degrade the signals.

So, if you use satelites, you're beholden to a foreign power which although
it is our friend at the moment, may not be so in future. This is not a
sensible course of action.

Which is why the EU is building Galileo as a "public" (i.e. not
military) system:

http://europa.eu.int/comm/dgs/energy.../future_en.htm
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