Road user charging in the UK. Where will we be 10 years from now?

This paper examines and comments on the current issues of road-user charging in the UK from two perspectives, the technical and the political. The paper concludes that the lack of appropriate technology will not be the constraint in implementing road-user charging in the near future in the UK. However the now up and running local authority schemes in London and Durham, the on-going National Trials in Leeds, the policy of introducing distance-based charging for HGV's and the recent announcement by the Secretary of State for Transport to examine the possibility for a national road use charging scheme utilising a probable black-box approach in all UK registered vehicles suggests certain policy and technology divergences which may be difficult to 'sell' to the public.