by David Finlay (22 Feb 07)

"The idea of tracking every vehicle at all times is sinister and wrong. Road pricing is already here with the high level of taxation on fuel. The more you travel - the more tax you pay. It will be an unfair tax on those who live apart from families and poorer people who will not be able to afford the high monthly costs. Please Mr Blair - forget about road pricing and concentrate on improving our roads to reduce congestion."

These are the words of what has proved to be by far the most popular - and certainly the most controversial - of the petitions created on the No.10 Downing Street website. The e-petition scheme was launched in November 2006, and in the same month Peter Roberts took the opportunity to write the above statement in the hope that a few of his friends would do the electronic equivalent of signing it.

The petition closed at midnight on February 20 - not because of some sinister government plot (just in case anyone thinks that) but because that was the date set by Roberts himself. Well before then, it was already being described as "the road pricing petition". That's a reasonable shorthand title, but it's not entirely accurate. The No.10 site lists 32 petitions of a more or less similar nature, several of them in favour of road pricing.

If you have the time and inclination, they are worthy of study, though in some cases only for their entertainment value. At the time of writing, one of the most popular calls for existing and planned tolls, road pricing and congestion charges to be scrapped; nearly 8000 people have supported that one. Two others - entitled "Scrap the idea of road pricing" and "Don't scrap the planned vehicle tracking and road pricing policy" - have gained similar levels of support at just over 3600 signatures each.

Yet another petition (which has so far gained just one signature) suggests that, once road pricing has been introduced, the resulting surplus of cars in the UK can be fixed by exporting all vehicles over two years old "to Africa or somewhere", which I suppose is quite cute as long as whoever wrote it isn't above the age of, say, ten.

The Roberts petition might have ended up with somewhere between one and 8000 signatures if it hadn't received a boost quite early on. Roberts started off by e-mailing links to about 30 friends and colleagues, without dramatic results. But he is a member of the outspoken Association of British Drivers, and when the ABD found out what was going on it quickly added a link to its own website, and was soon sending out regular press releases giving details of the petition's progress.

As more people signed, more press coverage was generated, so more people got to hear about the petition and more people signed it. The rise was something to behold. By Christmas, there were 50,000 signatures. In the first week of 2007 the figure reached 100,000. Before the end of the second week the 250,000 milestone had been reached. And so it all went on, until by the closing date there were around 1.8 million signatures.

By these means the Roberts petition single-handedly justified the existence of the whole e-petition concept. But if champagne glasses are being clinked together in Westminster as a result, the sound is well muffled. There has been a strong call for the Government to abandon a policy it clearly hopes to implement, and that can't be a comfortable situation for those in power.

It would be too easy, though, to distill all this down into something too simple; to pretend that an irresistible force has met an immovable object; to say that the politicians are definitely going to introduce a measure which the public does not want. The public has not spoken with one voice. You would have trouble fitting 1.8 million people into the same room, but if they all watched the same television programme that programme would not be considered outstandingly popular, and if they represented the majority by which a political party came into power you could reasonably say that it had been a close-fought election.

Similarly, although 1.8 million people represent a level of support unheard of in the short history of e-petitions, they do not make up an overwhelming proportion of the number of drivers who would be affected by road pricing, and who have heard about the petition through print, broadcast and online media, and who have the computer access and internet savvy to support the petition if they wanted to.

There is similar vagueness on the other side of the argument. Tony Blair's response to the petitioners makes several points which are undoubtedly true, and some which demolish any idea that road pricing is definitely going to happen and is just around the corner. For example: congestion is bad; congestion is getting worse; nobody has all the answers yet; it will be a long time - perhaps more than a decade - before road pricing is technologically feasible (and therefore it definitely won't come in while Blair is in power, probably not while Gordon Brown is in power, possibly not at a time when there is a Labour Government).

But Blair's message is itself unconvincing in several ways. It is not helpful, for instance, to support the idea of UK road pricing by saying - as Blair does - that road pricing schemes (clearly of a much less technically complex nature than the proposed one that involves satellite tracking of all cars) are in operation in Italy, Norway and Singapore, when conditions in those countries are so unlike ours. It is not good enough to say that "stories about possible costs are simply not credible, since they depend on so many variables yet to be investigated, never mind decided" when it is clear that a major road pricing scheme would be outstandingly expensive to implement, even if exact figures can't be determined for some time.

And then there's this one. "I know many people's biggest worry about road pricing is that it will be a 'stealth tax' on motorists. It won't. Road pricing is about tackling congestion." Once again there is too much scope for vagueness on both sides. Some motorists complain that any tax which does not benefit them is unfair - but expecting, for example, all the revenue raised on fuel to be spent on road improvements is like expecting alcohol and tobacco duty to be used for redecorating pubs and developing more effective air fresheners.

At the same time, though, why claim that road pricing is a deterrent to congestion as if people liked congestion? People don't sit in traffic jams because they want to, and they would find ways of avoiding it if they could: the point has been made so often that its relevance has almost been forgotten, but it remains relevant and it has never been properly answered.

Blair says that he wants the debate to continue, and that the Roberts petition represents "the beginning, not the end". We are certainly an immense distance away from solving the problem of traffic congestion in the UK, whether or not road pricing comes into it, and if we're going to get any closer there will have to be clear thinking and an understanding of (not necessarily agreement with) other people's views on the part of anyone who contributes to the discussion. From what we've seen so far, I'm not as confident as I'd like to be that this will happen.

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