Slashdot Mirror
Every Road a Toll Road
Great Britain is looking at a couple of different proposals for "universal road pricing", making every public road a toll road via GPS and black boxes in vehicles. There are also articles by the main proponent of universal tolls, and an editorial from the paper suggesting higher gas taxes instead.
The first time I saw the title I thought it said "Every road a troll road". I mean, I like to browse at -1 sometimes myself, but please keep the trolls off the roads! :-)
Laugh at stupidity: mod idiots +1 Funny.
In the US, roads are paid for by taxes. Thus, the poor can have equal use of all roads. (On the East coast, some highways are toll, but the majority of roads are still "free".
But, if all roads are toll, then what about the poor fellow? Over time, the use of roads will become the realm of the wealthy...
Is this what we want?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Why not use a bit of the huge percentage of the taxes used for millitary spending and use that for improvement of roads and other infastructure. Even after the attacks against America (tm) on 9/11 (c), American millitary spending needs to decrease. No more multi-million dollar cruise missles, and cut the amount of nuclear arms in half to help decrease the load spent on maintaining them.
Ok, are you a military fan? How about taxes on SUVs and other High Fuel Consumption vehicles (tax the fuel, as stated in the article). You don't need a 4 wheel drive urban tank to get to point B from point A in a city.
"It's the little touches that make a future solid enough to be destroyed" --William S. Bourroughs
Think about how it'll cut down on emissions. Sure it'll punish the poor for using the roads and further widen the gap between the "haves" and the "have-nots", but at least it's environmentally friendly.
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
The proponents of this either deliberately neglect or silently want the tracking information linking the citizens to their movements. This is the thinnest mask over, and potentially the biggest intrusion in modern times into personal freedoms. This would give GB the ability to know where a large portion of their populace was when outside their homes.
If _every_ road was a toll road, then it would be simple enough to just have a tax based on your odometer reading when you renew, along with the odometer being required to be functioning, that would serve the goal and be much less intrusive.
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
This system seems to me like it could be extended for other uses, IE catching people who speed. 5mph over, you get fined. Definately seems to me have the possibilies to really invade peoples privacy by knowing when, where, and how fast people were going. But on the other hand this technology could be used to help investigations after accidents. The black box could be used to determine an accurate speed of the vehicals involved.
Limey bastards. Socialist fools.
A column in the New York Times (you know the deal) proposes the same thing for this fine city. I think it's a great idea. A gas tax is far less efficient: it will over-encourage (economically) inefficient fuel efficiency improvements, and won't have other good properties, like encouraging people to seek out less-congested roads or travel at less-busy times.
There's a separate reason for distance-based charges: auto insurance. Every car on the road, especially a busy road, imposes a large externality on the others: even drunk drivers are mostly harmless even to themselves if they're lucky enough to stay off busy streets. (It takes two to tango in most accidents, in other words, even if one of them is more "at fault" legally or morally.) Charging for car insurance by the mile, rather than the year, would get more cars off the road and reduce accidents for all of us.
Long live corrective taxes!
I Can't Believe It's A Law Firm, LLP does not necessarily endorse the contents of this message.
Wouldn't "from the quadruple-edged-chip dept." be more appropriate?
If we port Linux to the "black boxes" in our cars, add an 802.11b connection then we can have one hell of a beowolf cluster.
That's right get stuck in a beowolf cluster on the way to work, finish of 2 seti units while you wait.
Rather expensive implementation. A gas tax would have the same effect less the implementation costs of a black box in each car. Clearly other motive are in play if this article is legitimate.
IIRC, the U.S. DOT has truckers log their mileage in states, and they pay road taxes based on their travel. This is why they don't pay gas taxes.
It seems to me that the British plan is flawed.... the expense of outfitting cars with the "Black boxes" would cause a bigger hit than it would be worth to most people.
Of course, this is the same country that taxed TV viewing, so what can you expect from the crazy socialists there.
Great idea- but have you ever met a government who will reduce/erase tax, even when they have a replacment stream of revenue?? I doubt it... This means I'll be paying over the odds for fuel, then I'll have to pay for the privilege of using the fuel I've just bought, as well as having to pay a silly amount just to go and get my fuel.
Now where'd I put my boots...
And to all those outside the UK who are about to suggest public transport, don't. It's just not funny anymore.
And on the evening of the first day the lord said... LX 1, STANDBY; LX 1, GO!; and there was light.
This seems at first to be a great idea, and the Guardian newspaper totally misses the point when it says that petrol taxes do the same thing.
"The CFIT report argues for congestion to be the measure for charging, not miles or time travelled or city limits. Prices would be based on historical traffic patterns, regularly updated, and aimed at smoothing out notorious bottlenecks, rush-hour gridlock, school-run snarl-ups and motorway tailbacks. "
The GPS system enables location and time to be priced in addition to miles travelled. That is fair... but..but..but it also creates inequities.
Basically it means that the poor are less able than the rich to be in some locations at some times. Roads currently are a democratic system of equal suffering. The limosine is stuck in traffic with the Escort during rush hour.
Is it a better world if the limosine can travel fast because the Escorts can't afford to be in that part of town at that time of day?
The inefficiency of petrol based taxes, or our inability to price time and location of travel, creates a more equal distribution of suffering.
Does the reduction in suffering from traffic jams for the well to do represent such a public good that we can ignore the fact that the poor can no longer afford to commute to jobs at certain hours and days?
The more I think about it the less I like it.
The people who use the roads should pay to keep the roads up. As far as poor people are concerned in a previous post, they should be living in a condition where they don't need to travel in a car that often. If they can't do that, then I dunno how they survive even owning a car and paying for the commute. Otherwise, why do they think they should get a free ride on everyone else's taxes to use the roads without paying for them (yes, they do pay taxes, but quite a bit less, besides the straight gas tax like in Michigan).
For the people who do live in the east and have had a chance to drive on toll roads, ever notice how nice and kept up they are? While it still only costs a few bucks to travel quite a decent distance along them.
The only situation that would cause problems would be trying to make extremely small, local roads toll roads. I would still probably agree to support Main St.s, downtown streets, and alleys through public taxes. But all county, state, and federal roads should be supported through a toll system - once there is an efficient enough way to implement a system.
In the US, we pay for roads with taxes on fuel. This is advantageous in that it encourages economy as well as correlates with the amount of driving a person does. Heavier vehicles generally do more damage than smaller vehicles...so there generally is a direct correlation between fuel consumption and road use.
As for the every road is a toll road concept. This currently exists in trucking. Truck drivers fill out logs showing which states they cross. (You notice how trucks always have to stop at ports of entry). State troopers audit these logs and the trucking companies pay taxes according to the miles driven in each state.
Basically, the current system gives us everything we need. The only problem I see is, if in the future, we introduce electric or alternate fuel vehicles that could avoid fuel taxes.
To try to put a black box in everyone's cars would cost more than anyone in England would care to pay taxes for on top of all the pretty dresses they buy the Queen and her family.
It would also run off the battery power of the car, which would cause everyone to buy new car batteries every five days, which no one would enjoy.
The computer mainframes to record all the stuff is ridiculous, considering how many they'd have to purchase (and the PSE&G price tag per month to run the damn things), and how would you bill it? Are you going to send a bill to the person the car is registered to? What if someone steals your car? What if you lend your car to someone?
And this is all on top of the debate about rich people vs. poor people. It's just a generally bad idea. If you want, kick the royal family out and that will save Britain millions each year from upkeep of the palace to the giant pointless banquets to the huge wardrobes that do no one good anyway.
Whoever thought of this must be smoking something heavily.
Anonymous Coward: (n.) 1. nerd at school or library. 2. karmawhore in training. 3. embarrased prep.
Ooops, sorry wrong road. :^)
Well it's bad enough in London, the tolls will kill ya along with the parking. Now these poor guys aren't even getting lubrication on this one.
Hmm let's see you want a car...Take your pants off.
Oh your going to need insurance...Bend-over..
And you need to drive in a city and park...put you hand in this.
WAIT! Your going to drive on our roads?..get your hand out,you wont need it!
This SIG pulled due to lack of funding. (This damn war is costing too much!)
This could be done without tracking individual by having each vehicle do its own metering, which would have varying rates depending on location. No government run centralized database needed.
But of course, then the true objective of tracking each individual could not be achieved...
More like, haha, I'm an American. I'm commenting on Britain from across the sea, not commenting on Britain from a complete insiders point of view.
Whoopah.
Anonymous Coward: (n.) 1. nerd at school or library. 2. karmawhore in training. 3. embarrased prep.
Well, I think this is a good idea, as you would only end up having to pay for the roads that you actually use, instead of having to pay (out of your pocket) for the all of the roads. Before (and still) there was no way to figure out what roads people used, so there would never be any practical way to privatize roads because you couldn't charge people for usage of them. It's the old free rider problem, there is no way to make it so that people who don't pay for it don't use it.
On the flip side, there are problems with this. Of course as someone mentioned it does hit the lower income people harder, but current taxes do that as well, because almost all taxes except for income tax are regressive taxes, which mean that lower income people pay a higher percentage than higher income. Sales tax, Gas Tax, even the lottery are all regressive taxes. At least with this system, you would only pay for what you use.
This will, I'm sure, provide much debate, however at this stage it seems rather impractical to employ, especially with the current road system the way it is.
I'd also be afraid of the privacy issues here as well... but that's a whole other topic.
"We shall show mercy, but we shall not ask for it" -- Winston Churchill
I find the privacy implications of having the location of every car being monitored by GPS to be quite disturbing. Particularly as our (ie UK) govt has a great track record of cocking up computing projects.
...
If you drive a car, I'll tax the street
If you try to sit, I'll tax your seat
If you get too cold I'll tax the heat
If you take a walk, I'll tax your feet
Taxman!
...
Taxation via UPS will make Britons even safer than the cameras. And getting rid of the Magna Carta will protect them from those nasty jurors.
If ever there was a sheep-like human, it is the British. They seem to absorb these insults to their dignity with an unusual amount of passiveness. Kind of reminds me of the Scenes in A Fish Called Wanda, where the British guy got ran over by a car and after he got up, apologized for the damage his hip had done to the fender.
The roads they are talking about charging heavily for are city roads... if the poor are that poor they can take the bus! This is the UK we're talking about - we do have public transportation.
Being a subject, and not a citizen.
American millitary spending needs to decrease. No more multi-million dollar cruise missles, and cut the amount of nuclear arms in half to help decrease the load spent on maintaining them.
While I agree that US military spending needs to decrease I think that decommissioning nuclear weapons will probably be quite costly due to the disposal and handling issues, and cruise missles don't cost multi-millions - most are less than $1 million.
If it were up to me the first thing I would do is close all US military bases in Europe. A fifty-year free ride on defense is way more than we have any reason to pay for. Europe is planty well capable of footing the bill for it's own defense. The time is long past to pull the plug there.
Although truly anonymous digital cash is so far not a reality, several techniques that come close are described in the book Digital Cash. Unfortunately, this never comes up in debates about ubiquitous tolling. As is typical, politicians are either ignorant or feign ignorance -- about technology and just about everything else.
The UK is turning more and more into Airstrip One every day... you've already got the cams everywhere, and now They want to have every motor vehicle create a record of its whereabouts so you can pay for your actual road use? Does anyone *not* see those records being used to disprove a criminal's alibi within about 2 months of its rollout? Who on earth would be pushing for this, is it a conspiracy amongst bicycle manufacturers, or what? Because the gasoline tax accomplishes the same thing, but without the facist aftertaste.
Given the choice, I'd rather pay for a little more than my actual road use to retain my privacy. Then again, I'm a different breed of cat-- I'd also be willing to pay a little more for my magazine subscriptions if I could get a copy without those annoying fucking blow-in cards and such in each issue.
~Philly
People aren't going to use their cars less, they will simply complain more about the already massive amount of "stealth taxes" which allow the Government to screw the British citizens left right and centre whilst still claiming they are reducing some of the headline taxes such as income tax. In fact, the only people untouched are the wealthy driving big gaz guzzling cars who won't care a jot how much they are charged.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
This sounds suspiciously like a method to fund civilian tracking. Placing a reason why "you cant drive where we dont know where you are -- for the petrol tax of course.."
:).
Can you imagine being arrested just because they can't track your car?
Besides if it is taxing all the roads why wont taking all the gas work? Encourage alternatives to peak period driving dont make the wealthy the only ones who can try to get home by 5pm.
Driving is evil but it is an equalizing vice. Make it exclusive and you seperate the dissadvantaged from what the dissadvanted always want -- their vices
bo
consider that by "taxing' road usage, you discourage people from relying on cars so much and will hopefully shift people's focus to building sustainable urban environments in the long run.
Right now it looks like elitism or big brother in the making - but in the long run cars will be less the transport of choice and society will tend back to mass transport and decentralized urban environments (mega-malls go bye-bye if people won't drive there from miles around - unless they're situated at the end of major public transport systems).
if at first you don't succeed, shoot the consultant who suggested you try in the first place...
Perhaps they could get some pointers directly from the cell phone industry? If you take this to where cells are today, you can already see the deals: Act now and get 500 anytime miles/month! Stop by your local BP station and purchase your MyMiles(c) prepaid miles card today!
I'm against picketing, but I don't know how to show it.
A while back comp.risks had an submission about a British proposal to use GPS systems in cars to enforce speed limits. There were the predictable criticisms of the plan - sometimes you need to exceed the speed limit, sometimes weather conditions make the speed limit unsafe, what about limited access roads with minimum speed limits and adjacent access roads? Plus the usual privacy concerns with the government knowing where you are - and more importantly where you routinely stop.
Now it's being proposed as a tool to smear out peak traffic loads. Because the Brits are too damn dumb to figure out for themselves that if they could shift their work hours by an hour or so then they could avoid a lot of aggrevations. (Not that Americans are any brighter, but at least I've seen ads aired for years encouraging employers to provide flexible hours.)
To me, this looks like there's someone in the government who really wants to get GPS systems in to every car and they're just trying different rationalizations until they find one the public will accept.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
My god.. is this in addition to the money we already pay?
* Road Tax ($250'ish a year)
* Insane petrol prices (equivilant to around $4 a gallon)
* Astronomical insurance prices (I am 21, been driving for 3 years, had no accidents & clean license, and I am paying £1400 a year for 'basic' cover on a 2 litre, 16 valve Corrado)
This country is all about ripping its inhabitants right off.. it pisses me off.
And the thing that gets me the most - the roads are in a terrible state ! My typical drive to work on a morning (about 5 miles), there are about 10 REALLY deep holes that I have to swerve to avoid, to save a back jarring 'THUD'. So where does our road tax, and extra money on petrol go?!
This country drives me nuts.. welcome to Ripoff Britain.
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
Have you ever noticed the large number of SUVs that are crashed at the side of the road after snow and ice storms? Yes, SUVs make it so you feel real safe driving fast in the snow...but they give you absolutely no extra stopping power. The large size of the SUV simply increase the chances that you will kill innocent people as you spin out of control.
My front wheel drive may not accelerate as well in the snow, but it makes it less likely that I will get in an accident or kill someone else. Of course, with all the idiot SUVs driving 65 on ice, I know there is a really good chance one will kill me.
I'm all for the idea, that people should pay for the roads to the extent they use them. The only valid argument against that would be that of the roads becoming a tool for the rich, but I think that can be solved by simply having rebates for low income individuals, or even by having a "standard deduction", say 25 miles a day, before you start getting charged.
That being said, I don't think this is implementable in practice. GPS solutions pose two major problems. The first is that they are almost certainly easy to hack. Just find a way to jam the signal (after parking in an underground garage where there is no signal anyway). The second, and perhaps bigger problem, is that I don't want the government (or anyone) tracking my every move by GPS.
I'm all for pay-per-use, but the easiest way to do it is by taxing gasoline. Maybe when electric cars become commonplace we'll have to come up with a better solution, but that seems like a long way off, if ever.
This is just plain stupid.
Producers of goods and services would have an even harder time trying to survive in Britian when they have to pay even more to transport goods on routes they've already paid for once, on roads and other forms of transport that are still congested. This discourages free trade, even slowing trade with other nations, and if they are serious about trying to run a prosperous economy, they should strike this idea down quickly.
Let's face it, they've got enough trouble competing with the rest of the world, what with being stuck out on an island (for all intents and purposes) by themselves.
I haven't read the arguments for this idea, but I have some idea of what they are: have the people who use the highways pay for it, etc. Still, I find the concept more than a little discouraging. In the US, at least, the highway and interstate is called the "open road". People see it as a network of freedom, similar too, although much more fundamental than the internet. If sattalites and other invasive equipment are tracking and, more importantly, charging you for this access (let it be said right now that I strongly disapprove of Illinois' use of toll roads on interstates, especially when you notice that IL has some of the bumpiest, worst maintained highway systems in the US. It's criminal) you lose a great deal of the untetheredness of the transportation system. The highways are the last great free network of mobility. Airplanes now take a great deal of planning, organization, MONEY, and so do trains and buses, to a lesser degree. But if I decided I wanted to go to New York tommorrow (I live in Wisconsin) all it takes is about 60 dollars of gas and a bottle of pep pills. When you think of it like that, some of the biggest expenses on a trip like that are the tolls in IL and NY, and I'm rambling, but basically, I think that all highways should be free so that we don't have to pay for them.
-- Nerds on toast in the new millenium
Irrespective of the rights or wrongs of the proposal, or the relative merits of a democratic monarchy, the royal family's actually an excellent business proposition for the UK. Not only are the costs associated with the royal family astonishingly low (as a percentage of the national budget), but the amount of tourism generated by having all those palaces, and the resulting revenue, easily outweighs the costs.
Furthermore, since the crown estate now pays income tax, there's evidence that even when tourism is ignored, the royal family is actually profitable for the state. See this report for details.
PenguiNet: the (shareware) Windows SSH client
Okay, I can understand their desire to cut down on traffic, or reduce pollution, or what not, but that doesn't leave out the privacy implications. Tracking people is desirous to many people (government, suspicious spouse, etc) and this would make it so easy as to be ludicrous. If this goes through, I'll laugh the first time this is cracked- and we all know it will be. (Anyway, see sig.)
If this happened in the US, bicycles would have to be declared "illegal circumvention devices".
Do you like Japanese imports?
how much do you want to bet that this becomes an additional tax, rather than a replacemet tax? In other words you'll wind up paying the road tolls, PLUS the gas tax, and that the taxes of NON-drivers dosent go down?
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
The basic problem with systems like this is not that they violate your privacy, nor that they cost money, but that they privatize public assets without, at the same time, shifting the tax base to net assets rather than economic activities.
Governments defend legally defined rights. Why, then, aren't those in posession of said rights paying for the cost of protecting them? If I have title to an asset, that title is worthless to me without enforcement of the entitlement to the asset. Why should some kid who is trying to get a family together be potentially subject to the draft at the same time that he is paying taxes on everything from income to capital gains to groceries to pay for enforcement of my title with his money as well as his blood?
There are alternatives. Just before the time I worked on the toll road archive system, I was politically active and my last ditch attempt to address via political reform the core problems I saw was a proposed net asset tax reform based on risk-adjusted net present value calculation (arguably the most fundamental business calculation of all). Since then I've become very disenchanted with politics as a viable route to reform and come to a more radical proposal I have called warrior's insurance where governments and international mutual defense treaties are replaced by reinsurance networks that indemnify in the event of loss of asset value due to force or fraud. The insurance premiums would usually be paid in scrip issued by the insurance companies, thereby displacing fiat currencies. The insurance companies could adjust their premiums to account for risky behavior by their clients (like building huge fixed assets in placed like NYC for people who go around the world tormenting Muslims). Global markets trading varieties of scrip would naturally turn into a reinsurance network supporting emergency action by groups of warrior insurers.
Said insurance premiums and their risk-adjustment are the way guys who own lots titles that need enforcement can pay younger guys who put their lives on the line to protect those entitlements -- and pay them something that might be remotely called fair compensation -- all without resorting to rhetoric about how "we're all one big happy clan around here". Of course, the warrior insurers themselves may be very clanish, but that's their business. Clans -- real clans -- do have a place in the foundation of such a reinsurance network. Clans are, after all, highly territorial.
Seastead this.
This is jsut further proof that the British government tax and charge you for practically everything you buy and everything you do. We're taxed enough, why the hell should we be charged more????
This really is the most ridiculous thing i've ever heard.
slainfu
"I can't be a terrorist if you're sucking my bum."
How is this off-topic? It directly relates to the parent post, which you moderators marked as "Funny". This is FUNNY NOT OFFTOPIC you STUPID ASS moderators.
What if people hacked into their cars and disabled the tracking? Or would everyone be forced to have a GPS sending out their car's location 24/7? That would be kinda scary...
Only government officials would be able to turn it off. Like in Orwell's 1984....
Macintosh humor! MacComedy.com
I'm curious.
/. ?
Why does it say on your website that you do not make your email address 'publicly' available - then you make it publicly available on a really really popular(busy?) website like
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
As it stands, having the government build roads subsidises car makers. If the government spent as much on building railroad tracks as it does on maintaining highways, owning a couple trains would be as profitable as owning a fleet of trucks... A tax like this reverses the subsidies... It would cover for new roads, as the articles suggest, but could also help pay for environmental measures, as well.
In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.
Here's the situation today: We tax people (primarily through gas taxes, but in many parts of the region through additional sales taxes as well) for our transportation systems. This actually hits the poor doubly hard:
Now, contrast that with tolls or user fees: Everyone still pays, but they only pay according to how much they use the highway system . This concept of "user fees" is more equitable (although, admittedly, less politically appealing) than hiding the cost of the road system underneath so many layers of tax that people don't understand the true cost of transportation. Getting people to see the true costs of transportation choices is something of a holy grail for many planners, since that (more than all the ride-free-for-a-week crap that passes for promotion) is one of the most effective ways to move motorists out of their cars and into more-efficient (at letast, they're more efficient if they're used) buses and trains.
There's also evidence that the private sector will step up to the plate and finance infrastructure improvements if the government will get out of the way and allow it. The 91 Express Lanes in Orange County, CA (disclaimer: I worked on this project) was the nation's first privately financed and fully automated toll road -- no toll booths, just windshield-mounted transponders that automatically debited your toll from a prepaid account. The backers of this road didn't build it for altruism -- they built it because it was a massive congestion headache that the state of California couldn't afford to fix and because the tolls would give them an attractive return on their investment.
Are they Lexus lanes? Not according to surveys of drivers. The people using the toll lanes matched the demographics and sociographics of the people riding in the adjacent (and congested) freeway.
"But what about funding transit and other non-road improvments" you say? Well, tolls make sense here, too. The goal of transit is to move more people more efficiently, as well as to give the poor, disabled and others who can't use a car a mobility option. Using tolls, you force those who use the road system the most to proportionately finance transit -- in effect, the people who are out on the highway causing the most congestion are forced to pay for more of the congestion solution. That's about as fair as it gets -- and it has the added benefit of encouraging the heavy users to think about switching to transit.
Tolls aren't perfect -- in Chicago, New Jersey and other long-time toll regions, the toll authorities have hired huge staffs and created a political constituency out of the people who work in the booths. But if you can create a system that removes many of the people from the process (through automatic tolling), then it's hard to argue that it's not a better system to finance transportation.
"It was a summer's tale: Just a boy, his Linux, and a head full of dreams..."
That's not my active email address anymore.
:)
richardh@rahga.com is now mainly a junk mail address that I screen about every week to see if anything decent is in there. Most people who know me don't use it now, so with 500 or some od emails a week there, maybe 1 out of 2000 emails are personally addressed and sent to me by a real-life person
and who pays for those less-often-travelled out-of-the-way but never-the-less beautiful roads to national parks etc. wanna see a $10000 toll to go thru a park?
I realized I should have said more. Poor people tend to own later model cars, and can't afford proper maintenance. This means that the poor end up paying more fuel taxes per mile driven than the rich-who have brand new cars at the peak of their performance.
Poor people would like to own economy cars...but they cannot afford new cars. So they get old, inefficent gas guzzlers. Most economy cars, like the Geo Metro, are not built to last. They shave off $100 bucks on the new purchase price by using crappy parts.
Poor people want to buy small used cars with high gas mileage and low maintenance. This type of car simply does not exist. So we end up with the poor owning gas guzzlers and paying a regressive tax on fuel. This is the problem of being in a secondary market.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Ah... sounds awfully like my @hotmail.com address - whenever forced to put my email address in for somthing that I dont really want (where it has like 5000 click here to recieve emails about ) thats the one I use :)
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
This is about state control. I live in England and I can assure you the only reason this is being "considered" is to test the public reaction to having a government spy-box in your car so that you every move can be compiled into a government database. We already have CCTV cameras everywhere, speed cameras on over half the main (trunk?) roads [using facial recognition now on the digitalmodels]. The atmosphere here feel more and more oppressive, at the same time as violent crime is going through the roof. You honestly have extremely frightening violent criminals wandering around the streets basically looking for someone to rob, but as a professional person with a career I can't defend myself because if I do I will be the one who is arrested and I'll lose everything. For example, last week 3 burglers broke into a families house, and put a knife to the mothers neck. Her husband wretled the knife off them, in the process fatally wounding the burgler. This man was arrrested nad has been charged with murder. This kind of thing is just getting out of hand and it *is* the government that is causing it and seems happy to go along with it. It is increasingly scary.
All your roads are belong to me......
Rick B.
..and how is this not tracking people everywhere they go?
Okay, more tax on petrol. Did I read that right? considering the majority of the cost of fuel is already tax, I'd rather see the bigger motorways in the UK toll motorways.
All this talk of alienating poorer road users - what about the Forth Road Bridge. The major link to Fife, everyone who goes from fife, or near enough everyone, goes over that bridge. 80p for over then back over.
Anything but more fuel tax.
> Is it a better world if the limosine can travel fast because the Escorts can't afford to be in that part of town at that time of day?
:-)
The proposal is to charge more for driving when/where there is more congestion - if the limo is driving fast, then the Escort can afford to be there. This plan essentially means that rich people have the 'right' to spend more time in traffic jams. Sounds good to me.
Seriously, though, there's a fundamental flaw in this plan, and that flaw is that at certain times, *all* roads are congested. People don't *want* to be stuck in traffic, they do it because they have no other choice. Taxing them more because they are stuck just adds insult to injury, it doesn't do anything to alleviate the problem. I'd much rather have the government give people tax rebates for riding bikes to work; it would help the congestion problem, the pollution problem, and the obesity problem all at the same time!
On stereophonic equipment, the monaural sound obtained through multiple channels will enhance your listening pleasure.
If you can do this, there's aboslutely no reason why the roads couldn't then be fully privatized, and all gas taxes and other road funding be repealed.
;)
Not that that'll happen, but I can dream
The British are so knowledgable in transportation policies, that is probably why they have the narrowest roads, the most expensive cars and gas, the shittiest railway network, and a national airline that is losing money and laying off people faster than it carries them.
If the idea is to be able to finance the peak capacity of the congested roads, and otherwise discourage the peak time usage, then the simple, and probably cheaper, way is to just put tolls on the congested roads. GPS will be less popular and possibly easier to defeat. Instead, put ID sensors on just those congested toll roads, which also detect when a vehicle w/o ID passes by. Many toll roads already do this, especially in metropolitan areas where the users are regulars. Then add a peak time surcharge (with published and stable schedules). Give tax breaks to employers who schedule people to arrive and leave work at off-peak times or give them at least 3 hours variability flex time.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
On the face of it, this scheme seems a reasonable way to apply weighted charges to different roads according to the time of day. In that sense it would be more appropriate compared to upping car road-tax or fuel duty. It also seems better that the London Mayor's flat-rate charge to enter central London.
There are a few problems though:
David Begg's quote: "... we can never road-build our way out of this or provide enough public transport." is quite interesting. Rail transport is in a pretty poor state. If the government had been in the habit of giving British Rail the 6 billion pounds a year that they are currently spending on a supposedly privatised rail system (haha) instead of the 1 billion/year that BR got in the last years of it's existence, we'd have a damn fine rail system and a whole lot less cars on the road.
Overall, the goverment needs to commit to public transport asap. Let the roads become choked. If the trains and busses get good, people will start to move over - principle of the carrot.
On an aside, Uncle Tony's New Labour Transport Department isn't having a very good time:
Time to leave the country...
Why can't women be like Hedy Lamarr - beautiful, talented and inventors of frequency-hopping spread-spectrum techn
I dunno what the UK govt have with GPS as a solution to road pricing and last year to control speeding by limiting car speed to the limit on the road the system thought it was on. GPS may work for in car navigation, but that is because it benefits the driver. once you use GPS for an in car police state, the aim of the driver would be to subvert it.
civilian GPS has no authentication; it'd be feasable to bring up a spoof GPS signal to tell cars they were in france and do what they liked. Or motorists would just snip the antenna cable to the GPS receiver and drive as fast/as free as they liked. That is unless the failure mode on loss of signal was to slow the car and bill massively, but then what do you do in long tunnels?
-Steve
(who cycles to work)
This is a classic case for libertarian & minimal government arguments. It's an example of yet another economic activity that has been monopolized by the government. The original excuse for public roads was just this - how to get people to pay for them unless everyone owned them. Now that technology provides an easy answer, we could get rid of this "government tax" entirely. Thorough economic analyses in the past show that a most conservative ratio of 5x higher cost for any economic activity the government monopolizes. This is a big deal - road maintenance costs have skyrocketed in the past 20 years, and everyone pays a significant fraction of their taxes for it.
tcboo
Agreed. The more miles I drive the more gas I buy the more taxes I pay.
Problem solved!
ac
In CA, the pseudo-libertarian nitwits propose new roads paid for by tolls. The roads get built, so developers can make money building houses. But inevitably, the toll roads go bankrupt, and the taxpayers are left holding the bag anyway. So what we wind up with is a government subsidy for real estate developers, and that isn't fair.
Democrats are SOCIALISTS? That's just hilarious. If you think the Democratic party is socialist, you're so far to the right as to beyond the reach of simple facts.
The Republicans tend to spend a lot more than the Democrats, but because it's on military use they think it doesn't count as government spending. You want to talk about WASTE, check out how the Pentagon works. The deficit grew at an astounding rate under Reagan and Bush. Under Clinton we had budget surpluses. Now, since we're back in Republican hands, we're increasing the deficit.
Republicans are not known for buying votes - but they are known for reducing government waste [cagw.org].
Were you awake during last year's Presidential campaign? The corporations bought Bush with campaign donations, then Bush tried to buy votes with harebrained tax cuts. When the election was in contention, the Republicans PAID people to travel to Florida and protest.
OK, The Republicans are all militaristic neo-Nazis who want to implement an Orwellian police state in the USA and have civil society run by the military, while impoverishing the civilian economy. I think we should give the Dems a break, since they aren't fascists...
Well, you would have thought a few people over her (in England, that is) would think so. But they all just go along with what ever the latest government indignity or spy-job is. This proposal is so tranparently about people-tracking but people here would probably go along with it anyway. Fortunatly with telco/ISP skills I should be able to move anywhere else in the world in a few years time.
I'm not a conspriacy nut, but I think that privacy violations are the only possible reason for this system. Their are two perfectly good solutions which do not require modifing cars:
a) They could simulate the desired effect by increasing the gas tax and decreasing the cost of public transit during rush hour. This could work if gas is currently expencive enough to have "real value" in the UK.
This would at least simulate the effect monitarily. I'm not shure it would have the desired physcological impact, i.e. people might really avoid those times if they are getting taxed twice for driving at those hours.
b) They could also just tax the all day parking garages; thus forcing companies to charge their employees for parking permits. This would have exactly the desired effect (as they don't really care about reducing the non-all day parking trafic during rush hour).
I don't see why anyone would support this (expencive) system, unless they really just wanted to know where everyone was driving.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
It's normal in the U.S., as well, but we do it by privatizing (having just recently flown, I had my nose rubbed in our own version of a class preference system as first-class passensger, "Platinum Eilte Card" holders, the aged, and the handicapped were all boarded onto the plane before us hoi polloi of able-bodied riding Coach). This is attracting attention because it's a more American approach (based on ability to pay) than British (based on picking the right grandparents).
But this isn't about that, it's about the monitoring, the rest is smokescreen. If your car contains a GPS and you pay tolls based on when, where, and how much you drive, then in some computer the authorities have access to will be a complete record of all travel by all vehicles.
The *obvious* use for that data is to use in law enforcement, but it doesn't have to be limited to disproving an alibi. If you've got the data, and you know your perp was at points A, B, and C on certain dates, you can pull out a list of vehicles that were near those points near those times.
But you can go further, and implement a system similar to that about to be created for air travel in the US: You can analyze driving patterns of known criminals, and from that flag other drivers for special scrutiny. For example, most habitual drunk drivers probably follow similar patterns, driving in the early morning hours from taverns to their homes by back roads. It would be *trivial* for such a system to spot such a pattern and produce a list of places, times, and vehicles for the police to give special scrutiny to.
Of course, nobody likes drunks on the road, so just as we accept sobriety checkpoints, we'd probably accept that. And nobody likes drug smugglers, so we'd accept looking for them, as well. Of course, around the time that your soon-to-be ex-wife is introducing your toll records into court as evidence of your infidelity, you might think things have gone too far. But by then you're pretty much screwed, aren't you? After all, everyone knows those records exist, so you have *no* expectation of privacy.
--Dave Rickey
The dutch goverment wanted to toll the highways that lead into the mayor city's. Those road are notourious for their traffic jams. However there was much protest (we have nearly no toll roads, only a small amount of tunnels and bridges that do have toll). So the minister dropped the idea (the automatic toll infrastructure was already in pilot testing! (they would use automatic cards that would be read remotely by overhead sensors. those without a card would have their license plate fotografed)).
The minister put some experts on the job and they came up with a new idea, which they will be implementing. The cars will have blackboxes for this. To protect the privacy only the tarif of the road and the amount of kilometers will be used to determine the amount due. The tarifs can change during the day (a busy road would be more expensive to drive on to lower the amount of traffic jams). This would come in place of the general road tax (which taxes whether you drive or not based on car weight,the kind of fuel used etc.)
The goal is very simple, tax those that drive the most on the busiest roads.
taxing fuel wouldn't help because
a) tax is very high already (fuel is about 1+ dollar a litre here, not 2 per gallon (4+ litres)!)
b) it wouldn't tax those in traffic jams, busy roads more than those on quite roads.
The taxes would be used to lighten the load on busy roads by making them bigger and for investments in public transport.
btw. currently i use public transport as it is faster because of those traffic jams.
Poor people tend to own later model cars, and can't afford proper maintenance. This means that the poor end up paying more fuel taxes per mile driven than the rich-who have brand new cars at the peak of their performance
But since the cars are older, the insurace on them is _much_ lower, so things roughly equal out.
Ron
Unless road users are provided with an alternative then they still have to use the road and therefore pay the increased tolls. People do not travel in the rush hour for fun therefore if your work requires you to travel at those times you will still have to. The UK gov. are as aware of these facts as anyone and know that all they are really introducing is yet another tax. UK people are already getting fed up with stealth taxes and yet the UK gov. keep trying it on with new ones. The UK gov. tries to say "we are keeping taxes down" and then they introduce another tax that they claim is not a tax.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
All Your Trolls Are Belong To Us
Disclaimer: I am from Western Massachusetts (west of 495 for over a decade, west of Worcester for about 9 years, and west of the Quabbin for two), where various proposals have been floated that would make the people west of Boston pay for the Big Dig, a massively expensive (and arguably necessary) highway reconstruction project which, at any given moment, is not being used by many people west of Worcester. I'm also somewhat of a road geek. As a young child I would spend hours sketching out designs for highway interchanges. There are few things I find more enjoyable on road trips than studying the design of the roads and watching their construction and rebuilding.
Under the Interstate Highway and Defense Act passed in 1956, the states would receive a sum proportional to the amount of federal gasoline taxes taken from the state. Originally, those funds could only be used for building highways. As a result every state, through about 1970, went on a highway binge. By 1972, save for major portions in Northeastern cities (Washington DC, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston) most of the system had been built. Why? Because state politicians knew that construction brought good union jobs for free (the Feds were paying 90% of the cost).
In the 1970s, Congress allowed Interstate funds to be used to build public transport systems. With many states having finished their interstates, save for useless spurs that are still built to this day, the party was over. But now that they could build public transport, they started with a vengeance.
Nowadays, very little of the gas tax money goes to construction or maintenance, because the construction has been done and most of the maintenance is cheaper, but the gas tax money has increased dramatically as the number of miles driven increases.
Thus, in many states, the legislatures have gotten addicted to the road money. If their state has lower gas consumption, less money goes to the State House. So it's no surprise that nowadays, public transport gets cut (because the more driving gets done, the more money flows in for political pork projects (stadiums, etc.)). It's also no surprise why the States are perfectly willing to roll back emissions standards, as an Excursion generates some 3 times more gas taxes than a Saturn SL1, and some 5 times more than a Toyota Prius. So few states really encourage their citizens to buy non-SUV's.
If the gas tax were abolished and roads were paid for by who actually used them, things wopuld change for the better, IMHO. If this happens we might actually see states doing sane things like discouraging massive fuel inefficiency (for example, charging extra for registrations of low-efficiency vehicles in urban areas (as a practical matter, restricting trucks in rural areas isn't going to work. The farm lobbies are too powerful). Remember, the problem with monster SUVs are the people in urban/suburban areas who drive them and don't need them). Also, there's this simple fact, which is nice. Those who use the superhighways pay for them. A decent-sized number of Americans drive a lot (thus paying gas taxes), while only utilizing superhighways (which account for the majority of expenditure) rarely. This is a slight inequity.
The reason that more roads, especially in cities, aren't toll roads, is because of the historical overhead of tolls, such as widening the roads and the traffic problems. However, nowadays most toll roads have an electronic option, with EZPass being the most common. By using this option, existing highways can be made toll roads with little overhead.
The rest of us just go on ignoring whatever fad westminster comes up with. What are they going to do - drive alongside you and peer through the window to make sure your GPS box is on?
Retrofit the TV detector vans?
Mass transit isn't cheap and is currently generally subsidised by the taxpayer as well. Are you going to charge people the true costs of mass transit, too? Are you going to make people who live in slightly less popular areas pay more than people in more popular areas? People who travel later at night pay more than people who travel during rush hour? Or are you just going to shut down mass transit and everyone walks later at night? Poor people have to act like everyone else because it's the cheapest thing to do?
They laughed at Einstein. They laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. -- C. Sagan
made you think it was in the US? Just because *your* inner cities are warzones, doesn't mean ours all are. Well, in the North perhaps. I've never had a car, although I am far from poor, and many many other londoners (especially ones who live in zones 1-4, I am in zone 6 which is the outermost) do not either. So why should I subsidise dirty polluting car drivers (as would be the case if it was from general taxation, but I would hope the proposal would be to use this to reduce road tax which would make it neutral to me).
This is just a bullshit story made up to take the heat off elsewhere. It'll never ever happen.
Some minister has some bad news that they don't want to get into the headlines so they've released this utter flight of fancy to distract the morons that run news desks.
Deleted
If people liked being on the road when it was congested, I could see the utility of this plan. But they don't like it! So, there must be another reason why the roads are congested.
When are they congested, I wonder?
The hours right before and right after everyone goes to work.
So, the net effect, since the work hours are that way so most businesses can work together, will be that everyone pays more money, the roads are just as congested as before, and the government is richer.
The only way this outcome will change is if work hours are changed to accomodate (and randomly, too, since whatever hours become the norm will create the same outcome then!) and I don't see that happening.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
aha ha ha. Way to go, tiger, expanding GB to George Bush instead of the intended Great Britain.
Notice that no matter how bad traffic is, no matter how much time people have to invest to drive around, they STILL DO IT. Any transportation system has built-in penalties for overuse/undercapacity. Inventing new and better penalties to discourage people from using a system they paid won't solve the problem. But is a typical anal administrator solution that will increase revenues.
The underlying politics here are that in the UK all taxes go into a central pool. The Treasury has always opposed 'hypothecated' revenues - that is taxes that are tied to specific purposes.
So the reason why the DoT is calling for new taxes on transport is first, middle and last a scheme to raise taxes in a form that the DoT think they could keep for their own ends. The Treasury meanwhile is happy to allow the DoT to believe in this dellusion up to the point where a new tax is created for them to grab, which they will.
If you think about it, a fuel tax is in effect a toll on road use that is indexed to the fuel efficiency of the vehicle and very cheap to collect.
I suspect that the so called government adviser is not going to be one for very long. An adviser's job is to inform policy making, it is not to make it on the minister's behalf. Attempting to bounce the government into a particular policy through the media is a sure way to find yourself out of a job.
The problem with the proposal is that the costs of deploying the necessary infrastructure are vast. Each car would require a certified GPS system that could not possibly be installed for less than #200. The system would have to be certified regularly or people would soon start finding ways to circumvent them.
The other problem is the threat to civil liberties which is taken rather more seriously in the UK than the US. In the US there is often the belief that it is not necessary to block legislative attacks on civil liberties because the constitution will provide protection. In the UK the checks and balances are in the parliamentary process alone. It might well be possible to impose the scheme on heavy goods vehicles since they pay far less than their share of taxes and people are willing to support any proposals that will reduce tailgating by them. Meanwhile the government has not forgotten nor forgiven the antics of the lorry drivers who tried to hold the country to ransom with blockades. A GPS system in the cab would discourage attempts to repeat.
The UK government is not going to be allowed to install spies in private cars any more than the US government is going to be allowed to confiscate all firearms.
There is a similar process at work behind the regular proposals to introduce identity cards. The police don't want them, the social security dept does not believe they will reduce fraud. The home office attempts to corner each new Home Secretary into proposing them, usually in response to some terrorist attrocity.
In each case the 'decision' is announced in the press as a fait acompli, it is going to happen and MPs and their constituents have no ability to affect the process. In each case the proposal is squashed in cabinet before legislation is presented. Typically the last home secretary or transport secretary squashes the scheme. If not representations from the back benches cause the plan to be swiftly forgotten.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
Because "speed kills".
If gas taxes and vehicle registration fees are reduced commensurately, then driving at off-peak times would be cheaper than before. That gives a new money-saving option to the poor, one which was not previously available.
The fundamental issue is fairness of road usage: if you drive during rush hour, then you are slowing down hundreds or thousands of other cars by virtue of your contribution to congestion. That's a cost that you should pay whatever your income level.
As regards the poor, the sad fact is that life as a whole is unfair to the poor :-(. Best to
design pricing models that imposes fair
costs for burdens imposed on others, and
then independently establish
programs that explicitly give the poor a leg
up on everything at once, like better education
and social programs to get at root causes. If
access to transportation is one of those root
causes, then slide the pricing scale in some
manner.
Curtains for windows?
The British version of road pricing was thought up by libertarian conservatives at the dawn of the Lady Maggy era. Like a lot sensible ideas from that time, however, it has now been hijacked, "triangulated" if you will, by erst-totalitarian socialists in a political era when nobody admits to have ever been a Tory.
I expect, nonetheless, that if the British government attempts to do top-down road-pricing by political committee, with centralized book-entry transactions, GPS transponders, and, probably, politically odious "is-a-person" identity schemes to clear and settle such transactions, such a system would choke on its own data-effluvia.
One need only look at the original proposal to have central automated control of the San Francisco Bay Area's Bay Area Rapid Transit system for reference. That kind of centralized traffic control still falls down, even 30 years after BART tried to do it.
If such a top-down, positive control system did manage to be built, however, it would probably still "morph", with the addition of financial cryptography on a ubiquitous internet, into a completely private system in the long run anyway. The dramatically reduced transaction cost of a streaming internet bearer cash toll system would be so much cheaper to operate than the proposed virtual highwayman's panopticon that it would eventually behoove the government to literally sell the roads to the abutters someday -- resulting the the fulfillment of that long-standing cause of libertarian nocturnal emission, selling the roads.
So, from a libertarian perspective, would-be totalitarian market controllers and transportation bluenoses and busybodies everywhere should be very careful of what they wish for.
For an example of that, remember what happened to telephony. In the US, the industry demanded from the state a Morganized monopoly to "prevent ruinous competition". In exchange for same, the various local political machines controlling the nation-state required universal service to keep the mob from voting them out of office, and to create a larger pool of deposits in the political favor-bank.
It took a quite a while, but the creation of a so-called "natural" monopoly eventually backfired on both of the industry and the state. The achievement of universal service required automated switching to prevent the telephone monopoly from hiring a significant percentage of the population (half of all females was the apocryphal statistic) from becoming telephone operators. As a result, electromechanical switching (rotary dial) begat electronic switching (touch-tone; Shockley invented the transistor for the phone company, remember), which, in turn, begat microprocessor switching and Moore's Law.
The resulting exponential drop in the price of switching completely inverted the economies of scale of network operation, changing its very structure from an increasingly larger, more unified hierarchy with exactly one fixed-price circuit-switched route from any two network nodes, to a massively geodesic network with a combinatorical number of routes between any two nodes, each route with its own possible auction price depending on latency, noise, and lots of other factors.
The result was a dramatic reduction in transaction cost, price discovery, market entry, and of course, firm size. That gave us a dramatic increase in the number of phone companies, even vertically integrated ones, and we haven't even started cash-settlement of network bandwidth yet. The paradox, of course, is that every "information worker" who sits in front of a microcomputer to work these days, sizeably more than half the female population -- even a MacDonald's cashier -- is doing exactly what a turn-of-the-20th-century telephone operator does, reprocessing and routing information from one part of the network to another.
Someday, the same thing will happen to roads, and to electricity, and to natural gas, and to any system requiring the movement of one ostensible commodity from one place to another, including physical goods in the commercial distribution chain, with internet bearer bills of lading and warehouse receipts being traded against instantaneous internet bearer cash settlement -- just like cars paying internet bearer cash to a road's intersection "nodes" as they travel down it.
---------- Financial Crypto is the Only Crypto That Matters
So when are they renaming that little island of yours to Airstrip One?
Liberty in your lifetime
Okay so they put GPS in your car so they can see where you travel and how much you should pay for roads. They also now know how fast it took you to get from point A to B, and therefor you can expect to get a ticket in the mail if you we doing 56 MPH on the highway (which in my mind is way too low, considering that most modern cars could handle 75 in the same conditions). They'll justify it so they don't have to pay as many highway troopers. And it just gets worse and worse. Match this with the stage III emissions they are planning, and they'll have complete readouts on your driving. Maybe even a Gas guzzler tax if you accelerate too quickly. Your car will rat you out, and the taxman will get richer.
So, what is the end result? The rich get richer. (auto makers can charge more for smart vehicles, the list goes on) The politicians get more power. The poor get poorer. And the middle class now has to work twice as hard to get by (not only to pay all the new fees, but to get a job since our society seems to enjoy systematically ruining peoples lives by replacing us with robots).
So, as you can see those within the sphere of the power elite enjoy a richer and stronger world, while the rest of us get the shaft. You just have to love human nature....
A tax on gas is better than a toll based on mileage for several reasons. First, a per-volume tax on fuel encourages the use of fuel efficient vehicles, which is obviously a good thing. Second, using gps to calculate peoples mileage and tolling them based on that would require an entire new infrastructure including a massive billing department and a device in every vehicle. Also, by switching to a gps based system, you open up the opportunity for creative people to hack some kind of workaround to thier billing and tracking system to avoid payment.
Move into the left lane to get there faster? add $5 to your bill.
Want everybody ahead of you to let you by? $500 should do it.
Want to go the wrong way down a one way street? How about $10 per block.
Need to change that traffic light NOW? How about $5 and its green in 10 seconds or less?
The possibilities are endless....
they'll need to tax the road to parliament at the highest rate of all, to discourage the traffic jam of people going there to throw their asses out of office.
"the tree of liberty needs to be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants" -TJ
I find it amusing that this proposal would work pretty strangely against people who continually get lost while driving. Effectively, they'd pay for their poor sense of direction/orientation. =)
One very unlikely but possibly hilarious spin-off would be a huge increase in people giving wrong directions, just to spite drivers. heh
But since the cars are older, the insurace on them is _much_ lower, so things roughly equal out.
Not really. The only reason a poor person might pay less for insurance is that they have less coverage. I opted out of collision insurance. I pay substantially less in insurance than others, but, if I am in a wreck that is not another person's fault... I will no longer have a car.
Property taxes are progressive. You pay less property tax on an '84 Buick than a '02 Rolls.
First... GPS would certainly collect the info as to where the vehicle is... BUT... how are they intending to get the info out of the little black boxes. GPS does not report anything - unless they're sticking wireless in there as well. I would think that aquiring the data is going to be a major problem. What, you have to have your car hooked to a phone line at least once a month?
Second... GPS is subject to error. No problem on rural roads... but what about in cities? It could very well error enough to put you on a different cost road. What about time of war (which as bush reminds us contstantly - we'll be wageing for the next 10 years) - when GPS jitter is increased? Less accuracy. Just the fact that your in a city with tall buildings, versus open country, means your error rate is much greater (wanna laugh? just turn your GPS on and sit still - watch it move all over the place).
What about people who live in the city or park in the city - won't they show excessive use of roads they *park* on?
Finally... this has got to be terribly easy to foil. Simply puting a good metal block around the box would certainly stop it from seeing the sats. I would think that (A) they would simply disconnect the devices and (B) they would block the signals or (C) they would confront the person who was collecting the data with a shotgun.
Good chuckle though.
Sounds good in theory, but how many cents per gallon is your gasoline tax right now, and what was it 5 years ago? I doubt there is one person in a hundred who could answer accurately, let alone have it really affect their driving.
Gas taxes are much more reasonable. They're easy to collect and regulate. They're also an established and trusted way to do it, so there's no need to setup another tax collecition agency. As a side-effect, they reward people for having more engergy efficient vehicles.
I see this as an application of the KISS principle. Do the bare minimum to get it done.
Too big to fail? Does that make me to small to succeed?
what i mean is.. you pay taxes on the car you buy so that you can use the damn car. to use it, to go anywhere you gotta buy gas.. so you pay taxes again to use that same damn car. then there's toll on the roads if you're thinking about using up the gas (which you paid taxes for to use your car which also, you've paid taxes for). in essence, you pay 'taxes' to use the road to use the gas on which you've again paid taxes for to drive the car on which you've paid taxes. i won't be surprized if they put a GPS up your ass to tax you every time you enter your own damn car. welcome to tax-slavery.
I mean how are criminals supposed to get away when we can track their every move. Next they will be installing a device in your car that makes it stop automatically. (which does exist, they just don't have the clout to install it yet)
They attempt to solve all social ills and the people pay a huge tax to fund the politican's programs. If people would attempt to solve their own problems, but to rely on a government that just seeks votes to stay in power: that is a gross stupidity.
People depend on the government to live and can't life on their own terms. Laws and such need to exist, but the government should not grind the people into dust with their "help". We would do better without their programs and assistance to solve "problems".
This can easily be implemented without tracking citizens!
Imagine a scheme where each car is required have a black box mounted. This black box contains:
A digitized map of your country diveded into zones of different price.
A GPS reciever.
A "tax-o-meter" that counts up according to speed and zone.
A port that outputs how much tax you owe, and where you are (So that you can plug your own navigation system into the GPS reciever)
The black box would only do counting, not tracking. Of course the box should be sealed, so the police could check whether it had been tampered with, but if it was allowed to "crack it open" directly after paying accumulated tax, privacy advocates could take samples to check that nothing 1984ish was going on. One could even allow independent reviewers to crack open a number of boxes of their own choice "for free" so that economy would not be a hindrance.
I like this technology, because it would allow taxing drivers congesting roads in areas with good public transportation harder than people living in sparsely populated rural areas where car-driving is a necessity.
A lot of people here seems to feel very bad about taxes on cars, but I'm from Denmark where they are taxed really hard already, so shifting the taxes in a more fair direction (while providing everyone with REALLY mass produced GPS navigation) is fine with me.
My only serious objection to this scheme is that it's probably too easy to jam the GPS reciever, but if you couple it with the odometer it could set the "Cheat flag" if you drive several miles without GPS coverage.
Just my kr. 0,02
It's just like in the movie Dragonheart:
Lackie #1: "A road tax! I mean they are your roads!"...
next thing you know, they'll implant sensors into every citizen so they can officially (and finally) tax the air we breathe!
I live in the UK, and have seen this idea bubble up from the sewers every few years over here. As though having the highest fuel tax, worst roads and high levels of congestion weren't already bad enough, they actually want to charge yet more for our use of them!
An interesting fact from my days in transport logistics:
When UK hauliers travel abroad, they must pay per-day to travel on the foreign roads, and also pay toll charges at the same rate as their European counterparts - this is ON TOP of having to pay UK road taxes at the same time. They are also in danger of legal action if they bring in more fuel than they had in they had when they left the country.
When European vehicles travel to the UK, they are allowed to use the roads for free - no taxes. They are allowed any size of fuel tanks, so they can effectively operate for a week on much cheaper European fuel.
The government have obviously completely ignored this and as a result we've seen increasing damage caused to our roads from the increasing numbers of foreign vehicles travelling around for free!
Based on the assumption there is only so much stuff to move around in this country each day, each foreign truck over here is costing 3000-5000 pounds per year in road tax alone, without fuel (1000-1500 pounds per week!), not to mention the unemployed UK warehouse workers/drivers/office staff claiming benefit as their jobs are now taken by European firms who can offer much cheaper rates as a result of their operating conditions...
I'm so proud to be a UK citizen sometimes... Really...
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
I think most people miss the real problems with traffic congestion.
1) People often don't have a choice of when to commute. I certainly wouldn't drive during congested traffic if I had the least choice.
2) People often don't have the choice of routes to use. Where I live, the route to work is limited to the available expressways. When I worked near home ( 10 miles) there was only 1 route, that by backroad, and that was usually congested too.
3) public transportation sucks, because it is still MASS transportation. The problems with mass transport is obvious to me. Consider it like ip packets. What would the internet be like if ever 20 minutes, the packet train arrived to pick up outgoing packets and stopped at every port along the way to drop off and pick up packets? It would be like our public transportation system.
What we need is a non-mass public transportation system. An on-demand train system. Imagine overhead cars where the current trains run now (and expressways too). You get to the local train station, pick a waiting unit that can hold 2, 4, or 10 people, get in and punch your destination. It rolls out to the tracks, waits for an opening, and heads directly to your station with no intermediate stops.
When it arrives, you get out, and it parks itself into the unit lot for someone else.
These ride overhead rather than on the ground. Monorails do it with much more weight, so I don't expect that these would be a problem. If you need more tracks, go vertically as well as horizontally. (currently where I live, my local train rents the tracks. No addition horizontal tracks can be built, but overhead tracks could be added if they didn't have to support the weight of the existing style of train.
A nice side effect is that commuter trains would no longer block traffic along backroads, since they would be overhead instead.
Of course, the ultimate solution would be computer controlled fusion powered flying cars that either fold up into a nap sack, or fly home to park themselves when not used, to save you a $20 parking charge.
This is a very bad idea. Not only for it's intended purpose, but for the other uses it will be put to.
1) Not only do you have the problem with the Gov't tracking your every move with this system, but any Corporation that wants access to it will probably get it. How long do you think the Gov't will hold out for when large sums of money are being offered to them?
2) How long do you think this will be in operation before they decide to turn on the "Speeder Tracking System" and start billing you everytime you go 1 mph over the limit? It has already happened here in Connecticut with a couple of Car rental companies.
3) "Mr. Doe we noticed that you were one of 5 people at x location on Friday at 2:13pm where a crime was committed nearby. Please come with us for questioning. We do hope you have an alibi."
4) For ONLY $5.99 find out where YOUR spouse was on Saturday night! We can also tell you everywhere your daughter went last week! Call now!
It's a good thing the world sucks or we'd all fall off.
...before they start tracking your speed and you end up getting speeding fines in the mail?
By the way, Texas just introduced by-the-mile insurance as an option. I think it should be mandatory.
If we just wanted to charge by the mile, without distinguishing busy times and roads from non-busy ones, all we'd really need is tamper-proof odometers. (Actually, they wouldn't need to be tamper-proof, just sufficiently tamper-resistant so that tampering could be detected.) Your car could, say, report your total miles every time you get gas. Big Brother (and his cousin Microsoft) could then know how much you drive, but not when or where.
Personally, I say it's worth the loss of liberty to do it full-scale, with satellite tracking. Remember, the IRS already knows lots and lots of details about you beyond your total income, and has the right to demand more if it wants it. I'm sure lots of people were uneasy about EZ-Pass and other electronic toll systems when they were first introduced, but they save so much time that many gave in. Traffic congestion is just a horrible waste, and the (insert ethnic/gender/age slow-driving stereotype here) should pay for making it worse!
I Can't Believe It's A Law Firm, LLP does not necessarily endorse the contents of this message.
Here in Atlanta our mass transit system MARTA is mostly used by the poor community (at $1.75/ride it's prolly a little better than a car). The problem is, except for some people heading downtown during the morning and back out in the evening, that's all that rides it. Nobody rides MARTA just to get around town, everybody drives.
:))
Atlanta traffic just plain sucks, I'd ride MARTA if I wasn't scared for my life every time I go on there. But it's true, I'd rather wait in traffic for 45 minutes, pay insurance, gas, road tolls, maintanence, etc... than ride MARTA. IMHO, this is a falure of the system. And, IMHO, this is where it needs to work. Right now, it's not the poor community that we need to get to ride mass transit, it's the people who can afford a car and actually have a choice in the matter.
(of course, I could go on for hours about how we need more rail lines and stuff, but you can look at the map and see that for yourself
--Justin Mitchell
"2nd Place is a fancy word for losing" --Bender (Futurama)
But the urban poor already aren't driving that much, I'd think? The rural poor need cars for basic livelyhood, and this new tax would shift some of the tax burden off of gasoline taxes. The rural poor will benefit, while the urban poor will be less effected because it is possible for them to arrange their lives not to need a car.
Why oh why... A much better, fairer and simpler solution is to raise the tax through fuel duty. Someone has to pay for this complicated scheme. If fuel tax is increased there is no extra expense in raising the money as the system to do this is already in place. I can tell you that I don't need any extra disincentive at all to avoid areas prone to traffic congestion. I'd only go there if I had no other choice. Use bus lanes, etc to limit effect on public transport. And before someone says "bootleg petrol", let me just say "bootleg GPS transmitter".
The idea is that you pay for using the roads in that money, not elsewhere as well.
This was in the article but you had to read it to find out.
I'm all in favor of toll roads. But private market driven toll roads not government owned and congress/parliament operated toll roads.
Without the market forces, the only purpose of government owned toll roads is to raise revenues, and there's much more efficient means of doing that (thugs with badges).
With market forces the price for driving on congested roads rises, thus alleviating the congestion; the demand for mass traffic rises and the price lowers; tolls target the roads used so that the roads most used which need the most mainenance get the most money; etc.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Increasing the gas tax is much more sensible. Not only do we already have the technology to collect it (and it's cheap), it actually discourages gas guzzlers, too.
(this obviously would just make a judge laugh if I took it to court, and yes, I know, it's not very realistic, but still...)
Public transportation is a good idea - but buses, basically, suck.
They are slow, noisy, polluting, have a high operating cost, come at irregular times, have a high rate of failure, subject to and contribute to congestion, and are generally unpleasant.
Light rail is much better. It is faster, much quieter, much cleaner, has a lower operating cost, maintains excellent on-time performance, is reliable, and not subject to, nor contributing to congestion, and much more pleasant to ride. Heck people with access to a car will often take light rail BY CHOICE (I would if it were available to me here in Las Vegas (*)), you do NOT see that with buses.
The system in the Santa Clara Valley (San Jose, Mountain View, etc) is an excellent example. It made life MUCH easier when I was there for a business trip.
Yes, light rail costs money to build, but so do freeways (which are MUCH more expensive). Light rail gets ALL its costs attributed to it - but the costs of buses are often not attributed to the buses themselves, e.g. increased road building and rebuilding needed to deal with the need for more capacity and wear and tear brought on by buses.
So when light rail is compared to buses in regard to costs - buses have an unfair advantage - since they aren't made to account for the ancillary costs they entail.
(*) In Las Vegas they do have some privately owned systems between casinos (which I use) which are quite nice (albeit limited). In 2004 we will have the Las Vegas monorail system for the resort district.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
As a Brit this artice outrages me. Every public service we have is a complete mess. As an example (and this happens all too often to other people too) I spent seven hours on a dirty run down train to make a journy that takes an hour in a car. I know the train service is no longer public but this happens because of the state the goverment left it in.
We pay the heighest tax Europe and still have the worst public services. The goverment will promise this is for our good. Its not.
I went to America with my mum and dad not long ago, the public transport was clean, on time and cheap. Until Britan has this quality of service we shouldn't be charged for using individual roads.
Don't get me started on the NHS!
Lets see them figure out how to fit a gps on to motorbikes, mine doesn't even have underseat storage
This is good, in that it will cut down unnecessary journeys considerably, and hopefully do for the school run once and for all.
But what about those of us with necessary journeys? I do take the train to the office occasionally, and it would be a damn site more often if it was a more pleasant experience. (And more timely, I may add.) Unfortunately, as a UK denizen I don't see that happening any time soon. And that's the real problem.
Zack
"... and more and more now there are all kinds of electronic goodies available" -- Pink Floyd 1972
Does anyone else have Orwellian alarm bells going off in their head, or is it just me? It might help spread taxes more fairly, but the government will know where everyone's car is. It may not sound insidious, but compare it to a hypothetical situation:
A tax on sidewalk use, for the upkeep of city sidewalks and so on. Only, everyone has to have a GPS "black box" implanted in their foot.
The privacy issues with such "tracking devices" are frightening.
Would not the cost of systems (people) to monitor avoidance be very high, if not to say prohibitive.
This is BB on the move again.... Watch your step!
~
--
"we live in a post-ideological world..." - Billy Bragg.
The last time I checked, gas taxes were probably the most direstly proprtional tax in US history. You use it for transportation, you pay for the roads. Toll roads are of course toll roads because they lack certain funds.
Honestly, is there any John Q Public that uses gas for much more than transportation? Not many.
It guages usage... it taxes it accordingly. It is expensive, and proprtional. Gas usage is also proportional to the expense of the enourmous SUV or a truck.
Lets get to the point, the GPS is needed to TRACK YOU, not your gas usage. You can do that through the pumps already, and it doesn't require expensive equipment or expensive bookkeeping.
The UK hasn't really been a 'class' society for some time now. Apart from the Royal family (grrr!) there are is no longer anybody in power due to their inherited title. Titles (again apart from thr Royal family (again, grrr!)) can no longer be passed down from generation to generation - Soon if you're a Lord, Lady, Baron, Baroness, Knight etc... it'll be because that title has been bestowed upon you.
However, things aren't quite as based on one's ability to pay as it is in the US due to British governments being historically more left wing than US governments, We still have a national health service, for instance.
The class system really began to tumble during the first world war. A huge proportion of young noblemen got killed leading 'their men' over the trenches, as they felt it was their duty to do it. Also, the first and second world wars bought such huge disruption and change that the old ways just no longer worked any more. With increasing education and career mobility anyone could become something and now you'll find the old class system is pretty much forgotten.
Come over and experience Britain sometime. The food has gotten a lot better over the last 10-15 years as well...
why not just block the satellite's signal to the GPS antenna when you need to? it isn't hard. i'm sure some geek out there can find a way...
eleven plus two / twelve plus one
I'm game- lets overthrow this bl**dy excuse for a government...
Any of our friends over the pond got a spare weapon or three?
And on the evening of the first day the lord said... LX 1, STANDBY; LX 1, GO!; and there was light.
The black box will have a GPS reciver on it. It will most likely output NMEA streams which would be easy to simulate with a $10 board.
5 years ago a real GPS simulator (one that generates the Radio signals) cost US$50,000. Today they are less than $10k. The proposed toll rate and based on how much I used to drive in the US, a $10k box would save me 9000 gbp per year. If there is a economic case for me doing this, how many businesses will?
A bad result of that is the use of a fairly inefficient mode of transportation. If roads were not subsidized at all or recieved subsidies similar to those for other modes for transportation, we would use the most efficient and cheap way to get around - which will probably involve trains. So i think some kind of use tax on roads should be made. Of course that does not mean that people should surrender their privacy for that purpose. A gas tax is sufficient.
I think that there are a lot people who don't like driving on congested roadways. Trying to marginalize them by hitting their pocketbook is by no means a real solution...
Rush hour is mainly caused by people commuting to work. On an average work day, I spend 30 minutes in my car to commute to work. Public transportation requires 3 hours of my time for the same commute. And I live in a city where we're supposed to have a great public transportation system.
How is this managed, you ask? I leave for work and head back home before the respective "rush hours" start (I work from 6am to 2pm).
While I requested this out of my own free will, I'm sure the government can give employers some incentives to help reduce rush hour congestion by avoiding the "everyone must be in at 9am" requirement.
related to this-- the government started assessing higher taxes on electric and combined gas-electric vehicles. Drivers were irate that they should be forced to pay more taxes when they were just trying to be environmentally friendly, but reply was that they were essentially avoiding paying their share of the road maintenance by driving one of these cars.
If these cars become common, something will have to be done to keep the taxation equitable. Not sure that this is a very efficient solution, though.
We've already established that the potential invasion of privacy this system creates is a bad thing, but here's one more problem. In order for this system to work, every car in the UK must be fitted with a black box with a GPS receiver, which logs everywhere the car goes, and reports this, by wireless network, to the authorities, who send you the bill.
Exactly how is Big Brother going to prevent me from disconnecting or tampering with the black box to avoid paying the road use fees? A person skilled in firmware & hardware hacking (think satellite TV pirates) will be able to disconnect the box from the power supply or disconnect the antennas, hack the box's firmware to make it report bogus information to the authorities, disconnect the box when he wants to drive somewhere without being tracked, attempt to run exploits on the authority's servers, report its miles as belonging to someone else's car, pretend to be a police car in order to get more green lights, etc.
Since this system will very likely force every driver to cough up hundreds or thousands of pounds in road use fees, there is a big motivation for circumventing the system, and it will be difficult to track down each car with a hacked box. They'll probably have vans sniffing for black box signals in the same way vans sniff for TV emmisions to enforce the TV tax, but how hard is it to spoof those vans?
Meldroc, Waster of Electrons
How hard would it be to remove something like this? And how would anyone know if you did it? I could see people getting as sick of paying to go up to the grocery store, and paying thier friend or neighbor to remove it.
The amount of damage done to a road is approximately the fourth power of the axle weight. Therefore, a Semi with 9 axles would only be able to carry 11250 lbs to be limited to the damage my SL1 causes. Since it is the fourth power, any additional weight means they cause vastly disproportionate damage and should actually be paying more in road use taxes. However, an Expedition causes 168 times the damage of my SL1. Perhaps SUV's should start paying road use taxes.
I'd much rather have the government give people tax rebates for riding bikes to work; it would help the congestion problem, the pollution problem, and the obesity problem all at the same time!
This might work in the UK, but in the US, where there is often neither widespread decent public transportation nor affordable housing within 3.5 km (2 mi) of work or shopping centers, it won't go over as well.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Taxation is the primary cause for traffic congestion. More taxation will not solve traffic problems. The solution to congestion is to encourage people to live where they wish to live in your state or the US.
Freedom to move without Gov't over penlizing, over taxing a move. Congestion is caused by people driving 30 miles to thier job. It is solved by people living 1 or 2 miles from their job. So liberty is the solution. It is simple. Liberty to move.
The solution is to never again vote for a Democrat Slavemaster. Gov't causes congestion. LIBERTY is the best solution.
Let's all see how many ways we can abuse this wonderful piece of crap...
1) Subpoena the records for use in some court case. Start with exceptions for "national security", and expand from there... Eventually the divorce lawyers get access...
2) Box cloning? Gee Mr. Jones, you drove 100,000 miles this month... Huh? You only go to the grocery store? Sorry guy - the system's never wrong! Which will beget an investigation, and a revelation that the guy was right, and modifications to the system, and mods to the hacking, and so on...
3) DOS attacks... Just build a box or two or three that create random ID's, and info. Then place them near the upload points... Get about 10 of these boxes going non-stop and see how many real uploads occur...
4) Reprogramming the box - Just like *ahem* DirectTV's PPV...
5) Zap the box... What? The memory's erased *AGAIN* - must be faulty wiring...
6) What if a rampant asteroid whacks a GPS or two or three? What happens when the whole damn system is offline? How do you charge then?
7) Shielding the box from receiving GPS - no signal, no records, nothing to upload...
8) Reprogramming the box to only upload that you traveled 10 miles... "Ummm, yeaaaaah, I only go to and fro the store.... yeaaaaah"
This bullshit is doomed to failure. The only solution is to STOP BUILDING MORE BUILDINGS and creating more congestion! If you require the developers to do traffic impact studies, and then fund improvements for all the roads they'll impact with their traffic, then guess what? Density will decrease! Things will spread out (yah, sprawl will go up....), and traffic will tend to be less congested...
OR - build the fucken roads so they don't have to be worked on for the next 15 years... then when they start getting congested, close a lane, and expand... BEFORE they're totally hosed... Oh wait, that would require planning... never mind...
I suggest you do some research on the cost of owning a car in Singapore. Your situation will not sound so bad anymore. Besides which the CBD already has such a system as that proposed in the UK. Except no GPS is used, cars drive through gates (kinda like tool booths without the boom gates), they have a proximaty card (such as that used for access control for some buildings) attached to the vehicle. If you don't have the tag, there is a camera that takes a photo of your licsense plate for a later bill/fine.
Taxation is the primary cause for traffic congestion. More taxation will not solve traffic problems. The solution to congestion is to encourage people to live where they wish to live in your state or the US.
Freedom to move without Gov't over penalizing, over taxing a move. Congestion is caused by people driving 30 miles to their job. It is solved by people living 1 or 2 miles from their job. So liberty is the solution. It is simple. Liberty to move.
The solution is to never again vote for a Democrat Slavemaster. Gov't causes congestion. LIBERTY is the best solution.
Why cant the government just stop fighting the car and go with it? The automobile has been around for over a 100 years, its not going away.
Its not as if there are no other methods of transport out there to compete with cars. In my home town of New Orleans, there is the bus,ferry and boat(a valid form of transport here),street car(trolly), bicycles, and amtrak. The state is even talking about building a mag-lev train to the northshore, mainly because the people in the northshore dont want the traffic and they figure no one will use the train.
I and most everyone else in the city have tried them, yet we continue to return to the car even in rush hour traffic. Maybe the people have spoken and they feel the advantages are outweigh the disadvantages?
The next one after this version can be called "the flogging a dead horse release"
Just tatoo a a barcode onto the driver's and passenger's wrists and just make scanning mandatory.
Offer $1,000 to anyone who shows up and has a semi-permanent birth control operation (vasectomy, fallopian tubes tied). Stupid crackheads have less kids, government saves money on paying for welfare or prison for those kids, society has less stupid people, and population pressure in general decreases.
Personally I like very many libertarian ideas but I think some things will have to be looked at as more important than the libertarian philosophy or else the country might go to shit worse than it already is.
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
Here's the O DMV site (scroll down to HB2133)
The longer part of the story is that Oregon relies heavily on the gas tax for its roads, and discussions of the impact on those fees as more vehicles go hybrid or electric (or propane, etc.) left some elected officials wondering where it's going to come from in a few years. Hencem the knee-jerk, short-sighted reaction.
Disclaimer - I live in Illinois and own a Honda Insight, and so I'm not directly affected by this change, but it's a peek at the chill tidings ahead. BTW, it's quite the "geek" car right off the lot! CVT (trans.) makes me dread when I have to drive a regular Auto or even a stick. It's a two-seater, but most of the time it's just me going to work and driving home, just like everyone else on the road. We've got the station wagon for driving my daughter around, so it was the logical "second car" for the house. (Sorry, got OT).
(Please don't mod me up, or at least mod me "redundant" on my earlier post. lowlypeon beat me to the post on this "Oregon" issue and deserves props on the comment. My bad.)
None of this is new. Singapore has had their ERP (electronic road pricing) system for years. It uses small devices in each car that detect whenever a driver passes a toll gantry. Money is deducted from the cashcard that goes into the device. Prices are noted on big electronic signs near the toll gantries and depend on the time of day. If you don't have enough cash on your card or no ERP device at all, you will be photographed and liable to pay a fine.
This system has been in operation for years now and works very well. Wired Magazine just did an interesting article on this a couple of months ago.
This has all been thought of before. These new privacy invading, "every road a toll road" devices will bring economic ruin. Yeah, I saw the greedy bastards licking their chops about this five years ago when I was working for the Louisiana Transportation Research Center. Not everyone there liked the idea. Now let's look at what you thought:
In urban areas, many poor people can't afford a car (plus insurance, plus parking fees, plus maintanence...) So tax-supported roads help them very little. They need good mass transit.
This is a sidetrack. Ask yourself why poor people in urban areas can't afford vehicles and if burdening them with the cost of mass transit will help. I'm a fan of mass trasit in urban areas, but that does not have much to do with the issue. People who don't drive cars don't pay gasoline taxes! People who don't pay taxes at all but instead get Earned Income Credit are not directly taxed to build the roads that bring them other goods, like food.
In rural areas, the situation is different. But the proposed scheme would have much lower costs-per-mile in rural areas.
People in rural areas already pay through the nose in gasoline taxes! They have to drive further to get anything. Farm equipment fuel is sold on a different basis, but it still has to be trucked around. Done wrong, pay per mile can finish off the rest of America's independent farmers.
Economically, this seesm like a good idea - it makes the paid price of driving closer to the true cost.
Asshole in the middle tolls like this are not designed to bring things, "closer to cost". They are designed to suck as much out of the ends as possible. The idea is to have variable rates on roads and time of driving. You would never know how much your dive would cost you, and your taxation could be raised at the change of a database. Let's face it, we don't drive because we want to, we drive because we have to. The people behind this know that and want to suck you dry. I hate driving, and I'll hate it more or be forced to quit my job if this ever happens here.
Please never ever consider this viable. The costs of implimenting the thing are much greater than the costs of traditional taxes, and those costs will be passed on. One of the United State's great strenghts is the mobility of it's work force. We don't have to go through all the losses involved in a move (selling your house is a loser) for work within a fifty mile range. I can only imagine how this would impact the cost of a truck rental or moving service for those unfortunate enough to have to move. Think of these costs, they are great. Think of the agregate harm losses incured if the right people are less likely to be matched to the right jobs. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Your privacy concerns will be aleviated by the same liars who told you Carnivore would not be invasive and that your email would only be read by machines. There is no point and the costs are great. Tell those greedy camera shoving big brother assholes to reconsider.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
For those of you who live in a totalitarian country that is able to articulate such idiotic taxe policies, here is the scoop:
It's very easy to block a GPS signal and render the whole tracking system unoperational. I work on something similar as a project recently, and things got very complicated when we had to take the shielding of metallic objects in account. So all I am saying is that their stuff: it's not for tomorrow
For details on GPS and tracking, check the latest Dr Dobbs journal. There is a programmer centric view on the system.
PPA, the girl next door.
-- I feel better now. Thanks for asking.
[cause employers to move from massive down-town centers, to more localized live/work/shop communities.]
Isn't this another way of describing sprawl?
First off, saying that charging for toll rods is going to hurt the poor is like saying that charging for groceries will hurt the poor. When done right, toll charging would create more incentive for competition and provide an environment much more healthier for the poor and provides better service to boot.
So the question is - how to do it right.
I don't like the GPS idea, I think it should be done per road, and per how crowded it is.
I don't like that the government would own the roads also - anything that charges should allow for competition and private controll.
And tax payers souldn't be expected to pay what they've always been paying.
One thought might to be to allow the roads to be free, but to give paying drivers higher priority to get on. Using digital cash and wireless technology, cars could auto-bid for the front of the line position. The freeway onramp signals would always be optimized for speed throughput and during rush-hour people who don't pay would wait a much longer time.
I don't want to flame, but Inflation is one thing, recession is another thing, this and that is very nice but, why is it that they always find CLEVER ways to tax us, that seems so good (like in this case, hey if you use it you pay for it, which of course is acceptable in theory). But when you do the maths, they NEVER reduce taxes the other way around so that it would actually benefit (let's say in this case, people that aren't using the roads) like it is supposed to.
What happens is they put that tax, it's an extra burden on the average class, they won't reduce your federal taxes for infrastrucure claiming they will do more roadwork with the new funds (and 2-3 years after that, it will still be like it was 2-3 years before that, exept you'll have yer ANOTHER tax to pay without any true benefits...)
If they want to get more money, how about trimming all the exceeding balance in their own gestion. Cut those 100$ Restaurants bills, cut that second car that you get for being minister or heck, stop making M.$ studies that you won't even follow just so you can tell us you at least evaluated the idea, if you want to rip us off and have it your own way, no need to zap even more money, money that could be better used.
This is a global problem in north america, Canada suffers from the same problem, big time, look at the federal tax, GST, 7%, funny thing is you pay that tax over the provencial tax, which is HELL to manage, example, if your province has 7% tax, and you buy something that costs 10$, you pay 7% tax on the 10$ and AFTER you pay 7%GST on the new total (10.70) so basically you're paying a tax on the tax. This was for the debt and supposed to stay there only a year or 2 when times were bad, did they remove it? Nope. Did they reduce it? Nope... it's been there for years, they made a promise that it would be gone or there would be tax reduction, nothing seen the light. It's not off topic, it's just an example on where all these "new ideas that will benefit the poor class" gets the votes and in return you get nothing. Remember that some people there are payed probably twice or more what you are doing annually just to come out with new ways to get bigger salaries and budgets.
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
Given the trend of government to reducing services to the taxpayer while increasing taxes to provide more benefits to campaign contributors, shouldn't we just put them all up against the wall and shoot them?
If this idea doesn't make you think that. Nothing will.
Step right up, folks. Just one quick shot in the arm is all it takes and the nanoprobes will mark you a lifetime member of the Benevolent New World Order. Don't worry if you feel a little nausea for the first day. That's just the probes interfacing with your neural synapses. And remember folks, the only safe society is a surveillance society. Yes, step right up and be a responsible citizen.
Revelation 13 (WEB)
--------------
15. It was given to him to give breath to it, to the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should both speak, and cause as many as wouldn't worship the image of the beast to be killed.
16. He causes all, the small and the great, the rich and the poor, and the free and the slave, to be given marks on their right hands, or on their foreheads;
17. and that no one would be able to buy or to sell, unless he has that mark, the name of the beast or the number of his name.
18. Here is wisdom. He who has understanding, let him calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man. His number is six hundred sixty-six.
I'm a libertarian and I'm not rejoicing.
... a government agency can also use to improve its monitoring capability.
The problem is a "transaction cost" problem, not a "free rider" problem. The cost to use a road in the United States is on the order of $0.01 to $0.05 per vehicle-mile. A typical trip is 10 miles. It's hard to measure something that cheap without perturbing the measurement with the extra cost.
Now Moore's Law comes into effect and the cost of monitoring traffic usage and processing the resulting information drops and drops and drops to the point where it's economically feasible to bill road users directly rather than levy taxes on gasoline (which punishes people who buy gasoline and don't burn it on public roads and subsidizes people who ride bicycles).
Unfortunately, the very same technological advance which makes it possible to monitor road users for economic purposes also makes it possible to monitor road users for intelligence collection. Going to a political rally? The FBI will have access to the license plate numbers of all private vehicles in that neighborhood that day.
So I disagree with you that the privacy issue is a whole other topic. I think it's inextricably linked. Any technology that a competitive firm could use to lower its transaction costs to operate a road system
In both of these links,
5 6107,00.html 0 /1838185.stm
http://www.observer.co.uk/politics/story/0,6903,6
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/uk/newsid_183800
they talk about charges being per mile and not per kilometer... Perhaps there's a glitch in the Matrix today?
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
the tolls should be really high too. i mean, i've got to pay every time i ride the T, or pay for a T-pass (I live in boston, MA), so why shouldn't you be paying for the roads. hopefully you'll start using public transportation more. hopefully it would get people to consider weather they needed to drive on a trip-by-trip basis instead of 'oh. i just got a car. i'll drive'
Are you serious? I have to say my jaw nearly hit the table when I heard about the so-called Tax Refund trumpeted by Bush & Co last year...oh...it wasn't really a refund, but a loan against the following year's return. WHY DID HE KEEP CALLING IT A REFUND, THEN? I've never seen a more blatant attempt at manipulating public perception.
For the record, I'm no fan of the Democratic party, but the Republican party isn't the solution - it has a built-in nastiness all its own.
It's been shown repeatedly, most recently in ISP and cell-phone pricing, that flat-rate pricing is the best way to encourage casual use of a resource. The obvious converse is that per-use pricing will discourage use. For cell phones and the Internet, encouragement has turned out to be generally good for society.
For cars, there's certainly something to be said for discouraging use. The trouble with the current proposal is that the pricing isn't income-based. Since an expensive car causes just as much traffic as a cheap one, the pricing model should discourage use based on car count (or size), not on income. As proposed, low-income people will stop driving but high-income ones will still clog the roads. If (fixed) tolls are set high enough to get the richer people off the roads, the poor ones won't be able to afford to get to work, and the economy will suffer in unintended ways.
Newspapers over here have a habit of taking something suggested by a government worker on his lunch break and calling it government policy. The british press are almost as untrustworthy as the politicians they write about.
The government has been trying (unsuccessfully) to reduce car use ever since it was elected... It's been fighting a running battle with the press over this. The problem is they're unlikely to succeeed. Everyone can see the reason why 'someone else' doesn't need to drive to work, but they always seem to have a reason why their particular use of the car is so essential. It's going to take a real change in attitude to make it work, and I just don't see it in the near future.
Personally I don't have a need for a car... I couldn't afford one, either - a new car costs about £10,000 or about $15,000. A second hand one would be about £2000 or about $3000. Insurance could easily double the price of a second hand car. A year travelling to work by public transport costs me £372. No contest, really.
is not completely insane like the US one (which was obviously designed by oil companies and car manufacturers), but many cities like London are very bicycle hostile. Look at Croydon's 2 metre long bicycle lanes for example :-). Some places like cambridge and ipswich are nice for bicycles, but my former boss was taking his life into his hands commuting the 8 miles from home to work each day through zones 5 to 2. He did outpace train/buses and cars though!
I've done the maths, and other than for city centres in rush hour when you (and I) really should take the bus anyway, I think this will actually result in a net saving for UK motorists.
Here are the proposed charges as per the BBC .
> Average charge proposals per mile
> Top charge: 45p, central London, rush-hour
> Motorway weekday: 3.5p
> Other roads weekday: 4.3p
> Rural roads busy times: 1p
> Rural roads off-peak: free
> Birmingham to Manchester - £7.40
> Leeds to Liverpool - £6
> Road tax scrapped
> Fuel duty cut by between 2p and 12p
Depending on the efficiency of your car, UK petrol currently costs between 5p and 15p per mile (70p/litre, US$4/gallon).
With a 12p (20%) reduction in petrol prices, this would mean petrol would cost between 4p and 12p per mile, a saving of between 1p and 3p per mile.
Road tax (aka tax disc) costs between GBP100 and GBP160 per year. Having ZERO car disc tax would give a further saving of between 0.5 and 2p per mile, depending on the category of your car and the miles you drive per year.
Total saving of between 1.5p and 5p per mile on petrol & disc tax combined.
Let's say we drive an efficient car with average yearly milage of around 12,000 miles (normal for a Brit). We'd get a 4p reduction per mile.
My opinion is that these figures sound fine for a 12p reduction in petrol tax and zero tax disc, but anything significantly less than a 12p reduction and zero tax disc would be a problem. I'd also like to see a stricter definition of "rural" and "other" roads (are A roads that pass through rural areas "rural" or does "rural" only apply to B & unclassified roads? If only B&C roads, that could mean an increase in rat-runs).
It will also require a huge increase in park-and-ride bus schemes. Many of these existing schemes are on, or butted against, "green belt" conservation areas. There are potential conflicts of interest in granting planning permission to expand these sites.
On the whole though, this is a superb idea.
As for privacy, your numberplate is tracked in the UK already (do you seriously think the police can't get your movements out of Trafficmaster? Get real!).
FYI, I live in the Cotswolds, a rural area near Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, UK.
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
Why not just increase taxes paid for the cars by car owners?
Ah, yes, I forgot, it isn't *really* about the *money*....
Because rural folk buy cars and petrol from the same places townies buy cars and petrol.
Because rural folk actually need a car, and townies don't.
Because rural folk don't contribute to congestion when they drive their cars out in the sticks, but when they visit the towns, they are just as much of a problem as the townies.
I live fifteen miles out of town. It's not until the final two miles that I get stick in a jam. You don't need to discourage me from driving the first thirteen miles, only the last two.
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
In all fairness, the tolls should be based on how much wear and tear your vehicle causes the road. If you drive a 2 ton hummer you are degrading the road alot more then a geo metro. The tolls should be priced accordingly.
But, IMHO, we already have a gas tax. When some moron proposes this, they need to drop all existing taxes used to raise money for our roads, not just add a new tax that people will foolishly accept. The most frustrating part about taxes is that they are becoming so complicated, that a significant part of my tax dollars are wasted on administering and collecting taxes. Let's simplify our tax systems.
-Paul
"I'm nobody suspicious... That makes me sound even more suspicious, doesn't it?" - Spike (Cowboy Bebop)
For those who don't know the background to this, the UK has, I believe, the most cars/mile of road of anywhere in the world. This has a perceptible impact on the quality of life for everyone. I live in London, where the average speed of traffic has stayed constant for over a century. Cars travel no faster now than horses did in the late 19th century.
The response to this has been to use fuel taxation as a punitive tax - it is seen as a simple way of reducing the distance people travel, since fuel usage is roughly proportional to distance travelled, and everyone knows that as costs increase, consumption goes down.
However, it has emerged that fuel prices are what economists call "Price Inelastic". What this means is that people will buy the same quantity of fuel no matter what the price is.
This means that increased fuel costs have gone to increase the overall friction in the economy, and has generated an enormous amount for the treasury, but hasn't reduced road usage.
Part of the reason for the price inelasticity is the "switching cost". Those who have decided to live in leafy suburbia do not have acceptable mass transit options to get them to work (this is a whole other story). This means that, if fuel prices are increased, their only option is to take the kids out of school and move house. No wonder people don't do it.
This new form of taxation is likely to cause more elasticity in road use because switching costs are significantly reduced - instead of driving at rush hour, and paying 45p/mile you wait an hour and pay 10p/mile. Or you travel in earlier. Or you work from home 2 days a week.
As long as the pricing scheme intelligently reflects real emergent road use, this scheme should reduce congestion significantly, improving quality of life for everyone.
Hi, Singapore implemented toll roads Electronic road pricing (links : http://www.lta.gov.sg http://www.mita.gov.sg/bksltp.htm). All you need is a regime which tells people what to do and what to think.
Of course, this is the same country that taxed TV viewing, so what can you expect from the crazy socialists there.
You raise an important point which (trust me) can be wrenched back on topic.
I was recently having a conversation about The Sopranos. The gist of what I was being told was that US advertisers would never have wanted to place ads during a violent show full of swearing and shooting, and that the Sopranos would never have been commissioned by an ad-funded station. Only because HBO is subscription-funded could The Sopranos be made. And I think we're richer for it.
Now, HBO can operate as a subscription service because now we have the technology to gate viewers (except the ones who circumvent it...), but when the BBC was launched, there was no way to "narrowcast" to a set of subscribers; you could only broadcast to everyone with a TV (or radio) set. Hence, the TV licence which funds the BBC is analogous to a subscription fee. It allows the BBC to avoid pandering to advertisers. (There are other features of the system which allow the BBC to remain independed of goverment, and a remit that they "inform" and "educate" as well as "entertain", but let's not get too embroiled in this just yet.) And this is why the BBC can produce "The Blue Planet", while ITV and Channel 4 (our two main ad channels) show "When Buildings Collapse" and make localised versions of "Temptation Island".
And here's where we wrench things back on topic: If the TV licence is like pay-TV for an age where you couldn't measure who watched what, then road tax and fuel duty are congestion charging for a time when you couldn't measure who was in a congested area and who was on a congested city road.
I think the scheme has merit. It needs fleshing out, a lot of fleshing out (the accuracy of GPS, areas without line-of-sight to enough GPS satellites, privacy, tamperproofing, are all issues for which I think solutions could be found).
One thing I think would be very important is a readout of just what you're spending, as you drive. One reason people in Britain drive instead of taking a long distance bus or train, is that when you're driving the cost is not immediately apparent to you. Petrol tends to be a weekly fillup, road tax is annual, insurace is annual. A train journey involves slapping real money on a counter.
The recent Big Brother award went to a research initiative to preserve
privacy in road pricing systems.
Worth reading in England I think. Soon.
-- From Denmark
Some insurance companies are looking at setting insurance prices by when, where, and how much you drive via GPS recordings. There is a pilot program in Texas. I guess rush hour, late night driving, and speeding are the targets. You'll probably get a 50% insurance discount or more if submit to big brother.
I believe the Federal Trade Commission banned GPS last week for a car rental agency for speeding fines. It was not because they didn't agree with the principle, but because they didn't tell the consumer they were doing this (except in the rental contract fine print).
The proponents of this scheme seem to be guilty (yet again) of the London-And-South-East-Is Representative-Of-The-UK viewpoint. The vast majority of the UK has absolutely no problem with serious congestion on the roads at all, sure the roads get *busier* at peak times but mostly it adds a few minutes to your journey. Extrapolating problem areas like London (and perhaps ten other cities and black spots) into a nationwide congestion problem when probably 90% of the population outside of London never sees London-style congestion at all is a bit silly. Then using that extrapolation to justify a nationwide GPS based road tax system is laughable. Perhaps if the UK was not such a London-centric economy then the congestion around London would ease; lets try encouraging business to move out elsewhere in the country; this would move traffic elsewhere, but would mean, overall, more manageable levels everywhere.
Yesterday, after making a VERY wrong turn from Niagra New York, I ended up in Toronto. An uncomfortable place for an American to be after loosing the Hockey Gold medal :-)
Anyway, Toronto has cameras set up on exit ramps that will snap a picture of your licence plate, and then mail the registered owner a bill. What I wonder is how the Canadian Government (or any other) deals with drivers that don't have licence plates. It may have just been a coincidence, but we noticed two vehicles passing us with no license plates at all !!!
Also,
could somebody please comment on privately owned roadways? I saw an interesting John Stossel news story claiming that a public roadway (in California I believe) often has bumper to bumper traffic while a business owned expressway built alongside travels at full speed. His point was that making government services run by businesses, there is a greater incentive to provide the customer with a better service. Here in Michigan we have no such roads, so I was curious was others had to say about them.
If one was to implement this idea in is U.S., most states have the infrastructure needed to bill people for the miles they drive.
AFAIK, all U.S. states (at least all the ones I've lived in) require you to renew your car license every year. Some states allow you to renew for multiple years.
When one registers a car, the initial odometer is recorded. When that person sends in the forms and money (or does it in person) a form is filled out with the odometer reading. The difference in odometer readings is used to calculate the "road tax" and a bill is sent.
Cheaters? Use a system of "random" audits like the IRS. It would an easy audit, bring you car down to the local DMV and have the odometer checked.
I would suspect the cost of such a system would be relatively low.
My ultimate point here is that using technology to track the movements of a large percentage of the citizenry is not necessarily the only, nor the best solution.
if the british government is going to do it, they might as well totally privatize the roads. Otherwise, it's just another tax to support Tony Blair's socialist utopia (which will probably have people walking and using a re-nationalized mass transit system anyway).
They have 50 million people in a relatively small area. They don't have to built ultra-long highways across broad expanses like us Americans do. Of course, due to the population density, they do have a lot of roads for it's size.
All of that taken into consideration, though, they should have less road per person than we do in the US. Then why do they have to pay these ridiculous gas taxes and now, have to pay for toll roads?
You hit the nail on the head there. Both main parties are pretty much controlled by people who just want popularity and power. They accomplish this by doing things like meeting celebrities in public and passing laws like "PATRIOT" that give them more power.
The people in the third parties are probably a lot more principled, because they know that their party robably won't become major, but they stick with it anyay.