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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.
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
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 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
In the US, we pay for roads with taxes on fuel.
Heh. No you don't. The US has some of the lowest gasoline prices in in the world. And the taxes you levy on your gasoline are the reason. By and large, roads are built with money from taxes on property or retail sales or personal income (depending on jurisdiction) more than anything else.
Britain on the other hand, entirely pays for its roads with gas taxes. That's why the price of gasoline there is the highest in the world. It never ceases to amaze me that when the price of gasoline in the US gets to almost half that of gasoline in Europe and Asia, everyone is up in arms and ready to nuke the Middle East. For the love of god, if it bothers you so much, just stop burning so goddamn much of it.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
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
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.
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.
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.
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.