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.

Comments

What about the poor?

[mcrbids]

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?

Re:What about the poor?

[Mr. Slippery]

Thus, the poor can have equal use of all roads.

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.

In rural areas, the situation is different. But the proposed scheme would have much lower costs-per-mile in rural areas.

Economically, this seesm like a good idea - it makes the paid price of driving closer to the true cost. But politically...the possibility of the state tracking my movements is not something I welcome with open arms. Not to mention the draconian enforcement measures that would be needed to prevent tampering.

Universal toolroads == universal tracking

[Tjp($)pjT]

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.

Creates real inequity. Poor priced out of rushhour

[SlideGuitar]

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.

Re:Already happens with trucks

[edunbar93]

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.

Blair Accidentally Sells The Roads

[Hettinga]

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.