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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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
...
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!
...
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
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
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.
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?
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.
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
> 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
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
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.
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.
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
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/
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
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....
I agree. The US Govt botched Amtrak. They should have taken over the infrastructure and improved it (electrifiying, etc), while creating a more open market to do the actual moving. The government does a good job of running infrastructure but not of serving customers (witness Amtrak delays and horrible service). This is analogous to roads: the government builds and maintains the roads, but private concerns run buses and trucks.
While not my favorite governor of Massachusetts, Michael Dukakis proposed essentially the same thing a while back. Unfortunately nothing ever became of it.
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?
That's how the war on drugs started in the US.
h istory/c onspiracy.htm
The supreme court said that it wasn't the government's business what people put into their body, so consumption of anything could not be made illegal.
So the legislature passed a tax act on marijuana, since Du Pont really really didn't want to have to compete with something like hemp fibers in his new synthetic marketplace.
Read the link below for the full story:
http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/hemp/
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
The issue is more one of land ownership and creating equitable methods of ensuring the things can be built. A public company does not have the right to force people to sell land they wish to build roads on, and if you were to get roads built by such means, the roads would either be prohibitively expensive or next to useless, as privateers pay exhorbitant amounts of money to get the land they need to build the things.
By putting the process under government control, you balance public interest (it is in the public interest for the roads to be built) with democratic accountability (so that conditions affecting others giving up land to get the roads built are fair and equitable.) You also get rid of the "Royalist" argument - real libertarians like Thomas Paine argued that people only "own" land because they, or their ancesestors, or someone they bought it from, were given the land as Royal reward. If a democratic government builds the roads and makes them available to all, abuse of that royal advantage becomes non-existant.
There's also a small question of logistics - I'm fortunate in living near the Florida Turnpike, which runs in parallel to I-95 here, making the two competitors. But in all honesty, do you believe that competitive roads are a practical proposition in most areas? How does it help someone to have the roads wrenched from their democratically accountable government and given to a private entity, which has no competition and therefore can charge whatever the market will bear, whatever the costs of road maintenance really are?
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
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.
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!
Personally, I say it's worth the loss of liberty to do it full-scale, with satellite tracking.
Those who would give up essential Liberty for by-the-mile insurance.... hehe
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
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...
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
So why should I subsidise dirty polluting car drivers
You don't, us drivers subsidise your
public transport, not the other way
round. The london underground and the
buses are money pits, meanwhile road
and petrol taxes take huge ammounts of
money from drivers, which pay for the
whole of the UKs transport policy and
still have plenty left over to be sucked
into other parts of the goverment.
I agree. This is potentially a good idea, but I wouldn't take it unless I get to keep the part of my income tax that otherwise goes to the various Transportation Departments.
Dyolf Knip
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.
[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.
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.
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
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.
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).
If everyone who rode on mass transit systems suddenly switched to cars, you'd need to dramatically increase the amount of roads. Massive numbers of buildings would have to be bought and then demolished to make way for the space needed. The "true cost" of owning a car would rocket.
Basically the choice is a straight one: You pay a little towards public transport and keep car taxes low, or you pay nothing at all and see them rocket. Unfortunately the "knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing" libertarian mindset can't grasp that simple bit of economics yet.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.