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.

Re:What about the poor?

[Teun]

For years the Dutch governement has studied a similar system.
But they could not find an affordable and reliable technology.
So now they propose a charge for distance covered regardless wich road you're on.
Only the time of day will be recorded and influence the charges.
If the Brits pull this off it'll be nice for Dutch car owners like me, as I make at least half my kilometers on foreign roads I'm realy pissed off at having to pay Dutch tax while abroad!

As an info for the Americans reading, in Europe these schemes are generally sold on the "Environmental" ticket as they hope it'll get you out of your car into public transport.
And as the UK has one of the most backward train systems in Europe this is a challenge....

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.

For those too lazy to read...

[weave]

Typical, loads of comments before reading the articles...

• U.K. already has the highest "petrol" tax in Europe and dare I say, probably the world.
• The proposal includes dropping the fuel tax by upwards of 12p a liter (that's about U.S. 65 cents a U.S. gallon).
• This is to discourage peak period driving. The duty on non-peak travel would be minimal or even free so during off peak times and rural areas, cost will be less to drive.
• The most expensive part of road building is to build for peak capacity. Those using the roads instead of transit during peak times and hence causing the greatest cost to support are being asked to pay their fair share.
• A better less opinionated piece from BBC News
• My opinion: UK is in a jam because their fuel taxes don't go to support just roads. It is used to pay for tons of social and other programs as well. If their fuel tax, as high as it is, was used to pay for roads, the M25 would be a double stack the entire length for example, and congestion wouldn't be so much of a problem. They are trying to get off on the cheap IMO... The privacy aspects of this are damn scary as well...

Re:For those too lazy to read...

[weave]

I got news for you, the poor sods making minimum wages in UK already don't drive. The price of a U.S. gallon of gas there is around US$5.00. So you move to a place on the same line as your job, or you get a job elsewhere. In the places where this is proposed, the public transport is pretty good (compared to any U.S. city besides NYC). Their biggest problem there is the push to privatize buses and trains. It's gotten them into a shithole. (So much for the argument that private industry can run things better... Often the case, but not always the case.)

The U.K. has some other qualities the U.S. doesn't have, all that must be considered. Their population density is high, yet they still have loads of rural areas. The way they do this is through strict zoning and green belts around cities. A city gets so big, it stops growing, it has to grow up or within. This helps transit, unlike in the U.S. where it's suburban sprawl everywhere and therefore it's near impossible to design a transit system that goes everywhere, like you said...)

They are also heavy on social programs. You can get benefits for just doing some care for a disabled relative, for example. With that comes loads of taxes. They are taxed to death.

Libertarians Rejoice

[FakePlasticDubya]

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.

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.

UK Politics and the DoT

[Zeinfeld]

The proposal is not new and it is pretty much what the DoT civil servants have been plotting for several decades albeit in slightly different form

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.

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.