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Satellite-Assisted European Road Tolls Next?
Roland Piquepaille writes "In 'Pay-as-you-go motoring just around the corner,' the European Space Agency (ESA) says that "road tolls could be made fairer if satellite-assisted distance pricing is implemented." Experiments are currently underway in Ireland, Portugal and Germany, before a possible extension to other countries. Potential benefits of such a road tolling system would be fairer implementation of charging on a 'pay for use' basis. All these experiments are using the US-operated Global Positioning System (GPS). But in 2010, when the system is fully implemented, it will use the Galileo satellite system."
Could the black box track the satellites inside a Faraday cage?
http://yetanotherpoliticalrant.blogspot.com
(little bit OT, but in a way related)
cellphones are used to track traffic jams. if phones follow a certain path they're likely to be in a car and is the phone stays in a certain zone for longer than t and more phones have the same behaviour it's likely there is a traffic jam.
this system has shown to be quite accurate.
Privacy is terrorism.
One thing that scares me about these systems is the potential for spying on people.
As soon as it is mandatory for cars to have transmitting GPS recievers to track their movements on highways, then it will become standard issue in cities and other areas. Call me paranoid, but I don't WANT the government tracking me like that.
Second, along the same lines, there's the potential that the system could be used to issue things like speeding tickets and other traffic citations. I guess this is another case of the fact that people appreciate the right to BEND the law. There are some toll-systems in place now that give speeding citations if you cover the distance between two toll-booths in too short a time, but as far as I'm aware their deployment is limited.
Any comments?
Stewey
There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who don't.
Satellite-Assisted European Road Trolls? ugh, I need to stop reading Slashdot :/
Burn the land and boil the sea, you can't take the sky from me
We could be charge for just using the road, the money would come just out of our account we might not even realise we are being charged.
----- Friends, l33tists, l4m3z0rs! Lend me thy keyboards.
Lots of Euro highways already have distance based tolls, especially France and Italy.
While this system might be able to replace some toll booths, it is unlikely to allow a much improved granularity of payment (I mean, the payment can't vary in increments smaller than the number of off ramps).
On the other hand, such a system would appear to have a big roll to play enforcing congestion taxes, such as now operate in London.
BTW - Is London still less congested now everyone has got used to the tax?
Alright, let's ignore the spying/creepyness aspect for one second. It's just plain obnoxious to tax residents, not buisnesses, but residents, who go one more roadtrips and commute farther. One should know where the tolls are and how much they are instead of just a sattelite odometer tax.
Since when has this country used intellectual elite as a pejorative term?
Of course we wouldn't want SUV owners pay more per mile than economy car owners do we? That wouldn't be fair!
..from current toll-road models?
For instance, when you get on the Mass Pike (the main line of the Pike, not the extension into Boston), you get a ticket. You turn in the ticket when you get off, and the toll is computed based on how far you travel (a rough formula is distance in miles times approximately 3.5 cents/mile with a minimum toll of 25 cents).
Barrier toll highways (a la the Garden State) substitute fairly regularly spaced toll booths charging a constant (and higher than the ticket type) rate.
In both cases, it's charging for the amount of road usage.
If you manage to remove the black box from your vehicle you can avoid the road tolls.
How are they going to stop this?
...but this kind of thing gives me the willies. I don't want the gummint tracking me wherever I drive all the time, no matter how 'innocent' they claim it is.
Of course, I have a navigation system in my TL, so maybe I'm just plain stupid...
/.: why the hell am I here?
2010 will be a little early for my midlife crisis. But I'm very happy to hear that Europe's new satellite system will drive their automotive surveylence system. As long as I'm living in the USA, I'll take a Porsche with a Euro-tracking system over a Corvette with US-GPS.
I'll be sure to get the Corvette for my European vacations, though. Wouldn't want EuroLand to catch me at full speed...
I think that with a little co operation between law enforcement and auto makers that high-speed persuits could be a thing of the past. By having an arrangement where a car's GPS system was also tied to the car's entire electrical system, you could arrange it (I would hope) so that a police officer in persuit of a felon could "remotely" turn off a felon's car --and thus potentially saving thousands of lives as this system is implemented all over the country.
I think that orwellian implications aside, this could be a Very Good Thing.
Toll Usage : 56 Euros
Satelite surcharge : 734 Euros
Getting a ticket because the sattelite tracked how fast you went : priceless
Desi Noise, Live!
I don't see what this could possibly accomplish that a tax on gasoline couldn't, and without all this useless, expensive and potentially invasive technology to boot.
What is the big advantage of this system over a fuel tax?
Your favorite
The government hopes to raise 650 million euros a year through the new charges.
Even given privacy/personal liberties angle to be completely aside (which I am not ready to do just yet!), the only "fair" way to implement such a system would be if "they" would promise to take less tax on private citizen as a result of that. No, "they" just want to get more bucks to spend on bureocracy... (relating to the old argument "If not for the Govt., you would not have the modern highway system")
Paul B.
I would like to say that I just can't believe this. Europe is a place where you must pay a tax on your gasoline that is more than the cost of the gasoline itself - that in itself is an insane infringement on our freedoms. The idea that European nations need to collect more taxes and fees is proposterous. However, liberal European politicians never felt that there was a problem with any tax or fee. I predict that within the next decade, the French and German governments will provide a licensing system that charges citizens for the air they breathe.
END RANT - Now, mod me down!!!
Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???
I OWN A BUSINESS! WELCOME TO C:\Program Files !!!
--
Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING, eh?
Who says a WORD about "avoid[ing] paying a gas tax"??? No, it's The government hopes to raise 650 million euros a year through the new charges! you will keep the same tax (if not more, because originally you will be told that "we need more $$ to maintain this new great satellite-based infrastructure", and you will never get anything back...
Paul B.
Oh new! Slooshdud won't stend a chosh!
Fuel tax has the dual advantage of discouraging driving and discouraging vehicles that use large amounts of fuel.
Oh, wait, Europe already does that.... HOW many $/gallon?
But really, some of the proposals are to tax what were freeways -- yet it is clear better for the environment and safer if people use freeway-style roads instead of local roads.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
I don't see what this could possibly accomplish that a tax on gasoline couldn't
;-)
For the simple answer, a tax on fuel rather than miles "unfairly" nails those who chose to destroy our environment (quicker than the rest) by driving big gas-guzzlers.
Of course, one could counter with the idea that gas-guzzlers also tend to weigh more, causing more damage to the road, thus warranting a higher tax regardless of the environmental impact, but, don't say that too loud around the current US oligarchy...
Now me, I think we should tax based on total time spent on the road, to penalize grannies out to cause their regular Sunday afternoon traffic-jam.
In my country, the "road toll" is the number of people who have died (or maybe just been in an accident) due to road accidents in the holidays (eg. Easter road toll of 3). You can imagine how I read the title, satellite-assisted road accidents??
The only charges we have are occasional ones such as when they built a new expensive bridge across a harbour, you had to pay $1 when you want across. Now that they've regained all the money, you don't have to pay anymore.
... hoping to be able to remotely" turn off a POLICE car?
Also, in '1984' there were many Very Good Things implemented, if one wishes to put orwellian implications aside...
Paul B.
You can track vehicle positions. It's much harder to track which roads have been used.
I've done a bunch of work with GPS-based vehicle tracking systems--and it is entirely feasible to track vehicle positions. However--it is something else entirely to track which roads a given vehicle has used. The problem isn't with GPS--the problem is with the accuracy of map data: sometimes there's a pretty substantial difference between where GPS reports are, and where the actual roadway is supposed to be. (A very common instance of this is service roads--the roads that typically parallel a limited-access highway in urban areas. Is the truck on I-78 or on the adjacent service road?
This is a ridiculously expensive way to charge tolls.
This problem has already been solved in the U.S.: you can travel from Massachusetts to Virginia using EZ-Pass. And the EZ-Pass system costs lots less to implement. For starters, the on-windshield transponders cost a few bucks; substantially less than even the lowest-cost GPS vehicle locators (which use cellular telephone control channels to report).
So why dream up such a boondoggle?
Oh...that's right. Because the Galileo system is just an out-of-this-world waste of money. So the European Space Agency needs to dream up problems for their solution to solve. And the Europeans wonder why their economies are stagnant.
...no one cares?
I don't understand why we need full time satellite tracking in our cars to simply track how many miles we drive on a highway. A system where each car has an RFID tag and each entry and exit ramp has a receiver be much simpler and cheaper, and would still provide the billing companies with all of the information they need (and then some).
Now excuse me while I use this sledge hammer to hit the button on my mouse to submit my post.
Me thinks that the government is only interested in how much they can pick from our pockets.
Fight Spammers!
Might be this - EVERYTHING you do is monitored and metered. Your speed will be checked in real time. A fine is assessed based perhaps on how much you're exceeded the speed limit, and for how long. Your insurance bill may vary month to month in proportion to our speeding. Your driving habits will be monitored. If you take an excursion to somewhere you usually don't go, you'll be flagged for extra scrutiny. And you'll have to pay a special registration tax if you want to keep driving an older vehicle that doesn't have any monitoring black boxes.
then civilians should be able to turn it off.
no?
they are enough of a problem on slashdot. the moderation system helps somewhat, but it is getting out of hand.
Did anyone else read the headline "Satellite-Assisted European Road Tolls Next?" and see "European Ninja Trolls" instead?
In Mass. they were supposed to take the tolls down from the Mass. pike over 20 years ago. The Turnpike Authority kept avoiding that by aking out more loans to extend their life.
Fight Spammers!
Did anyone else read that Sattelite-Assisted European Road Trolls? I know I did. And you know what would happen, if one of these road trolls went too far east and back in time twenty or so years, don't you?
He'd be in Soviet Russia, so... bear with me, I'm sure the knowledge he'd have gained by having lived 20 years more than anyone else had, and he'd know how the USSR fell. So he'd be taken in headquarters, Gorbachev would drastically try to change plans, and would try to launch some sattelites. And the troll, would, of course, assist him in this proccess, with his powerful knowledge of the future.
So you see, it's all very logical, that in Soviet Russia, road trolls assist sattelites.
Moving right along, Gorbachev would probably try to create a new business plan of some sort to try to figure out how to conquer Capitalism while at the same time reforming the USSR. And I am sure that it would go along the lines of launching sattelites, converting the capitalist pigs, doing something, and then the Soviet Union would rule the earth. So the troll'd type this up for him.
1) Launch troll-assisted sattelites.
2) Convert Americans to Communism.
3) ???
4) Profit!
And they would, of course, succeed. Because that's a good plan. And the troll would be given a powerful role in the new world order. Of course, he'd would fall to a little corruption. Maybe by the late-nineties you might kidnap Natalie Portman or something. Do something nefarious with oatmeal or something roughly analogous. Maybe kill all the BSD developers. Maybe mass amounts of sexual debauchery would occur. Birds bred to roost in strange places, stuff like that.
Of course, eventually this magical time travelling troll would die, or be overthrown, and hopefully things would be evened out.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." -- Hanlon's Razor
One thing that isn't taken into account by most toll schemes is vehicle weight. To imply that a 400lb motorcycle causes as much road wear as a 4000lb SUV per mile is ridiculous. Why this fascination with per mile charges instead of per weight charges?
Most toll roads charge based on the number of axels, but I don't see how that matters for anything less than 18 wheelers.
Does anyone know if the rates charged by tollroads are simply to recoup costs or to encourage certain types of usage?
Doesn't it seem like the answer should be both? Do things like raise the toll during rush hour, give discounts the longer you go (to discourage hop-ons, hop-offs) etc...
Gee. That's a tough one. Er, how about taxing the gas, anyone? mpg x distance seems to cover most of it. I've got to imagine someone's already thought of this taxing gas thing. A gas tax, or putting it another way, a tax on gas. But don't we already do that, he said, looking at the receipt for the last tank of gas he bought.
Since people are already paying a tax on their gas usage, they shouldn't have to pay tolls. Governments argue that the roads need to be payed for, but roads are such a help to the economy that the cost should be the responsibility of ALL taxpayers, not just the ones that use them. Think of the last ten things you've bought and try to guess how many of them did NOT use a highway or freeway to get to the store. Roads are the backbone of any nation.
DO NOT WRITE IN THIS SPACE
okThey could charge more when they know you travel more miles than average.
The typical argument against this sort of thing in the US is that poor people often drive older cars with worse gas consumption, but that's still no reason for attacking their privacy.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
That's a pretty big risk, for a science officer, it's, uh, not exactly out of the manual, is it?
I do take my responsibilities as seriously as you, you know. You do your job, and let me do mine, yes?
(did I mention that Ash is a Goddamn robot?)
---
Yes, I'm sending the DVD back to you soon.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
The current US-operated GPS system only allows this type of accuracy for military purposes. I feel it is a little irresponsible to give civilians (including criminals and terrorists) access to such accurate targeting systems. Maybe ESA wants to have a marketable advantage over GPS but it may go to far IMO.
I'm not trolling for replies concerning irresponsible military uses, that is another topic...
Where the Music Matters
Specifically, the Oregon legislature, in its infinite lack of wisdom, proposed replacing the current gas tax with a GPS based system that would track the total number of miles you drive regardless of road type (Previous Slashdot Article). The GPS receiver/controller would be mounted on the car and would report the number of miles driven to a receiver built into the gas station so the road tax could be added to your total. They thought this would be better received than an increase in the gas tax.
And they were wrong. Even those not concerned about obvious privacy issues objected to the costs of the GPS unit, costs of upgrading gas stations, getting billed for travel on private roads and the fact that it penalizes onwers of fuel efficient vehicles by charging a flat rate. That and refitting older vehicles. And billing out-of-state drivers. The list of problems was endless, the benefits were few to none. The backlash was noteworthy and I have not see much more about it since it was first proposed; with luck the legislative will realize just how bad of an idea it was and drop it forever.
Oh, in case some think I am an anti-tax nutcase, I support reasonable increases in gas taxes and vehicle registration fees to pay for the massive road network I enjoy so much. Tollways, however, annoy me to no end.
where is this mystical magical country of yours because here in new york we are getting reamed with tolls.
Please next time proof read what you write and dont just ramble on and on about really stupid things.
because there is no way my 1 ton Nissan does as much damage to the road as a 3 ton Hummer. They better get taxed more. Yeah, I know it says europe, not the US, and most of europe drives smaller cars. I'm just saying WHEN the stupid politicians in the US get ahold of this, they do it fairly. I don't know why they don't just apply it to gasoline. Bigger cars that do more road damage use more gasoline. It's that simple. You reward the smaller more efficient cars, especially the hybrids. But the US wouldn't be interested in that....
-- Having a Creationist Museum is like having an Atheist place of worship
Why would one want to charge people for travelling on roads? To pay for upkeep and maintenance.
Well, why don't you charge more to those who destroy the road the most?
And what does make one destroy the road more than the next guy? WEIGHT.
Weight. The heavier you are, the more you destroy the road.
So you have to get heavier vehicles to pay more for the road.
Now, what correlates nicely with vehicle weight?
PETROL CONSUMPTION. That's right. The heavier you are, the more petrol you need just to move about.
And, guess what? Petrol is taxed. Yes! There is actually a (gasp!) tax on petrol!!!
So, the more petrol you take, the more tax you pay.
And, better yet, you pay the tax wherever you travel. No need for toll booths, no need for fancy schmanzy technology.
Plain simple good old-fashioned accounting will do it.
Want more money for the roads? Want it to be collected fairly?
Just increase the petrol tax.
First, I live in Germany, where a toll is to be collected for vehicles over 3.5t from November on. There are heavy problems with the collection system, which is based on a combination of terminals located along all highways or (depending on the taste of the vehicles owner) 'black boxes' that automatically get the toll from your bank account, measuring your road usage by GPS and transmitting the data by GSM nets. While with the black box solution it is possible to track you down and even make up motion profiles of your vehicle, the first way to pay the toll is completely anonymous, you just buy a ticket like for a bus or subway. ;)
The other error is about Galileo. ESA says much about technical advantages and improved accuracy, but the most important reason for Galileo is beeing independent from the US (GPS) or Russia (GLONASS), because both have the possibillity to switch off their systems or at least disrupt accuracy in times of conflict, which is unbearable for applications like "location based services" in mobile communication (like ordering a taxi to your exact location, calling for help or only let your phone show you the way to next pub
I really can't decide which is worse. GPS or RFID? I used to think that we had pretty rational politicians in NZ - until I read this recently.
Motorists face travel tax and 'Big Brother' microchip law enforcement
Motorists face being taxed on how far they travel under government plans to generate cash. Transport Minister Paul Swain said with vehicles becoming more fuel efficient, revenue from petrol tax would drop and alternative charges needed to be considered. It is one of a number of transport schemes being looked at by officials, including a Big Brother-style project to equip every car with a personalised microchip so law-breaking motorists can be prosecuted by computer.
If fuel economy is the problem, then the simple and cheap solution is to raise the petrol tax a suitable proportion. It does not require extra costs to create the infrastructure to deal with the increased fuel efficiency issue.
That argument alone should be enough to show that this is not about efficiency and tax, but something else. I'm guessing that something else is that they really would like to invade citizens privacy. Of course if they can automate mindless policing functions, such as vehicle registrations, parking fines, speeding; then that frees up a police force to focus on real crime. Here in NZ police have quotas for speeding fines that they have to meet!
I think these proposals must be looked at in the broader context of what the technological change will mean for society. There are some benefits such as more efficient policing, but the potential privacy costs are huge, and I would suggest that not everyone will agree with that.
Fark to Slashdot osmosis time: 12 hours, 13 minutes
.
You apply accurate positioning over time and you get:
VELOCITY!!!
I can just see phase II involving "speeding ticket as you go without even incurring the inconvenience of pulling you over". And no bothersome checks, they can just deduct the fine from your account. How nice!
In phase III they can watch for cars leaving bars at 3AM. Of course if those cars speed, they'll get pulled over in person. That is until the in-car breathalizers are installed to see if your are drunk and then auto-drive kicks in and drives you to jail. Of course that would be after your sentence is determined via an online forum on the way there.
Think I'll throw out my bread machine and stick with coin toll booths.
Hunger is the best sauce.
Unfortunately, in Oregon, such taxes have become decoupled from the source and all wind up in the general fund, or worse, a fund irrelevant to the source.
If you want to have some fun, for a few seconds at least, go to a public meeting where the county or city is proposing a tax increase to pay for roads. Ask them where the gas tax money that was supposed to pay for the roads in the first place went. (In Corvallis, the city meetings in are in the beautiful downtown firestation, with real brick facade and comfy chairs for all the councillors, to go with the nice wood trim all over the place.)
This isn't the first time such a system has been proposed either, some /. stories for your enjoyment:
:)
Oregon Considers GPS-based Road Taxes
and
More on Oregon and GPS-tracked Gas Taxes
Opt out of what?? Out of getting monitored for your speed? Isn't that kind of a no brainer?
or.. do you mean "opt out" as in, just NOT sign up for the service? Thankfully it's optional...
Stewey
There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who don't.
I'm right on that? Right? Right!? Who the hell am I kidding, they'll only go up and you know I'm right on that. It's going to be triple dipping, fuel/tire/ect, road(via county/country/city taxes), and then GPS based.
Get ready for pillaging of a lifetime! That 6ft(2m for our euro friends) reamer has your name on it!
Om, nomnomnom...
Despite my respect for your 5-digit /. ID number (and vaguely mainframe-ish/VMS-ish UID ;-) ), I
would have to disagree with either the contents of your post or the lack of tags around it...
I had an impression that "Driving on the public highways" is not a "Right", driving on your own private property OR public property (where it does not violate other laws) is not different from walking/bicycling/rollerblading/swimming/riding a wheelchair/whatever... Am I right?
Paul B.
In the SF Bay Area, we've been using the Fast Trak system for a while. These are wireless transponders that allows you to drive through toll booths for the bridges around the bay without having to stop to pay. The transponder identifies your car as you pass through, and they just bill your credit card.
They recently expanded this program by embedding sensors around various highways. The sensors track people with the Fastrak transponders as they drive by. What they use this for is for tracking how fast people are going. You can then log onto a website that shows the average speeds of people traveling at different points along the highway. This tells you not only if there's traffic, but how bad the traffic is.
When they started this program, they sent me a letter telling me that they wouldn't use the information for any other purposes than traffic monitoring. They also included a foil pouch into which I could put the transponder if I didn't want them to track me.
It's actually pretty cool. I log onto the website and check the commute before I leave home or work - and I know the rate of speed at different points along the highway I'm traveling.
Satellite-assisted European road trolls. Would that be a satellite system that would guide trolls to the underside of the nearest abandoned bridge? Maybe let them know where the nearest unattended goats are? Hmmmm? ;P (Please someone rate this funny. I need the points)
Un-news
To paraphrase Strider, "Are you paranoiac? You're not nearly paranoiac enough." It's clear to me that the simple taxation aspect is a trojan horse. What's really happening here is that there will be individual identifying information for tracking vehicles, and therefore individuals, anywhere in Europe. I'm guessing that the uplink (i.e., the part that sends from the car to the tax authorities) will be a real-time UMTS, which means you'll have a continuously updated real time fix on people.
There will be scope creep to include people location, plus speed limit enforcement -- "You exceeded 130 km/h for 15 seconds, here's your ticket, we already deducted the money from your account!".
It may even be used to create "no go" areas (such as those enforced by car rental companies) and for forensic analysis in traffic accidents (you were going too fast, therefore your insurance is invalid.)
Paul Gillingwater
MBA, CISSP, CISM
Can anyone duplicate GPS signalling and jam (locally) the signal? It wouldn't take much signal to overpower GPS.
Let's say I commute from Munich to Berlin for work everyday, and that everyday, after a 10 minute drive, I turn on the jammer. As I return from Berlin in the evening, I turn off the jammer. I get billed for a short drive, not a long drive.
Wouldn't it make more sense to use RFID? Put scanners near the road. Scan cars that go by. Cars with bad ID's don't get on the freeway. Police pull over bad ID's or cars w/ missing ID's. Traffic would be easy to monitor... traffic accidents would be easier to detect. Speeding would be easier to detect too.
-- No sig for you!
It's not like we have been doing this since Roman times now is it?
I fail to see how this is more fair than a fuel tax.
With a fuel tax, efficiency and conservation is encouraged.
With a fuel tax, the further you go, the more fuel you buy, the more tax you pay. How is this different than satellite tracking, other than the missing big-brother aspect?
With a fuel tax, if your vehicle puts more weight on the road, you use more fuel to move it, and pay more tax.
The only use I can see is to tax more for use of certain roads, but even that can be handled without tracking your every move... anyone heard of tollbooths?
One could also improve the situation by taxing things that cause more road damage... like (in the U.S. anyway) studded tires. Expecially studded tires that some morons use for the full season in places where it freezes maybe once a year, and snows once every few years.
One could tax someone who lives/works in a relatively snow- and ice-free area more than someone who lives/works in an area with more legitimate reasons to use studded tires.
Really, it pisses me off to see people with studded tires on in areas where snow or ice is uncommon. They simply tear up the road for no good reason.
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
How are they going to receive information on all the millions of motor cars?? and how are the motor cars going to transmit all the positioning info??? and what is going to receive all the info????
Maybe somebody should point out to the politicians that like TV sets, these things only work one way...
There has been a lot of comments on exactly how stupid this system is, because you could just tax fuel or have ordinary toll booths...
But destroying the roads isn't the point, it's about supporting public transportation in cities whith too many cars.
of course you could raise the tax on gasoline, but that would hit people in rural areas just as hard as (or harder than) people congesting traffic in the major cities.
although I see the privacy issues, fact is that public transportation IS better suited for cities than cars.
"I don't know that Atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots." -George H.W. Bush
speed limit enforcement
We already have a system with a similar effect in Austria: It's called "Section Control". It automatically takes two pictures of the license-plates at two different times and places. If you got from A to B in less then the allowed time then you are automatically issued a ticket. If you were slow enough the pictures get erased after 7 minutes.
The system also detects when you are driving in the wrong direction.
Yes, and along the borders, which are not guarded witin the EC, you simply drive to the other side, if it is cheaper there. Usually, this leads to a pattern where the gas stations on side where the taxes are higher reduce their price, depending how far they are from the border. I live close to the German borders, and when my parents, who lived in the mid visited us, they would always hop over the border to get some cheap gas.
I bet the SUV drivers are behind this taxing proposal... and maybe the road developers too...
They want to charge all the economy car drivers for the wear and tear the SUV drivers put on the roads... and incourage the wearing out of our roads by those SUVs
Bigger cars use more gas and wear out the road more... and take more space on the road!
If we drove mini's and motorcycles we wouldn't have to build new roads... and we'd save our gas!
Morons who drive big gas guzzelers should be fined accordingly!
Gas taxes would encourage technology development and conservation of our resources.
oil/gas is scarse!
we here in the us should be paying $5 or more per gallon for it...
I want to see our
Grrr... Tired and furious
Please use [ informative / summarizing ] SUBJECT LINES
Flame me here
1) Buy a bike.
:)
2) Ride a bike.
3) ???
4) Don't pay tolls.
It's pretty simple
(And for those who argue that this isn't a practical solution, it is for me, at least -- I live in Saskatchewan, Canada, and save about $20-50 per month on gas/bus fees and vehicle registration. My bike was $200. You do the math.)
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
I for one despise the general idea of 'pay as you go driving'. I am sure that the same kooks that think it is only fair the US pay $5/gallon for gas because Europe does will also think we should pick this up.
Will you nincompoops Please just follow Johnny Depp to France? I hear the place is really wonderful.
Really.
Got that off my chest.
Now my real question.
These roads will be using the GPS put in place by the taxpayers of the US.
I know I am coming off like a knowitall, but I swear to you I am not. I don't have an inkling of an idea of who pays for GPS.
So I ask, is the US going to get anything from this?
When someone buys a GPS transponder is there some sort of royalty in the price or a licensing fee that gets kicked back to the US government?
I don't think that US citizens should have to pay such a fee, after all our tax dollars bought the damn things.
I don't think I have any qualm with the US looking the other way when friendly nations military (say Britian) uses GPS. I got no gripes with that.
But private industry run by foriegners, some people here forget but we are a capitalist nation, why shouldn't those foriegners be paying for the use of those satelites?
And this goes doubly, triply hell dozenly so for governments trying to collect taxes for road use.
Thanks to the new technology there won't be that problem next time round.
Jews? Arabs? People who vote the wrong way? Men who live together? We're installing the technology to make it possible to track and eliminate them all.
Doesn't it make you proud to be in computing?
If not, why not?
Nothing irks me more then automated ticketing machines, wether it be red light traps or speed traps they are bad, bad, bad, bad and bad.
But if the governement has enough information to say that I did $32 worth of traveling last month then they also have the information they need to mail me speeding tickets.
Evil.
It isn't speeding tickets I am against.
On the contrary, a smart and well run police department does an enormous public safety service by running traps.
You post a cop car on a busy and fast stretch of road and you make a point.
People like me slow down and do a reality check.
Others get written tickets.
It slows traffic to a reasonable level.
But automated speed traps, what public safety mechanism do they serve?
I have never gotten one of those tickets. But I can only imagine what it is like. How long does it take for them to issue it to you?
Do you even remember the stretch of road where it occured?
Does the automated speed trap actually affect the speed of the traffic?
While I am for using police and governemnt to enforce laws I am against using the police as a pure revenue mechanism.
Anyone that allows a GPS tolled road is not very far away from automated GPS ticketing.
Everybody is using German roads in central Europe to go from A to B, but hardly anyone buys their gas there. So the taxes go God knows where, but Germany gets nothing.
You may not have heard about it where you are but back in Sept 2000, the UK had a good old fashioned tax revolt over the highest fuel taxes in the developed world. Over a period of 8 days, the country was almost brought to a standstill. These very high taxes have not cut private car usage, nor have the reduced congestion. It is now politically impossible to raise these taxes any further.
In contrast, the London Congestion Charge, a 5 GBP daily charge for entering central London, has cut congestion by 25% and has been easily digested by the public, provoking almost none of the widely predicted opposition. The traffic doesn't slow down down for poll booths, they just use a camera that takes your vehicle license number. The scheme is a far bigger success than even the Mayor of London, the man who introduced it, had hoped for.
The UK government is now very keen to extend road charging elsewhere.
-- Nick "Hallo this is Beel Gates, und I pronounce weendows as
There is a design lesson in here.
In Germany, the toll collect system was supposed to begin September 1st. The implementing consortium (bigshots like DaimlerChrysler and Deutsche Telekom) missed that deadline, so it was pushed back to November 1st, and this new deadline is in doubt, too. The On-Board-Units that every truck has to carry are
- not enough: the consortium initially figured they'd need about 50000 units for the entire country
- defective: as many as half of the delivered units show defects. Some even self-destruct on starting the truck's engine
- expensive: they cost several hundred Euros apiece, and logistics companies who have to buy them are complaining
PR-wise it's a disaster.Last week, manager-magazin.de ran an interview with Peter Newole, executive at Austria's equivalent, Europpass system, which does the same things TollCollect is supposed to do, only that it's cheaper and actually works. (The interview is in German, sorry.) Basically, what Mr. Newole says is that the two systems are doing similar things in vastly different ways. In both countries, trucks have to carry boxes that can communicate with base stations to register their location. Based on these location profiles, the toll is calculated. But the design of these boxes is completely different:
The design lesson is obvious: The more of something you are going to deploy, the simpler it has to be. Put the logic into the servers and make the clients as dumb as you can.
A fuel tax is a very unfair way to tax cars, especially in Europe
In rural areas we have no traffic problems, very poor public transport. In urban area we have severe traffic problems and excellent public transport.
Our present system tends to car users in rural areas more than car owners in urban areas because the distances they have to drive tend to be larger. As well as being unfair this is economically inefficient as we should be charging more for the use of the scarce resources (congested urban roads) than for the plentiful resource (empty rural roads).
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2. Its for collecting truck Tolls on Freeways.
3. The (main) reason its there is the Problem that currently German taxpayers pay for the Freeways but a goodly precentage of the trucks carving the Asphalt are in transit from and to outside Germany.
4. The easy option of simply taxing Truck fuel doesn't work since the trucks easily have the range to fuel more or less where they please.
or just use another means of transportation and stop whining about driving being too expensive. the number of cars shows it's not.
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
Call me cynical, but is this just a way to effectively increase fuel tax and to keep the truckers off the governments back.
A couple of years ago in the UK there was a fuel crisis for a few days caused by truckers and farmers blocking the distribution depts and refineries. In little more than a day panicing motorists emptied every single filling station in the UK.
Since then we have seen the London congestion charge and the new motorway north of Birmingham will be a toll road (approx 6 pounds for approx 40 miles). Petrol prices have remained lower than the 86p/litre (approx 4 pounds per gallon) that caused the protests.
I somehow doubt the tax will hit the truckers anywhere near as hard as they will hit car drivers.
Philip
Signatures are broken
The road still supports your car from falling into the center of the earth even if there are no toll booths or satellite billing systems.
This is a toll *enforcement* system. Or maybe a toll *collection* system...
I don't know about everyone else, but I don't trust governments. This system would make it entirely TOO easy for a govt to toll roads that do not have any existing toll boothe structure.
Imagine how this system would be exploited in a budget crisis... "oh just add highway such-n-such to the tolling system". Next thing you know, EVERY road would be a toll road.
What a shitty concept.
Your comment is rather short sighted given that terrorists didn't use GPS to bring down two World Trade Centers, they used onboard inertial navigation systems along with standard US domestic navigational aids. Aside from which, even if you had shut down GPS and all the country's navaids, they could still have headed roughly towards New York City, then simply aimed by hand at the two tallest buildings they could see. Which is pretty much what they did, I'd say. Don't forget, the attackers were pilots trained in the US. Not to mention the fact you could have a normal aviation map of the US and simply follow big navigation features like roads, mountains etc to get to your destination.
:o
My point is, your comment is ill researched because if you understood the nature of smart missiles etc, you'd realise that rarely if ever do they use GPS as their primary means of navigation/ targetting/ tracking. Only recently has the US started attaching GPS kits to dumb bombs to give them extra guidance in the final stage of ballistic flight. Items like Tomahawk use TERCOM mapping to "see" the terrain they fly over and match it to the programmed route and correct as necessary.
If someone has the motivation and money, all they need to do to build a smart missile is install an INS from any aircraft and they have a fully self-contained guidance system which cannot be jammed.
On a related note, all the hoopla over fitting IR jammers etc to commercial jets is a collosal waste of time and money, because once again, you don't need high technology weapons to bring down an airliner. Any old RPG-7 fired up at an aircraft on finals from below will likely cause catastrophic damage, not to mention there exist, wait for it, optically guided missiles!!
Look up the specs of an RBS-70 some day and try to work out how you can jam it.... then look up the Russian equivalent (this is your homework assignment Slashdotters!). Have you heard of the government saying anything about THEM? Of course not, because they can offer no quick fix "solution" to those threats and they know it.
Having better navigational accuracy the world over is far more beneficial than it would ever be harmful. Don't let the new paranoia of "terrorism is everywhere" cloud your rational thinking, because that is precisely how totalitarian governments take hold.
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The problem with applying the taxation to the fuel is that it ends up taxing exactly the wrong group of people.
People outside cities usually have lower incomes, greater distances to travel, and few other options regards how to travel. Taxing the fuel taxes these people heavily.
Inside cities incomes are generally higher, typical journeys shorter, and there are alternatives to the car, which sadly many reject for reasons as vacuous as "personal space" and image. Fuel taxation affects these people very little.
The advantage of taxation based on when and where the vehicle is driven is that it can be used to discourage selfish vehicle use in cities, where it causes congestion and pollution, but not penalise those whose journeys are not causing the problems that we need to address.
Ian
In Germany, there will be automatic cameras above the motorway to catch those who aren't logged in.
In any case, the system is a Bad Thing [TM], mainly because transport companies will forward additional costs anyway, and the consumer will have to pay. It would have been fairer to simply implement another consumption tax, instead of implementing a vast (and partly non-functional) system and having to pay for the entire administrative overhead. IIRC, we are talking about $400M of overhead - money that will be withdrawn from the economic cycle, further weakening our economy. It is ridiculous.
open (SIG, "</dev/zero"); $sig = <SIG>; close SIG;
Toll roads everywhere? Sounds like a return to medieval times. What next, every town having it's own currency? Charges on passing merchants?
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Britain already has government video cameras on every corner, now government GPS tracking of your every move?
No thanks...
The europeans won't be happy untill everyone has to walk everywhere and pay a tax on the air they breathe.
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
i am proud to see our gps system being used for such high minded uses as only the tax happy anti freedom europeans can find. is there some plan for them to pay the us for this revenue generating scheme riding on our coattails again. god bless the french.
The current US-operated GPS system only allows this type of accuracy for military purposes. I feel it is a little irresponsible to give civilians (including criminals and terrorists) access to such accurate targeting systems. Maybe ESA wants to have a marketable advantage over GPS but it may go to far IMO.
You're wrong. Civilians have had access to highly accurate GPS for a few years now -- to within a few cm. We've come to rely on it for everything from marine navigation to heavy construction -- GPS is still more accurate than the best captain's eye, and it's awfully handy for lining up bridges, etc. It makes so many things safer, easier, and cheaper, that to limit public access to it would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
To reserve the best accuracy for the military, an error (called Selective Availability) is introduced, limiting the resolution to within a few meters. This was being used all the time until about five years ago, when they determined that the benefits of GPS far outweighed the potential risks. They do bring back SA occasionally, but only for brief periods -- probably during specific military operations. They do warn the public that SA is being used, but in my experience it never lasts more than a few hours. (I'm a professional sailor and captain.)
In Germany about 73% of your fuel bill is taxes. Gas costs more than a buck a liter.
The reason for this stupid system is that the German government wants to zap Eastern European truckers, who are overrunning the market. It only applies to trucks in Germany. They planned to offset the costs to local truckers with a tax break. The system was supposed to pay for itself and for the tax break, all at the expense of Eastern European truckers.
But Brussels killed that idea, because it so obviously breaches European anti-protectionist law, so now they're stuck with this stupid system and still haven't come up with any protectionist dodge.
Moral of the story: Berlin is stupider than Brussels.
Oh well at least we got electricity.
Saskatchewan? How do you ride your bike during the eleven months of winter?
(Yes, I was being a smartass, but... it's still a legitimate question. Any place that has a good, honest winter means you can't ride a bike for a third of the year).
The system that London for charging cars that enter the inner city takes a picture of your car if you try to sneek into the city without have the requisite electronic pass (its not much different from photo-radar speed traps). I think Singapore uses a similar cheater-cam system. You will pay substantive fines for trying to bypass the system or use the highways without a functioning BBBB (Big Brother Black Box).
The bigger nasty, if you use anything like GPS, is snow. A nice coating of snow or ice on the antenna means no GPS, means BBBB is not working, means you are in violation of the system. Their cute little test in Lisbon won't reveal this nasty defect in the system, but I'm sure drivers in Northern Europe will rue the day they bought into the idea.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Raising the gas tax is bad idea for two reasons:
1. The poorest people get hit the hardest. Outside of very large cities, public transportation is the USA is a joke or nonexistent. Where I live there are no alternate means of travel.
2. Everything in the USA is shipped by truck. Higher gas taxes mean higher prices for nearly everything; it is very damaging to the economy. And the poor get hit here again.
This means it can only be used as an aide to pilots (air and sea), never the primary method of navigation.
Ahh. So I guess all of those FAA-Approved GPSs (including Approach-Approved models like the GNS-430) aren't really approved, and the GPS approaches I teach my students aren't either.
--Dave Buckles
2711311 CFII 06/04
Moderate drunk! It's more fun that way!
You can do it with a gas tax.
I covered multiple ways a higher gas tax would help the situation.
imagine replacing the SUVs with mini's or motorcycles...that means less conjestion!
traveling at conjested times means that you will be idleing a bunch... and not going at your most efficient speed... so you use more gas per mile!... so you start traveling at less conjested times!
Don't charge public trasportation the gas tax... fund it with the gas tax... it will get enough money so that it will actually be convient for people to use if there are good connecting routes!
sometimes people really need to get from one place to another at a certain time... why penilise the poor people for having a need and let the rich poeple waste everybodies resources?
You'd have to do this with a gas tax.
more effient technologies will be created if the demand is there...
and the poor people can have better public transportation and or carpools and other stuff..
Big brother in and of itself is a quasher for that satellite plan...
but a gas tax is way easier to implement, (the infrastructure is already there) and it hits the wastefull hard while allowing the people to do what they need to do.
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Good point, though... I bike as much as possible during the warmer part of winter, but during the hardcore -40oC part, I usually take the bus.
You'd be surprised at what kind of weather you can actually bike through, if you're sufficiently bundled up! Sure it's cold, but it's cheap!
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
Actually all of the state gas taxes are be law reserved for transportation projects (10-20% mandated for mass transportation), if I recall correctly (my permanent address is in Cottage Grove). The state-level road funds are actually padded with more money out of the general fund plus special bond measures and the like. The firestation you refer to is probably a legacy of the flusher times, or was paid for with a bond measure.
The Federal gas tax, however, is over half the total gas tax paid and goes into the general revenue funds for the Federal government.
... get this...
...fines from drivers who used the EZ Pass lanes and did not have an EZ Pass tag.
Initially, a whole bunch of drivers did go through the nice new lane with no line even though they had not ever heard of EZ Pass. So this seemed like a good plan...
...Until the cops complained they couldn't catch all the perps. So of course, what did the Bridge Authority do? Yep, they installed barriers.
The number of perps instantly crashed to essentially zero, and so did the expected revenue from fines. Now the Bridge Authority has a DEFICIT after tooting EZ Pass as a cost saving measure!
This kind of nonsense does soooo much to warm my faith in the States' wisdom. NOT.
--
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What happens to my tax/bill when I drive past someone whos using a "Noisy" TV antenna amplifier and I bounce all over the place in excess of 400 mph?
...
...
Will I be billed for the distance I covered, even though physically impossible?
see http://www.gars.net/gm/gm2001-07.pdf or search for many other references.
The problem is that the amplifier is quite unstable in many samples of this antenna, as well as similar ones made by Winegard, and tends to oscillate around 1.57 GHz- right on the GPS L1 C/A frequency! The owner of the boat had no idea that his TV antenna was blocking the operation of all GPS receivers within a 1 km radius of the harbor.