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California Considers Tracking Your Car
dan_sdot writes "California's budget problem has led the state to consider desperate measures: taxing you based on how much you drive. The only problem is the way they propose to do it. California is now proposing to put GPS devices on all new cars to track how far people drive and tax them accordingly."
Did you read the article? oh wait, I'm not new here, so no, you didn't.
Since a prius will drive much further on a tank than a person in an H2, if both individuals drive 100 miles, the person in the H2 pays significantly more in taxes. They're proposing to change the system so that its based on how far you drive, not how much gas you use.
Moo.
The way it was said on the morning radio, KROQ's Kevin and Bean, was that this was coming about because too many fuel efficient cars meant the amount of monies recieved from gas taxes was reduced. So by taxing the number of miles driven a year, they can more accuratly pay for the roads.
Because they only want to bill you for the miles you actually drove within California, not the trip you took to New York...
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
In the Netherlands they tried something similar a few years back.
It stranded long before implementation.
And since the American populace loves to drive and loves their cheap gass price, I don't think that the government will be able to do this successfully.
(Pardon my typos and possible bad grammar, I'm dutch, so english isn't my first language)
This is the sig that says NI (again)
Not nearly enough, from what I see. California is supposed to be one of the most expensive places to live, with housing and taxes, but don't believe all of it.
I judge whether the price of gas is high or not by the number of big-ass trucks and SUV's I see cruising the roads and they're still hot sellers, so the price of gas isn't too high, yet.
In terms of taxes, Californians aren't taxed any more, on average then the rest of the country. Actually, all together taxes are fairly low in the state. Biggest problem is the way it's spent, or more importantly not spent. Schools in Cal, which were once top notch are in the bottom third nationally in terms of funding. Consider that a teacher has to be paid fairly high on average to live here (housing mostly) and you can see there's little left for school upkeep, instruction, programs, etc.
I'm keenly aware of this as I now work for a school district in an area which has some of the richest and poorest of Californians in the same district.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Because that assumes that you only drive in California. Which isn't a bad assumption for most people in California. However, a good chunk of my driving is cross country. I may put 5,000 miles on my car in california and another 10,000 miles out of state in a year. I'm sure that there are many other people in my situation.
Did you read proposition 71? I did.
First, its set up in such a way that it has no fiscal impact for the next few (2? 3?) years. The finance charges are rolled into the bond issuance so it requires no cash.
Second, the money it kicks out will largely go to California business activity, which gets taxed, sending some of the money right back where it came from.
Third, it proposes that through interests in any discoveries it is self-funding.
Whether you believe the second and third points or not (and the jury is definitely out here...), the first point is not up for debate - 71 has no impact right now, and will not for some time.
I don't drive hardly at all either, so I don't really care, but we're nerds, and nerds like facts, right?
Little do you know, we're already paying taxes for the internet. Not to our ISP, but to those who run the line. There are creative naming conventions for taxes, such as 'telecommunications fee'
Back when my college couldn't raise tuition and couldn't get enough from taxes, they added ta-da fees! Learning resources fee, high cost (of instruction) fee, and so on. It was really an increase in tuition, just like is happening to taxes.
BTW, we had a slough of tax proposals this Nov. 2 which, all together, would have made our local sales tax ~ 10% (it's 8.25% at the moment, IIRC) Bush or Governator cut income tax? No worries. We'll just pay through another tax system. New fee schedules, you know?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
It's actually a little less than the Federal Tax on gas.
s .h tml
D F .4 cents/gallon less than the national average.
The federal excise tax on gas 18.4 cents/gallon, whereas the state tax in 18.0 cents/gallon.
http://www.energy.ca.gov/gasoline/gasoline_taxe
According to this site:
http://api-ep.api.org/filelibrary/ACF15F.P
the state excise tax is
I would much rather increase the tax on gas another 5 or 10 cents than put some sort of tracking device in my car.
Nice Marmot
Doesn't work if you EVER drive out of state. You need GPS to ensure that you only tax people for the time spent on YOUR roads.
It's entirely possible to come up with a system for tracking how much you drive, without tracking where you drive
It's called an odometer.
It doesn't work for what they are trying to do though. They can only tax you for driving in their state, not for driving other places, so the odometer doesn't work.
The federal govt can just print money to get out of debt. California can't.
couldn't they ask you to report your vehicle's mileage on a yearly basis?
My state is toying with this too. The problem is that they don't have a legal right to tax you for time you drive on your private roads or more importantly, out of state. I live on the border of Washington & Oregon, so without either some kind of border crossing monitoring station, or a GPS system, they can't know when I'm actually driving in the state.
If this is such a grave issue, then we should just raise the gas tax overall. Or maybe a sliding tax can be used based on the model/year of car.
Oregon Slashdot Article
"My girlfriend's got sodium laureth sulfate hair."
You have never been to California have you?
Yes, you have some wealthy people driving hummers around. However, a Prius is frickin A expensive too! Much more so than a regular car.
No, in California, if you are poor you can drive a POS car belching smog, and don't have to fix it. If your car is older than 25 years or so, then it's a "classic" and you don't have to pass smog checks. There are no safety inspections because that would hurt the poor.
California's laws and regulations dealing with vehicles are insane. Frankly California in general is really fucked up which is why I left. Everyone that had a clue saw California's tax problem comming long before it was announced.
You missed his point. He was saying by making his residence out of state. He won't have to install this GPS crap in his car. There fore not having to pay this crappy tax at the pump when he fuels up in CA. It had nothing todo with income taxes..
If you are self-employed (e.g. doctor, lawyer) and buy a vehicle that weighs 6000 lbs or more (e.g H2), then you can write off the cost of the vehicle against your income as a business expense. Ok, I'm not a tax lawyer so I may have the precise wording or details wrong, but the end result is that you purchase the H2 for $50k and save $20k on income tax. You have to buy a lot of fuel for the government to get that $20k back.
Thirty feet long, 2 lanes wide, it's sixty-five tons of American Pride --- Canyonero!
Yes, its called variable valve timing. Most modern cars have it. Honda calls it VTEC and Toyota calls it VVT-i (there is a VVTL-i which controls valve lift too). Granted its not 100% electronic. The reason a lot of cars still have somewhat mechanical valve systems is RELIABILITY. Just replace your belt every so often, and its good to go. They work, they work well, they work well for a really long time. Replacing it with something more complicated will almost always decrease reliability. Junking your car more often because a valve didn't open or close and shredded your engine isn't worth the small difference in efficiency.
A Prius is a $20,000 car (before the popularity markup), about the same as a Camry or Accord. An H2 is about a $50,000 car (also before popularity markup). So no, a Prius is not more expensive than a regular car, and emphatically not more expensive than an H2!
Also, 25 years old would mean cars made before 1980. I don't doubt that there's a lot of '85 - '95 cars on the road, which are also less safe and more polluting, but there can't be all that many 25+ year old cars -- they would either have to have been maintained well, or they would have fallen apart by now!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
If the roads are costing the state too much to maintain, and they don't want all residents to shoulder the burden equally, then they need to increase the tax on gasoline... plain and simple. People who do sufficient amounts of their driving outside the state of Calif. will probably be able to regularly fill up outside the state and therefore won't have to pay the higher taxes.
Not that I'm a proponent on high gasoline taxes, but only someone without the slightest grip on reality should fail to see that putting a GPS in a car to measure how far a car travels within the state is, when all is said and done, overcomplicating things waaaaaaay too much. Adding complexity to a system brings addition possible points of failure to that system and this idea would be almost certain to bring with it more problems than it would really solve.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
And since the American populace loves to drive and loves their cheap gass price, I don't think that the government will be able to do this successfully
It's not so much the fact that we love to drive. It's the fact that we lack useable public transportation. Many cities had fabulous rail and light rail systems 100 years ago but in our wisdom they tore up the tracks. For many of us, the car is the only option.
That being said, only a complete moron would even consider taxing a car that weighs in over 3000kg the same as a car that weighs in at 1100kg. To me this is total non-sense. I looked the article and saw that the Hummer, an off road vehicle, is taxed twice as much as an average sized car, which is taxed about twice as much as tiny sub average sized car. This to me is more than fair.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
In California this was recommended by a bipartisan commission. That means Democrats were involved. Next year it's getting implemented in Oregon, an emphatically Democrat state.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
In this country, you obey the laws of thermodynamics.
Technology can't break the laws of physics.
- There's no way to get around the carnot efficiency in a heat engine. Maybe if billions of dollars were invested into a hydrogen economy you might be able to get up to 40 percent efficency with fuel cells, but if the hydrogen comes from fossil fuels and you account for the losses in the H2 production process, you're better off sticking with internal combustion engines.
- THere's no way of avoiding newton's second law- F=ma and its derivation E=1/2mv^2. Even if we could make the theoreticlaly impossible 80% engine, a 5 tonne SUV will still consume twice as much energy as a 2.5 tonne car to accelerate.
-And once you get to speed, there's no way of avoiding fluid dynamics- The drag force is proportional to cross sectional area, so driving a giant car will always waste fuel, no matter how much technology you have.
No, the answer isn't technology (unless cold fusion gets developed, which is highly unlikely in our lifetimes). The answer is conservation- why spend billions of dollars to develop a 300HP high efficiency SUV when a 150 HP car is enough for people's needs, and a current 150 HP car will consume less fuel than ANY 300 HP SUV made with ANY technology that could ever be developed?
It's not all about efficiency - mechanical valves, cams, and timing belts are extremely reliable mechanisms in ICEs that have been refined over decades. Electric valves and all the high power, complex electronics behind them just aren't proven. Even if they came out in production cars tomorrow, I wouldn't buy one for at least 5-10 years. Why? They're not proven reliable in the long run.
;)
While I'd like fuel efficiency (hence the reason I have and usually drive a 95 del Sol - nearly 40 mpg with no exotic technologies at all, perfectly reliable for its first 180k miles), reliability is absolutely paramount. I travel into some of the more remote parts of the US and Canada that are still accessible by road, and a breakdown hundreds of miles from the nearest service facility or cell tower is not acceptable. I carry a rather extensive set of tools for dealing with most minor issues and some not so minor (anybody ever spent most of the night changing a halfshaft in a parking lot of your hotel?), but a major drivetrain failure in one of these places would be more than annoying. A dead valve would be just that, especially if it was the only one the exhaust side of a cylinder - a major failure. There just aren't that many ways that a mechanical valve can fail.
Not saying it can't be done, but if I was a car company engineer, I'd make sure those things had been in a fleet prototype test vehicles for 5 years and 250k miles before ever turning them loose on the mechnically-inept public.
As others have posted, though, a significant portion of the benefits can be gained by adjusting the timing on a mechanical cam - Honda's VTEC, a well proven technology, powering my del Sol since, well, 1995.
You may not believe but there are other ways of taxing based on road mileage. Every vehicle has an odometer which tracks the distance travelled - use that.
In New Zealand, we have a tax on petrol to fund roads and other useful things. Because diesel vehicles can get vastly different fuel efficiency they use a Road User Charges (RUC) system.
You can buy RUCs from many places like post offices or AA stores. You must keep your RUCs up to date or you face a fairly steep fine (I think it's 3 times what the RUCs would have cost you). The police check the RUCs every time they do a routine stop. Normally the distance travelled is measured from the odometer however large truck and trailer units will often have a hub mounted distance meter (I don't know why).
Fairly simple and doesn't involve expensive privacy-invading tracking units.
And while we're about things - don't bother whinging about increased taxes. The price of petrol in the US is about a third what much of the rest of the world pays.
Anyway, one tidbit of information I took away from that article was the fact that roads last longer if you use them, but not if you abuse them. Remote roads that are seldom used actually break up faster than roads that are moderately used. Cars use them, constantly rolling them flat; trucks abuse them, constantly squeezing them like a toothpaste tube.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
The agriculture industry in the central San Joaquin Valley produces about 1/10 of the California "GDP". (That doesn't include the Imperial valley down around San Diego.)
10% of GDP is 10% of GDP, whether it comes from an urban area or a rural area.
The only place where lower taxes come into effect is the endpoint sales tax on groceries. Sales tax revenues are consumed locally - so you don't really lose.
FWIW, since Ag takes about 3% of the population to produce that 10% of GDP, we are actually more efficient than you: it's you who are the moocher.
If you really want to shift roads expenses to us rural people - go for it. But don't be surprised when the delivery cost on food becomes astronomical to you people who are so foolish to live so far away from it.
Maybe you want to let that sleeping dog lie, eh? Or, you can continue to stab at it with a sharp stick. What do your brains tell you?
"The most sensible request of government we make is not, "Do something!" But "Quit it!"
Um, I think everyone is forgetting here that the California government is CONSIDERING this. It's far from even being a bill that we'd vote on -- if this was just passed without our consent, everyone in the state government knows that HEADS WOULD ROLL. I think that was one lesson they learned from Gray Davis' recall and Schwarzenegger's election.
This is the kind of sensationalist crap you see on Slashdot -- WAY blown out of proportion.
From working in a gas station before, I can tell you how much of the price of gas is government tax -- about HALF. I've seen the invoices that gas stations pay for gas. So, I would seriously have to look at exactly how this kind of tax would compare to the gas tax we already have.
Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the "gas tax" both Federal and State? So, this driving distance tax would only eliminate part of the current gas tax.
Of course, in my position this kind of change may be just fine for me because we tend to stay very close to home (within 50 miles) because we have a young family.
This kind of change would probably hit commuters the most because of the high cost of housing in the urban areas. Remember, even if this would encourage people to move to the urban areas in California, that doesn't mean they would. They still have to have a job that would support buying a $600k-$900k+ house. A large percentage of people I work with just could not afford it, and companies like ours faced with losing employees or handing out raises would simply leave California.
This kind of tax change would make the exodus from California go through the roof and in the end probably decrease the total amount of taxes the state collects. The governator isn't going to let that happen.
So, it probably won't happen, but it's nice to "entertain" it...
News Releases
2004
* November 15 -- RUFTF meeting Nov. 19
* May 12 -- OSU, ODOT give gas tax alternative first test
* May 11 -- Road User Fee Task Force to meet May 14
2003
* November 7 -- Road User Fee Task Force to meet Nov. 21
* October 8 -- Oct. 10 RUFTF meeting cancelled
* January 10 -- Task Force weeks new revenue system for roads (opinion piece)
2002
* November 13 -- RUFTF to meet Nov. 15
* September 4 -- RUFTF meeting in Salem Sept. 6
* July 2 -- RUFTF public hearing and formal meeting in North Bend
* May 31 -- RUFTF June 4 meeting announced
* April 30 -- RUFTF to hold public meeting in Pendleton
* April 26 -- Road User Fee Task Force to meet May 3 in Pendleton
* April 4 -- April RUFTF meeting
* March 1 -- RUFTF to meet March 8
* January 22 -- RUFTF meeting Feb. 1
2001
* November 21 -- Governor, Legislature announce Road User Fee Task Force members
The older Prius (pre-2004) was a tiny car -- in fact, it was basically a re-engined Echo.
The newer ones are far larger. It's quite a nice four-passenger car, with a reasonably roomy hatchback and other bits of storage space.
And, the new ones are more powerful and more fuel efficient than the older ones. You just cannot imagine the lengths that Toyota engineers went to to get the last few percent of fuel efficieny and pollution-control. Thermos bottles to retain heat in the coolant, carbon canister to trap startup hydrocarbons, drive-by-wire braking to do only regenerative braking until below 5 MPH, fins and baffles under the car to route air more efficiently...the list is almost endless. It basic Synergy drive, which throws in for free a CVT by basically using electricity the way other cars use transmission fluid, is the best known radical system, but it's only the beginning.
Ob-topic -- this is an insane scheme. I have to agree with the tinfoil-hat crowd that the only reason this makes sense is to get the GPS units into the cars for some other purposes -- like making it more expensive to drive through downtowns in rush hour (as they do in London, Singapore, and other rediculously congested cities.)
There are so very many ways that the State (and the state) benefit from more fuel efficient cars, that reducing the incentive to drive them is remarkably short-sighted. Treating the fuel tax as a carbon-dioxide tax really does make sense -- those Hummers and SUV's really do impose a cost on everybody else. Reducing the gasoline-delivery infrastructure is a good thing, from reducing the number of tankers that need to port in California, reducing the number of tankers on the roads, reducing the number of leaky gas tanks under service stations...these reflect costs on everybody that the gas tax goes some part of the way to paying for. Fewer kids dying of asthma would be a good thing.
If they want more money from the gas tax, they should just raise the tax.
Thad Beier
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
exactly. And my orignal point was to dispute the poster who said that only diesel engines have the torque available to move a truck. Electric motors have the best torque curves across all speeds compared to combustion engines. Electric trains and trucks are usually direct drive, or fixed gearing to avoid complexity and failure points.
Obviously, the electricity has to come from somewhere. But an electric drive-train opens up many other options: regenerative braking with a battery, dynamic braking which is more reliable and conisitant than mechanical brakes, and constant RPMs on the diesel for efficiency and reduced wear.
These court decisions, and the various legislative responses to them, led people in the relatively wealthy areas (read "people who care enough to vote") to limit their property taxes dramatically. In the end, school funding is equal -- yes -- but equal at a very low level. People remember the tax cut and the 2/3 vote necessary to raise taxes, but they don't remember or even know the political environment that caused it to happen.
Thad Beier
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
Oshkosh is working on a hybrid truck which means a diesel engine with A/C electric torque motors. There are several benefits to this as well as some potential downsides such as decreased overall efficiency when using a pure D/E drivetrain on a highway truck. Obviously some large off-highway trucks used in the mining industry as well as loaders, etc. are D/E now because of the flat torque curves of electric motors and the elimination of mechanical complexity of routing power through the vehicle using transmissions. BTW *any* engine can be used to move a truck with torque amplified by the correct gearing. The total power will determine speed and load ability. It just so happens that diesel is more efficient as displacement increases, a fact supported by the use of diesel engines on large ships.