Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
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.
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...
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.