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IBM Patents Pricing Motorists Off Highways
theodp writes "Self-professed patent reformer IBM snagged a patent Tuesday for the Variable Rate Toll System, which covers the rather anti-egalitarian scheme of pricing motorists off of the roads by raising tolls as congestion increases. 'Congestion pricing of traffic is emerging as a completely new services market for IBM,' boasted Jamie Houghton, IBM's Global Leader for Road Charging."
Now there's a way to simulate the sagging economy! Have them pay more for commuting to work!
GOOD. That's the whole point of congestion charges. I am a motorist
Patriotism is a virtue of the vicious
Don't live near any toll roads. Yet another asset of not living or working in a big city or up North.
It is egalitarian if everyone is surcharged equally based on traffic peak times.
And this seems to be as much the rage amongst liberal urban planners as evil corporatists.
Yeah, because apparently my government doesn't think that it costs me enough to drive (even with my efficient Japanese car) fail.
"If for any reason you're not satisfied with our service, I hate you."
As congestion increases, tolls increase, so more people, instead of traveling on toll roads designed to take the kind of abuse that volume and congestions provide, begin taking surface streets which are not designed for these kinds of volume.
So the toll makes out even, or slightly ahead at best. While the tax payers have to pick up the tab to repair the surface streets that are now getting heavier traffic because of increased pricing on toll roads.
So people with money get to work faster, and people with out will get taxed more. Sounds like a great idea.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
To show up at work at 10:30 AM :)
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
You mean, they're charging people differently based on their religion? Their race? Their social class? Are they not charging people regardless of who they are?
Charging people more for things in higher demand is called "capitalism". Perhaps that is anti-egalitarian, but this particular instance is no more anti-egalitarian then, say, charging people more for higher quality health care, or charging people more for better quality food.
The cake is a pie
... and it's been kicked around for a long time. There is no reason IBM should get a monopoly on this.
The fact that Friedman thinks that (1) this is innovative, and (2) that the fact that IBM has a monopoly on this helps anybody just shows again what an idiot he is.
My idea goes halfway: you get charged for the *lane* you're in. Faster lane == more $. That way, the people who can't "afford it" still get to use the cheaper, government-subsidized lanes.
And, I believe ALL major roads should be toll so that the people who are actually using a road can pay for it.
That if you really need to get somewhere you take the tollway to get there faster. Tollroads always have less traffic than their free counter parts. You pay a little bit to get their faster. I hate the morning commute enough that I'll pay a little extra for a road like this. And on the other hand I always feel like a moron when I'm taking a tollroad home at 3AM and I'm the only one on the road. I'm glad to pay to different charges for the two different times
When demand outstrips supply, you have 3 choices:
- Endure lines (traffic jams). This sucks for the environment and our dependence on oil, makes the roads less useful for everyone, and costs society a bundle in lost productivity.
- Create more supply. Build more roads. We've been trying that for a long, long time. I don't think the Jersey Turnpike can get much bigger.
- Curtail demand. Many ways to do this, including building more public transit and taxing fuel.
- Raise prices. This affects the poor more than the rich - big surprise there! So does everything else, why are roads special?
Now, I understand the appeal of helping out the poor. But this isn't health insurance or food stamps or housing. The "right to drive a car to work" is not exactly a basic human right. I think that a nice balance of 2-3 is the way to go.W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
...every now and then it'd be nice to read useful and timely news on Slashdot without having to sift through the author's heavy-handed and ill-informed political opinion.
I don't think driving on a toll road is one of them. After all, poor people are by definition, not as valuable as wealthy people so why should anyone care about their commute times?
What's egalitarian about the free rider problem Why don't we let drivers pay the real cost of driving rather than letting everyone else subsidize the construction of roads (oh, and wage wars in oil-rich countries).
BTW, please save the commerce-needs-transport retort, it costs four times as much to ship something by truck compared to rail.
If you want to reduce traffic, increase the marginal costs of driving and provide cheaper non-driving alternatives people actually want and will use.
Make telecommuting and mass transit dirt cheap and very simple, and make the marginal per-mile cost of driving a private vehicle a lot higher than it is now.
On the other hand, there will be unintended consequences, like a revolt at the polls by people who insist on the right to drive cheaply.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
AAPL in the tank
SELL
SELL
SELL !!
People don't drive into rush hour congestion because they like sitting around in their car waiting for lights to turn green. They drive into rush hour congestion because they have places to go, and because if you can avoid it, public transit is by and by large garbage. Congestion charging won't stop people from driving into work so they can save a few bucks by climbing onto a cramped bus next to the homeless people, in the same way that rising fuel prices hasn't led to the abandonment of automotive or airplane travel. There's nothing inherently wrong with just trying to grab the cash. What's immoral is trying to hide it beneath a thin veneer of social engineering. If a government wants to yank up additional revenue by gouging commuting in the same way it gouges everything else, then at least have the balls to be straightforward about it.
I like this idea. No, really.
If you live in the sticks, I imagine this won't be too much of a problem for you. I don't live there and don't intend to find out for sure. Me, I live in Philadelphia (home of the useless muni wifi). I used to work in the far suburbs. I had two options for getting there: 1) Drive on the Schuykyll "Expressway," or 2) take the train. Of course, I had to wait for the train, but then again I didn't have to wait in traffic - evens out. But I could read a book on the way to work, and overall I saved gas money. And in so doing, I'm pretty sure I helped the environment to boot.
If I want to go downtown to the Gallery mall, I can drive, or I can take the trolley that runs one block from my apartment. The trolley goes underground at 40th Street, so it can zip through what would normally be some nice urban gridlock to 13th Street, the end of the line. The Gallery is two blocks on foot from there. Total time saved - usually 10 minutes or so, plus, again, I can read a book and not use gas.
Each TCP packet has a "ECN bit", Explicit Congestion Notification, which routers will set if the packet encounters congestion on its way. If TCP stacks started taking note of these bits to slow down then the internet would (provably) run faster. One way is to charge for each packet that gets this ECN bit, maybe in real money if you're a big player, or maybe in virtual money, so long as the computers at each end of the TCP connection both feel the pinch.
I didn't exactly RTFA, but they already do this in LA. It's not the entire road, just the commuter/carpool lanes. As traffic increases the toll does too. There's no tollbooths either, it's all run via FasTrack.
Ugh. If that's what you think, reduce congestion by getting on the bus now because I certainly don't want to end up sitting next to you.
In the book Jennifer Government, there is a part where a character is looking for a quick exit from a "premium road" that a wrong turn inadvertently placed him upon. Sad to see this dystopia coming to a reality near us. :-(
It is good if the public transportation is:
1. reliable
2. reasonably quick
3. reasonably accessible
I am not saying that it is not. but those conditions must be met before attempting to reduce number of individually driven vehicles. i.e. provide an alternative before taking away the predominant means of transportation.
IBM thinks it has a good idea, adding insult to injury?
There's no joke here. Their parent is funny enough. I could add nothing to this to make it any more funny. Wow.
This is exactly the same thing that's done with the on-ramp lights in Los Angeles, only here with toll roads there is a pricing scheme just like the Vegas hotels.
How is this not an obvious, yet ignorably stupid, idea?
-- Prepared at the direction of, or to be sent to Legal Counsel, in anticipation of litigation. Attorney Client Pri
BTW, congestion tolling on I-95/I-395 from Northern Virginia into Washington, DC is projected to be up to $1.60 per mile, or $41.46 for a round trip.
IBM patents a Variable Rate Troll System?
Slashdot, time to get a lawyer, a real good one..
*sigh* When you have a limited resource, you have to discriminate. Either you'll have the people you can pay or the people who don't mind waiting in line. The great thing with price discrimination is that it introduces an incentive to produce more of the scarce resource. This is what the entire economy if not the entire civilization is based on. Yes, discrimination is anti-egalitarian, but guess what, everything cannot possibly be available to everyone, that's a physical impossibility, discrimination is natural.
\u262D = \u5350
to Grand Moff Tarkin here.
We watch Science Channel and History Channel programs all the time showing off our prodigious engineering and design ingenuity and what do we get? We get disincentives and perverse incentives one after the other from the people who think the popularity contests we call elections are licenses to do whatever they want to the people.
We the people put them there more and more as if we expect and masochistically want them to do us up the backside so we can get angry and rebel more.
The whole shebang is headed for disaster and revolution and everyone involved is intelligent enough to see it, but not wise enough to stop it.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
I don't at all understand were people got this idea that IBM is a nice company. Few companies has a worse track record of bullying other companies. And of cause few companies has more bullshit patents, probably the worst company on the planet in this regard.
1. Congestion charges are the goal for the reduction of traffic while you maximize welfare. You force people into making choices both about WHEN they drive and WHERE they drive. a variable charge based on traffic is much better, from an efficiency standpoint, than a flat charge simple to use the road. a flat charge will keep pople off the road who need to use it, and provide an incentive for those who DO use the road to overuse it.
2. That being said, we don't live in an ideal world. Congestion charges work very well from a welfare standpoint when there are easily accessible alternatives to dirivng on the highway. I can't afford to live in a city, but I have to work there. I can't make a light rail system appear tomorrow, but now I have the economic incentive to ride light rail. We can see the impact of congestion charges at work in a place like london, where public transport is a viable alternative for ANYONE. It is much harder to see it at work in wisconsin.
How about using taxes to pay for roads because they are part of the public infrastructure?!
Using the PA turnpike as an example, almost all of the tolls go to pay for the state employees and their benefits, heated booths, etc, and very little if any goes back into the road. The toll system is in place to pay for itself and not the road. It's a sham. If they got rid of all the zombies in the toll booths and put up those buckets that you toss change into they could charge a fraction and have more money to put toward the road, but still... that's what taxes are for.
As a result the PA turnpike is the worst highway in PA to drive on, full of potholes, poorly maintained, half finished construction sitting empty and idle most of the time.
The other huge reason toll roads are a BAD IDEA is that there is no competition, no other option. There's almost never a parallel highway going the same place, and who would really want that anyway. So you have to pay the toll or not go at all, or spend hours and gas $$ going around. It's taking a critical public resource and using it for legal extortion. Imagine if you had to pay a sidewalk toll to walk to lunch every day.
This idea of congestion tolls seems to have yet another bad idea behind it... Most people aren't on the roads for fun. They're on the roads because they need to get somewhere.
If skyrocketing gas prices aren't thinning out the traffic why would congestion tolls thin it out?
Operator, give me the number for 911!
Look to Singapore for prior art. An article at http://www.tollroadsnews.com/node/2239 suggests that *many* places have done this. I'm sure that IBM has added some "non-obvious" twist to an obvious idea.
On the other hand, creating a disincentive to driving can help create a market for superior public transportation. Many places have good public transit, in part, because the hassle and expense of driving--and parking--is too great.
.sig withheld by request
Airlines/Hotels change prices all the time based on supply and demand.
With more and more highways going under private ownership, this day wasn't far off.
IBM just automated it.
Egalitarianism-shgalitariniam. This is your basic free market Capitalism at work.
Be proud and if you can't afford the toll, take the bus.
Every time I drive on the California 91 through the valleys north of Orange County, there is a big sign stating what the current toll is for the toll lanes. It fluctuates between 1.50 at midnight on Sunday to $6 on Thursday at 5pm.
How is this different?
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007
If the government needs to create a toll to fund a portion of road then it needs to be 100% equal for all. This will ensure that natural demand drives people to other means of transportation. The government is too corrupt and inept to be put in charge of manipulating drivers to force social change.
While we are talking about VRT systems it should also be noted that only the government should be able to levy a toll. The selling of toll roads to private companies (who did not buy the land or pay to have the road built) should be illegal as it allows for the private owners to increase tolls which maximizes profit but drives motorist to side streets which the government then pays the repair cost on. Note that this will happen with varible rate toll systems as well during peak hours.
| ...Probably the biggest green initiative coming down the road these days, literally, is congestion pricing -- charging people for the right to drive into a downtown area. ...|
Give me another reason not to drive downtown from the suburbs, and watch the Urban Blight of the 70's come back with a vengeance as the infrastructure crumbles.
Since this is a new way of taxing people and raising revenue, I am sure it will be adopted in all the 50 state's largest cities by the end of the year if not sooner. When that happens again as in the 70's, I will politely take my business to the local strip mall 5 minutes away from to avoid such none since. This kind of thinking is what ultimately lead to the Rust Belt Effect in the Midwestern States. So I guess it's coming back by popular demand thanks to IBM who wants to sell "The People" their newest master plan software. Ugh, not again...
You know, I would love to take public transportation to work. I mean really love it. The hour I spend in my car driving to and from work every day would suddenly be converted from "chore time" to "me time". I could read a book. I could watch a movie on my iPod. I could even do some work on my laptop, if I was feeling generous to my employer.
But the it seems to me that the truth is that "they" (the public transportation authority) really don't want me to ride the bus. Why do I say this? Let me tell you.
The nearest bus stop to my house is 2 miles away. The nearest bus stop to my work is 1 mile away. That's 3 miles in the morning and 3 miles in the afternoon. I just happen to walk at about 3 miles per hour, so now my 60 minutes of daily commuting time has now turned into 2 hours of commuting time just to walk to the bus stops and back.
But it gets better. According to the online "plan your trip" schedule, they pick me up at the bus stop, then there is a layover (oops, transfer) as I wait for another bus to take me to work. Total rode-and-wait one-way time to work: 3 hours! Coming home at night is a bit better, at only 1.5 hours.
So my 60 minutes of daily commute is now a whopping total of 5.5 hours! As if that wasn't enough, due to the times the buses run I can only work a 6 hour day. On top of all this, I have to pay!
So, yes, I'd love to take public transoprtation. Too bad there's no such thing, practically speaking, where I live.
I don't know how they got a patent for this; the center lanes of Interstate 15 in San Diego, CA have had pricing adjusted based on traffic congestion for at least 5 years. Is there something special and new to this patent that I am missing?
They are a leader in outsourcing jobs to other countries. Soon there will be no jobs in the U.S. and therefore no commuting.
Run and catch, run and catch, the lamb is caught in the blackberry patch.
Can't slash claim prior art? :P
With any luck, this patent will do exactly what patents aren't intended to do (but do anyway). I would not be disappointed if other companies were not able to put variable tolls in place without getting sued. So go ahead, IBM, and patent them. While you're at it, do you think you could manage to patent price gouging, and then sue everyone who does it? Or, more appropriately, try to get a patent for patent trolling.
How about not taxing income at all? It favors the already wealthy, and helps keep the less wealthy from becoming wealthy. How about taxing ownership only. The more you own, the greater percentage of your net worth you have to pay. Helps stop the runaway feedback loop of wealth generating more wealth, regardless of whether the wealth owner even works at it.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I would rather not share the road with large public buses. Transportation on that scale should more properly be served by light, safe monorails, which would retrofit easily into most suburban neighborhoods. Unfortunately, economical solutions which do not divert the maximum tax money to the private sector are impossible to implement in The Land Of The Free. Perhaps someone could skew -er publish some data of concern: "CHILDREN CRUSHED BENEATH THE WHEELS", or something. A little late for this Election Cycle, any takers for next time?
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
Oh God I know. Only those rich fat cats will be able to afford the huge sums of money those toll boths will demand. Oh think of it, it might peak out to a ungodly amount like a dollar. Maybe those capitalist pig dogs will demand two. Oh the humanity.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
At that point, the price accelerates, (say, US$6 gal) and people stop driving.
Thtis drives demand destruction, and the price levels off, higher than before.(say, US$4 gal)
People adjust, and the amount pumped out reduces, and can't be lifted up, and then the price bumps up again to $8 then drifts down to $6. It will do that, essentially, forever or until people stop using petroleum as fuel.
so, there is no need to charge for congestion. It will simply disappear of its own accord in the next 10 years.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
The existing "egalitarian" approach is that everyone is stuck in traffic equally — you can not pay more to get better commute.
The proposal would certainly be an improvement. The "(non)-egalitarian" is a red herring — I don't see anyone complaining, that "the rich" have better TV-sets, jewelry, or, indeed, cars.
What we really need is some accountability for the road-maintainers, which are, unfortunately, mostly local governments, who are paid, mostly, by the Federal government... But, at least on the toll-roads, there could be rules instituted, mandating an automatic full refund of the tolls, if, for example, the average speed of the vehicle between the entrance and the exit was below, say, 40mph...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Carpools? I won't join a carpool. If I wanted to be around other people while commuting, I'd take the bus. I don't get nearly enough time alone, and my 20 minute drive to work is one of the times I have alone with my thoughts (such as they are). Why should I give that up?
I write sci-fi for metalheads
$2 each way = $4 a day
$4 a day = $20 a week
$20 a week = $1000 a year
That's $1000 a year less than you would have to spend normally.
A lot of little things add up to one big thing.
So kindly have a cup of shut the fuck up, unless you enjoy watching the middle-class driven to extinction.
The patent has no value, french highway operator Cofiroute did this in the 1990's...
And it failed : people waited on emergency lane for the toll to go down, thus creating big danger.
Isn't this what already happens with public transit? Many systems have lower fares for "off-peak" times and weekends (or offer things like weekend passes, which amount to the same thing). And theaters have cheap matinees. Restaurants have early bird specials, and charge less for the same food at lunch. Power companies sell electricity for less at off-peak times.
What's weird about this debate is that you have libertarian types complaining, "I paid my taxes dammit, you liberals keep your hands off my free roads," while liberals are saying, "let's let the market take care of this." A role reversal. I know that's an inaccurate generalization, but the sides taken in the above posts have sometimes been rather strange.
.sig withheld by request
Nah, what it means is, taking public transit out of the equation because many places with toll roads do not have effective public transit: rich people pay proportionally less of their income to use the road than poor people do. That's regressive and anti-egalitarian. It makes an unlevel playing field even less level. If the system charged people a percentage of their income, that would be egalitarian. That's why sales taxes are regressive too.
This isn't even about making more money. This is about reducing demand, getting people to drive less, use public transit more, creating less traffic congestion for all of us.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
...to count the amount of humans passing by in cars, then divide the number of humans by number of cars (mass-transport excluded)?
Have anyone ever gotten an average person per car ration close to 2:1, and if so, where do you live?
Something discussed in an average Economics class a decade ago is patentable now as "novel"?
This would suck for people that actually car pool. Groups of people trying to do the right thing, but yet get slammed by some toll system that is only looking at one item. What happens when weather is bad and cars slow down, or construction? This will not work.
Hell, that should be modded +5 each Informative, Insightful and Redundant for obviousness.
Every job I've had for the last decade I've made the simple, usually accepted, case that coming to work an hour earlier costs me two to three hours of my own time, which comes out to roughly 500-800 hours of my life per year just to entertain some pointless mark on the clock and I'm not willing to write off an entire MONTH of my life every year for something wholly without purpose, much less am I willing to come in while it's still dark just because of some anachronistic farmer's pride in rising before the damned birds.
Why is this so hilariously difficult for so many people to deal with without their collective heads exploding at the thought?
Sir, I could not come to work today as the fee to use the road was higher than my daily pay + gas.
If you don't vote, you don't matter, so don't waste your time telling me your opinion
TFA "The percentage of your working day spent in a commute will go down and the time you spend being productive and being paid, or simply relaxing, will go up. Also, more people will do business in the city, because they can get to stores, offices or the theater more easily."
Really? And how exactly will more people do business in the city if less people are travelling in by car?
London implemented a large congestion zone five years ago and the city has pretty much the same levels of conegstion as ever. Before the scheme there were already plenty of excess commuters who would have wanted to drive their car in but were deterred by the congestion levels. Once the charge was implemented the folk who could afford the charge started driving in! There are more busses and taxi's buzzing around than ever before and the all important *average commute time* does not appear to have been reduced by much if at all.
It seems to be a big cash cow for the local authorities with little real benefits for the majority of city goers.
"He Who Dares Wins"
New York City's congestion pricing plan will add $9 to the people's daily commute.
Let's see, $9x20 working days/month = $180/month, just for the luxury of not being spat on, cursed at, and not having to sniff someone's armpits for 2 hours a day.
Hummers, SUVs and semis charged more. Electric and smaller vehicles charged less. and/or by purchase price. Camera get a shot of license plate, looks up assessed value in the database, GVM, cross references vehicle mileage and charges large gas guzzlers more.
Profit!
Now how do I patent this idea?
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
AFAIK the efficiency of most urban roads seems to collapse around commute time. A simple solution would be to add an ultralight monorail system. Unlike Buses and cars, nobody would be forced to fear death going to and from work, and it would scale very well with a "packet frequency" rather than a "packet size" approach.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
Let me know when they tax me by the volume of air I breath....
I though the roads were already paid for via gas tax and state/federal taxes? So we the people pay for the infrastructure (and throw stadiums in there as well), and then have to pay to use them. Genius! I gotta get me a business where the public pays for construction and maintenance, and then still has to pay me a fee for usage.
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
There's a knee-jerk rant in response to this sort of thing that it is "pricing the poor off the roads".
This is utter nonsense, of course, as the poor aren't on the roads in the first place, as they can't afford cars.
Schemes like this actually make life better for the poor by enabling the buses to run faster.
Anti-egalitarian? I think it's pretty damned anti-egalitarian that I pay for suburban and exurban sewer lines, telephone lines, police and fire protection and myriad other infrastructure because inner cities generally are too politically powerless to implement a truly just scheme, like concentric taxation, that would assign tax payments to those who consume the most services, and encourage sustainable, habitable community development.
Paying more for roads you actually use is a good first step, but it doesn't go nearly far enough.
"Nerds" use to be considered smart.
They used to be literate, too. Have you noticed how many here don't know when (or not) to use an apostrophe, to be able to tell "their" from "they're" from "there", or "lose" from "loose"?
See what happens when you become respectable? Normal people try to horn in. Me, here I am trying to not be so much of a nerd (one of my hookers, "Bighead", was aghast this past weekend that I called myself a "computer nerd") and all these normal people want to be like us? Wierdness abounds.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Somehow though, I don't believe that the best way to make one option more acceptable is by making all the options suck.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
douchebag. Come get a job and D.C. and see where you can fucking live. Maybe for $1400/mo you can get a studio apartment where your guests can't take a dump without stinking it up. But a house, even 30 minutes away, in any direction, is going to cost at least $1400/mo in mortgage too. Want a 4-bedroom single family home inside the beltway? Cough up $500K. And good luck finding a bank to approve your loan.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
Here's a BETTER idea. Give tax incentives to companies to change their work days. Seriously. A lot of companies (i.e. software developers, etc.) can easily change their company's workday schedule. And give them tax incentives to do so. That way X companies work 8-5, Y companies work 9-6, Z companies work 10-7, W companies work 11-8, and V companies work 12-9. Then have some go the opposite direction, and work 7-4, or even 6-3. That way ALL companies will be open 12pm-3pm, and plus the economy will be stimulated because people will actually be able to visit stores during the work week since all the stores' hours won't coincide with your working day! Brilliant! How in demand would the bank be that was open noon to 9pm daily? Or for the seniors, 6am-3pm? Think about it! Not to mention it would put WAAAY less strain on our roads, and our other systems during the day and even out the load.
"Know but never fear the consequences of your actions."
The first major city to introduce congestion charges, London, did so under its mayor Ken Livingstone, otherwise best known for belonging to the hard-left "Old Labour" faction of the Labour Party, and his nickname "Red Ken". His reasoning is that driving into a congested area during peak times, when you could instead take the tube or commuter rail, is a scarce luxury good, and should be taxed accordingly. The result is both an increase in quality of life for everyone else, and extra income to fund better public transport alternatives.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The article's point is that US companies may not be competitive in labor-driven manufacturing, but still have a lot to offer in terms of technology.
Why the fear mongering over toll systems by posting an article that has nothing to do with any "rights issues"?
Most of the road pricing schemes out there include a GPS unit in the car. Certainly proposals for the UK include compatibility for European systems.
Combine this with European insistence on a GPS system that works much better in urban areas (Galileo), and you are drawn to the conclusion that it's not just about relieving congestion, but there is a large component of wanting to track vehicle movements as well.
Lets say someone has a 1 hour commute taking side roads. But they save 10 min taking the toll road, which is low balling it. 20 min a day 100 min a week 500 min a year
A lot of people would love to be able to just get a little of the time the waste in the car back and thats a fair price to pay. No one is forcing you to take these roads and you still have plenty of options open to get there. You still have side streets, car pooling, mass transit. And these are all positive outcomes compared to everyone sitting in dead lock in the highway. And as for extinction of the middle class, I've got no loyalties to some economic class that I've been put in. Something tells me the middle class is resilient enough that a toll booth that charges depending on the demand isn't going to kill us all off.
Take Montgomery Avenue
So,not only am I going to be pissed at the stupid fucks in my way because they are making me late, but their going to be costing me money too!!! Road rage will go through the ROOF!
Anyone care to explain the logic here?
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
There is no such market.
Infact: In some places it's ILLEGAL to provide a private mass transit service.
This just punishes commuters. It will either escalate traffic on alternate
routes or just "increase the cost of doing business" for people who had the
bad luck to get a job that's not in their own neighborhood.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I'm guessing you live somewhere very suburban which, due to very low density, makes it difficult to have profitable transit routes. This, unfortunately, is a problem in much of North America, and it'll be very hard to fix transit without rethinking our urban form. It doesn't help that most (like you) seem to vote for ever-growing suburbia with their personal choices.
There's a lot of dubious posting going on in the summary and in the comments.
Nothing, absolutely nothing, can change the fact that "things cost money".
Roads cost money. Dumping CO2 into the air costs money (although it has a indirect cost function making it problematic to measure).
When things cost money, people need to pay for those things.
Someone correctly pointed out that when you don't let the price function work the way its supposed to, you have shortages, gluts, etc.
I think most of us understand supply and demand and accept that it is fundamentally true. But when rich people can do things and poor people cant, that tugs at peoples heart strings and they forget economics.
Well, economics is the study of choice. Putting a per-use-fee on something to provide additional funding, or to more properly relate its funding to its use, is not inherently anti-poor insomuch as "things cost money" is anti-poor.
The nice thing about a direct-pay-for-use model is that SOME poor people will CHOOSE to pay the tolls and perhaps save money in other areas. Others will decide that the cost is too high for the value delivered as a component of their total funds. They'll stop using the road and the road will get less congested. "The System did what it was supposed to".
Note that this whole paragrapoh is true for ANY level of wealth. You need to let people be free to decide how they want to spend their money, and making the cost of things closer to the users and the use of things helps people make better decisions about them.
Without price information, capitalism doesn't work. Society has said that congestion has a cost, and that cost must be paid, and ought to be paid by the people that contribute to it.
This proposal is only anti-egalitarian in the sense that more money always means more choices. Any complaints about it essentially boil down to redistributive socialism.
A common complaints about America's lack of effective transit and ubran sprawl is that roads are massively subsidized and the true costs are hidden from everybody. Well, someone has an idea on how to try and address that and its nothing but jeers from the peanut gallery.
Suppose that we somehow expose the true cost of congestion, roads, etc, and people decide its too high and that they need to spend their money elsewhere? I bet you'll see EFFECTIVE mass transit start cropping up in America more and more.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
You bought your house in the wrong place. Next time look for bus stops when you buy.
I concur. I also like unemployment pay from the government. It's critical to establish a safety net, a floor so people never fall below that floor and enter poverty. I'd gladly pay a high tax rate to establish and maintain these things for flesh and blood people (in other words, not corporations, real people). I don't want people to be homeless, hungry, or go without health care when they need it. Most people in the US agree on health care -- according to Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon citing CBS and CNN national surveys:
Digital Citizen
I could take public transit to work. I wouldn't even have to walk that far (a few hundred feet at each point). But I'd need to make two transfers, for a total of 57 minutes of my time, and pay $3.10 in fares. (I checked their trip-planner site to get that accurate.) Which isn't that bad.
But if I drive? 8 minutes and 55 cents in gas.
Seven times more costly; there's no comparison.
Public transit is a joke in this country.
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
We already paid for our roads. If they make us pay tolls, we are paying twice.
If we need more space on the road, reverse the hours of the commuter lanes.
Then my company moved out beyond the reach of buses (aka by the CEO's house in the rich township that won't pay public transportation taxes). I loved the bus. It's completely me time. I'd get home refreshed. I read more. I programmed recreationally more. I wrote more. I bought my current house with bus stops in mind. I seek out jobs with bus stops in mind.
That said. Congestion pricing is actually a great idea, because it forces the hand of employers to be more efficient. Pointy-hair bosses want everyone in by 8 and out by 6, so they can watch them. It's horribly inefficient on infrastructure, worker moral, etc. This would force employers to rethink when employees came in vs. how much they pay. And perhaps they'd realize that it's better to have their call center employees telecommute rather than paying $20/day to come in at "normal business hours". I used to hate this idea, because I felt like it pandered to the rich. Now I love it because I realize it has the probability to remake the world for the poor. Think about it. The people who will get stuck in the worst traffic will be the ones who can pay. You won't be able to find McDonald's employees to come in during rush hour because they won't get paid enough. So you'll have to change your shifts. Roads will get used more effectively. Only the rice will get stuck in traffic. Business hours will become more efficient. The hand of telecommuting will be forced. I just can't see many downsides to this. Unless you have one of those a-hole bosses who thinks you should come in from 8-6. On the dot. And won't give you the raise you need to cover the $400/month congestion charges. But then the problem is your boss finding a new employee, isn't it?
IMO some sort of parity could be implemented in our support of the infrastructure of transportation. At present I believe it is skewed towards a particular mode of vehicle here in USA at present. OTOH, since it is PUBLIC MONEY being spent, (quit your crying already about who pays gas tax, even the ducks pay for oil), maybe we COULD provide a reasonable level of service to all citizens. Some would choose not to support the Bus/Car thing, and I think we could accommodate bicycles a little better. (Eliminating buses would be a good start. Replace them with ultralight monorail.) Pedestrians deserve better access to the Earth as far as that goes. BART out here on the west coast is a colossal joke. It did almost work temporarily when the earthquake broke the bridge, but as soon as they repaired the bridge, they crippled the train system again. I wonder how many megadollars that glitch cost the oil guys.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
Wow! Where is that? In China? Cuba? Belarus?..
Hey, where'd you get your car? I'd like a free one too. Cost, maintenance, and possibly storage would drive your 55 cents up a bit.
90% of people would love to take transit to work. Like most people, there is no transit to get from my home to my work in a reasonable time. Now lets look a bit into the future here...
In 5-10 years, plugin hybrids are going to be the norm. This mean car pollution is not going to be a problem for a daily commute (50-60k). So lets put that out of the way.
So the only real reason to use this is traffic. I already use a toll road to get to work. It's nice, convenient, and costs an arm and a leg. But I'm fine with it. I wouldn't mind if all roads were tolled. BUT...here's a big BUT...if you want drivers to pay the full cost of driving, then please let public transit users pay the full cost of transit.
I'm sorry, I don't appreciate paying an arm and a leg for my toll highway every morning, while I subsidize public transit. let public transit users pay the whole cost, and maybe subsidize low-income families with a cheaper rate.
The key to successful transit. People don't use public transit because it is cheaper. they use it because its more convenient.
Some people need to get a clue before spouting off and talking out their ass.
If something hasn't already been done, there's possibly a good reason that this is the case.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I live 8 miles from work, in West Los Angeles. I MUST drive. Why?
1. I would ride my bike, if there were a shower anywhere near my office. Nope. No way to shower, and I can't spend my day reeking of sweat.
2. I would ride the bus if I didn't have to switch buses in order to get to the office. Yes - that's right. The genius route planning of the buses means that to commute 8 miles, I would literally have to get on one bus, ride it 5 miles, then get off, wait half an hour, get on another bus, and ride it 3 miles. This is unacceptable.
Public transportation in Los Angeles is pathetic. But to be fair the city is so sprawling that it must be a nightmare to try to properly fund or design.
They're one step off. Such a toll system would certainly get more people to take side roads, use mass transit, or drive at off-peak hours but simultaneously reward the people who decide to pay the toll by improving traffic congestion. Under the described system, carpoolers would pay some middle additional per-person cost (toll / number of occupants). Why not place carpoolers in the same class as the first three alternatives by waiving the toll for multiple-occupant vehicles, in this way penalizing only the pathological case of the single-occupant vehicle?
Note as you drive down the expressway how over 3/4 of cars (more like 9/10 last time I tried this statistic) are single-occupant vehicles. I imagine that for most people it would not be a difficult task to find a friend who lives nearby you who also works nearby. After Pittsburgh cut service on their mass transit even more, I ended up taking this option--even when there is a schedule conflict, it's usually not a problem for one of us to sit around and read or find something to do until the other is ready to go. This is an alternative to poor-smelling, unreliable or nonexistent mass transit and options that are often not tractable such as walking or riding a bike.
When parking costs $10 a day, gas prices are over $3/gallon, and possible tolls are added up it makes a lot of sense to carpool and split parking and gas. It will make even more sense when all riders are given a larger savings on the cost of the toll.
~Ben
Tolls in NYC are like $5 each way. Not pocket change any more.
> Next time look for bus stops when you buy.
Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn't. Route changes happen quite often in some public transit systems (I know I've seen changes to the same route less than a year apart here in Chicago). In the process, houses that used to be quite near a stop can end up very far away.
The problem could be helped a lot by simply giving businesses more incentive to NOT set up downtown, and to change zoning laws so that businesses and residences can mix more. NOT to take an accepted social contract between the taxpayers and the government (i.e. "Taxes get roads"), one which many people have based their decisions on for DECADES, and turn it around into a money-grab which also restricts the poor from being able to freely move. Oh: And government subsidized hybrid cars. Or at least: Stop fighting better emissions standards (I'm looking at you, Bush.) This isn't going to save the taxpayers any money; it will just become another source of revenue for the government. The extra money is not going to be fairly distributed, and even if it were now, there's no guarantee that it will be in the future. Government getting up in your ass is not good. Pretty much ever.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
Unlike many areas of government, this is where deficit spending *is* justified. Plan carefully, borrow money, build the system and then pay back the incurred debt via fares. Waiting for people to wreck their lives just to take public transit, and then use that money to improve the service, can only fail. Politicians can get elected while running a deficit; they probably can't stay in office if they make driving too costly without offering an immediate, good replacement.
cheers,
Andrew
A method for taking well established economics concepts and applying them to whatever I can to make money.
How the hell is shit like this patentable?
No sig for you!!
You clearly do not live in Los Angeles.
"Give me the mass transit before you start charging me for not using it (and acting holier than thou.)"
Hey, I ride public transportation, or ride my bike or walk if the weather is nice. My taxes pay for the roads that you drive on everyday that I rarely use, just like your taxes pay for my buses you rarely use. I won't bitch if you don't.
"But this one goes to 11!"
Yeah that does suck. But it's much more rare than people buying houses nowhere near public transit and then complaining that it doesn't come close to their house.
Plenty of that as well. Unfortunately, it's hard to find houses for sale near public transit in some areas.
With all the new developments going up recently during the bubble, most of the houses on the market (all in some places) were nowhere near public transit.
Of course whatever planners didn't bother to extend public transit to new multi-thousand-home developments should be fired... but I digress.
I used to work in the toll industry designing all those nifty systems that classify your car as you pass through the booth.
I remember seeing a rfp for this type of system from California back in the early 90's.
I'm pretty sure this is the road...
http://www.91expresslanes.com/tollschedules.asp
Great solution douchebag. How were they supposed to anticipate a ridiculous commute tax?
Just another example of how the government is putting the cart before the horse. People NOT big business should be put first, almost everthing now revolves around MONEY and corporations. WE DONT NEED ANY MORE GROWTH, this is what happnes when we get too big, the wealthy inevitably get what amounts to a free run while the lower classes get what they have worked hard and paid for taken away, piece by piece by corporations that support the politicians and the wealthy. The capitalist will tell us it will all work itself out in the long run, but at what cost? Public amenities like road should not be put into the hands of corporations fullstop and they should be available to all on a first come first serve basis.
In the end it boils down to over population and the corporations never ending need to get fatter. This fallicy that we need continual economic growth will kill us all in the end, which will come much sooner if is not gotten under control.
Not everyone on slashdot is a rabid libertarian. I don't mind any of those.
People whine about how the government is inefficient and if we privatized everything would be cheaper/better/faster/etc. Well, a private company would seek to maximize the amount it gains from a toll road.
Aside from that, according to the libertarian way of thinking you can't be "forced" to take the bus by increasing fare rates. The alternative's just being disincentivized is all.
New York City is, as far as I'm aware, the only city considering adding congestion pricing, and it's only considering it for lower Manhattan. Lower Manhattan, and NYC generally, is quite well served by public transit.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
You bought your house in the wrong place. Next time look for bus stops when you buy.
I live in a city where decent housing near public transportation are nearly 3 times in price what they should be. I mean... Its great if you have money to blow on a $600,000 house, but othere wise not so great if you don't make they much.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Surprisingly enough, a car will still be needed for other things besides commuting.
~ I am logged on, therefore I am.
You should give it up because it's a disproportionate waste of the commons. Of course, with variable rate tolls they can charge you an appropriate fee, which you will pay if it's truly of value to you. I'm guessing, however, if you have a 20 minute commute you don't fall into one of the areas that is going to be tolled first.
[Ego]out
Congestion pricing already exists in several countries in Europe. On the surface it seems like a good way to change driver habits to easy congestion. Except that it doesn't actually address anything. It merely shifts the burden and provides the government with yet another way to tax us.
The rationale is that those who don't need to be out during rush hour will avoid going out. Except that how many people are really going out for reasons other than to get to work? Stores generally only open at 10am, after rush hour has come and gone. So people aren't going out to shop. The fact that the highways are clear on holidays makes it quite obvious that the vast majority of the people on the roads are driving to work.
Working from home is all well and good, but many people, myself included can't realistically do that, nor would I want to. So is the government going to provide some kind of refund for commuters? If so, now the system has gotten significantly more complicated.
But the government just can't keep their hands of a potential revenue source. Let's take my state, Connecticut. When I was a kid we had tolls on I95. There was a movement to eliminate them and they finally disappeared after a bad crash at one toll booth. So in exchange we got gasoline taxes and property taxes increased considerably.
Traffic congestion has become a more serious issue in the intervening years. And now the specter of tolls has reared its ugly head. Studies have been conducted into the feasibility of bringing them back. And politicians try to tout them as a solution to our traffic problems.
States need to manage their money more wisely, first of all. Our roadways need to be modernized and expanding to accommodate increased traffic. But more importantly, public transportation needs to be turned into a viable alternative. It needs to start by addressing corruption and poor management. The government-subsidized commuter rail company around here, is utter garbage.
The trains are a mess, first of all. It's a generally unpleasant experience. First of all, their definition of on-time means 5 minutes late. The times they list in their schedules mean nothing and commuters are often confused as train schedules overlap because of tardiness. Secondly, the trains themselves tend to be a mess; apparently nobody bothers keeping them clean.
There are no turnstiles are anything. Because of union demands we've still got conductors walking around punching tickets. What does this mean? On busy trains they have no hope of reaching ever rider before the train has gone past several stations. These means that someone going several stops will often get a free ride.
Then there's this whole mess of replacing old train cars. Years ago it was announced that they were replacing them all. I've yet to ride in one of the new trains. They exist, but rare. The best part, however, is that despite the old cars being electric the new cars are all being pulled by diesel locomotives. So we've essentially regressed.
Amtrak spent hundreds of millions of dollars and was a good 5+ years late to upgrade the same rail system for that so-called high speed train, the Acela. Except that it crawls through a good portion of this state and when it's at speed it barely keeps up with cars on the highway. And the best part is that every few months one of the trains gets hung up on some power lines and pulls them down causing massive delays.
And the cherry on top of this turd is that the MTA is constantly trying to raise fares.
So the point of my tirade is that the government seems to be trying to force commuters into alternatives that don't really exist.
If thats true I doubt you have to worry about it as its most likely going to be targeted at urban centers with mass transit.
Because it's not forcing. The carpool lane is a form a forcing. With congestion pricing, however, you _always_ can use the road. You're just paying for your incremental traffic loading on that road. You also benefit because there won't be as much traffic when you're driving. The costs you pay, in a fair system, should be offset by a reduction in other taxes. Of course, politicians never give money back, but that's a different issue.
The only U.S. city seriously considering adding congestion charges (at least seriously enough that it's likely to happen in the forseeable future) is New York City, and even there only for lower Manhattan. I'm not sure if you're familiar with the demographics and transit of New York City, but poor people there generally do not drive to work. A large proportion of poor (and even lower-middle-class) people don't even own cars at all. So a congestion charge is not going to hit them---it'll hit the generally well-off people who insisting on driving into lower Manhattan for work instead of taking the subway like everyone else.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Shut the fuck up, you whining two-year-old.
If bus stops were guaranteed to stick around for the 15 years it'd take to pay off a house, I'd accept your point as valid, but they're not. Bus stops are changed constantly, shifting as the people who run the bus refine the system or try something new. Recently in SLC, they shifted everything around to better streamline with the TRAX. In the process, they cancelled a dozen routes, and removed every second stop from the ones that were left.
Not saying it's wrong of them to do it, but you can't blame the home-owner for something that's entirely out of his control.
--Jimmy
My job is fairly flexible on work hours, as long as I get stuff done. If I can sync my email before and after my commute and spend an hour of my commute on a train or bus responding to emails, that's an hour of work I don't have to do in the evening after I get home, or an hour I can leave the office earlier, depending on workload. If I were to drive, that time would be 100% wasted, because I couldn't get any work done.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I would like to patent a process involving inserting one's index finger into one's own nose in order to remove excess debris and enhance breathing. Anyone know any good (free as in beer) patent lawyers.
return EXIT_SUCCESS;
The roads will still be congested, they'll just be congested with rich people.
And what's the difference between a road you can't get through because it's congested with cars, and a road you can't get through because it's congested with fees?
This whole system is just a way to give rich people more access to public roads (that they're not paying their share of taxes to support anyway), while also tracking everyone like criminals.
--
make install -not war
Let's say the GP gets 5 miles in his 8 minutes. My work reimburses me about $.49 per mile. That makes the GPs commute worth 4.90. I'm not quite sure if he meant 3.10 (bus fare) one way or 2 so the value will depend on that.
.12 [(12000 - 6000) / 50000 for my 2000 Civic) .04 [2000/50000 -- Kind of made up but definitely achievable on a new car for 5 years if you can change your own oil and you don't blow through tires] .33/mile
.62/mile (assuming that's a one-way fare). So it'd be slightly cheaper if you could get a really cheap bus ride.
$.49 a mile seems a bit much. Let's do a calculation for my car:
Gas=.17/mile
Car Depreciation=
Maintenance=
=
The bus fare works out to
Now, I'm not including fees that you have to pay for just having a car, which would include parking (somewhere, we'll assume work is free), insurance, bullshit state fees and all forms of state-sponsored graft (smog checks, parking/speeding tickets, etc).
According to this a similar car would cost 25k to drive for 5 years, not new, and that's all-inclusive I mean down to the financing if you borrow your car from a bank. Let's try to own a bus pass for 5 years:
Bus: 3.10 * 2 (each way we think) * 240 (working days a year otherwise we stay in the dank cave and guard the precious) * 5 years = 7440 .
Seems to me the only way to achieve dramatic savings using public transport is to not own a car at all. YMMV if you live in a crowded city. I mean clearly most people in NYC have done the math and realized driving isn't worth it.
At least in New York City, which is (so far as I know) the only place in the country that is seriously considering implementing a congestion pricing scheme in the immediate future, the vast majority of the revenue from the congestion pricing scheme is specifically earmarked for upgrades to public transportation. This is meant to address exactly the concern you raise, that public transit is woefully inadequate in many places, and could become even more so as ridership increased due to congestion pricing. A very decent public transit system is basically a prerequisite-- the idea of congestion pricing is to both alleviate traffic, to make existing public transit systems an increasingly viable alternative to driving, and to give drivers an economic impetus to explore this alternative. Forcing drivers to pay a toll that benefits the public transit system they don't use seems like regressive tax, but the other popular method for raising money for public transit, hiking fares, is a lot more regressive. Public transit may not be an appealing option for you, but is is an option. It doesn't work the other way for people who do not own cars. The other huge misconception about congestion pricing is that these measures are only being considered seriously for use in urban centers, not for metropolitan areas where you might be miles from the nearest public transit option. So in the case of New York, the congestion pricing scheme only applies to midtown and downtown Manhattan. If you lived 60 minutes away and didn't have good access to public transit, you could still drive to within 15 minutes of your office, pay to park, and take a subway. Since in the case of New York City you would almost surely need to pay for parking were you to drive into the congestion pricing zone anyhow, this could actually save you money and time, while reducing traffic in the urban center.
How are we going to save the world when there are selfish people like you who value your own time higher than other people's commute time?
Does Firefox implement <sarcasm> rendering yet?
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Which sucks. The high cost of inner city housing is another debate entirely (and won't be fixed by congestion pricing). But part of the reason developers can offer you those cheap houses in the suburbs (with no public transporation) is that they're expecting you (and the city dwellers) to foot the bill in gas prices, vehicle depreciation, utility maintenance, road maintenance, school buses, the list goes on. I'm not down on people who buy houses in the suburbs. My first house was in the suburbs. But it's pretty clear that this is not a sustainable model. Especially if we have a real oil shock. If you can't afford a 600k house my guess is you're going to have trouble buying a brand new hybrid if gas hits $500/barrel. Congestion charges are great because they are incremental changes that make us start re-analyzing the way we do things. Before it's a matter of having to sell your house and move to an apartment because you can't afford your commute.
NYC's public transportation is excellent. I take the subway everyday from Brooklyn to Manhattan, and not from the yuppie part of Brooklyn either. I wouldn't trade my subway ride, where I can read my book, for sitting in traffic for anything. And yes, I would be willing to pay $9 to get into Manhattan in a car when I really need to. In fact, I wish they would make it $20 to discourage needless use of the roads.
In addition to a) less idiots on the roads and b) more clean air, you also get a faster bus service because of a).
If there's no mass transit anywhere near where you live, then there's not enough of a tax base to support one, and therefore not enough traffic congestion for demand pricing to be of any use.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
My front door is 500 meters from the bus stop. The transfer station is only 1 mile away (if I want some exercise - which I usually do after work - walking from the station all the way home).
Down town the bus stop is 400 meters from the front door of my work place.
That being said, since I started riding the bus I've saved $150 per month (gas), incalculable wear and tear costs on my vehicle, and I've gone down 3 pants sizes (and am continuing to lose weight), not to mention polluting a bit less than before.
Now, the flip side of that is the time spent (2.5 to 3 hours per day), encountering the occasional insane/smelly hobo, or strange liquids/powders in seats. Most of that is easy to deal with (pay attention to your surroundings - and don't sit in someone's mess). And I think of the 3 hours as 'me' time - I listen to music, entertain myself by observing strange behavior on the bus, talk to the occasional sane person, and get that aforementioned exercise.
Now I may have lucked out -- the U.S. certainly doesn't have the ubiquitous public transportation I experienced in Europe. But it isn't that bad either -- unless you live out in the sticks.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
Its the Democrat way... Spread the misery equally.
There are those, like me, that are outside consultants or reps who have no choice but to be on those roads. Public transit cannot serve me. It is not possible for me to haul all of my samples around on the city bus! All that this upcharge will accomplish is a rise in prices in general. Nobody chooses to be in that traffic for fun... Anyone out at rush hour is there because they have to be. This is just another way to squeeze a few more dollars out of joe schmoe out there trying to feed the family. It is born of a government idea that they can spend your money better and more effectively than you can.
"It seems that we are at the age where life stops giving us things, and starts taking them away..." Indiana Jones
8 miles? 13 minute commute? I doubt that the high-congestion areas that will benefit from variable rate tolling find such a commute anything but laughable. Do you even hit a toll road? When you have areas like NYC or LA or DC that have multi-hour commutes due to overwhelming congestion it's beyond a question of whether the load needs to be reduced, but rather how.
That said, with an 8 mile commute why aren't you riding your bike, at least on some days? It will take you a bit longer, at least at first, but I guarantee that bike maintenance is cheaper than a car. If you're actually in that range of your work, the environmentally friendly option is getting their on your own power.
I'd note, though, that having used Portland, OR's light rail, Boston's T and DC's Metro to get to work all of them work perfectly fine, and anyone who complains otherwise is probably a curmudgeon looking for something wrong.
[Ego]out
well, most of it is. The owner of road system (government) should weight more on public good (throughput) than profit (if at all). It's not a simple demand-supply situation in a free market.
The PA turnpike is BS. I have had the unfortunate experience of driving on it several times while traveling through PA. The traffic is fairly heavy, signs are confusing, and like any other toll road there are few on/off ramps. Toll booths are not only an annoyance but also a hazard. Three lanes of traffic dividing haphazardly amongst a half-dozen toll booths? Drivers are approaching these things at 65mph probably not even knowing which lane they need to be in until the last moment.
One time the cops had 76 blocked right off, so the entire thing was diverted to one exit. Instead of letting folks pass in order to minimize the inconvenience, they collected tolls! I got to pay $1.50 for the priviledge of being able to cover 7 miles in 2 hours, and end up in the middle of nowhere.
Makes me glad there are no toll roads within 50 miles where I live.
being that the stop is also a mile from work.
Glib != Insightful
very confusing mod....
A goal is a dream with a deadline
Eh - the Netherlands is already talking about putting in a variable tariff toll system based on the time, congestion, car size/weight, specific road and maybe other variables. Or is simply contemplating/talking about planning something not considered prior art?
California has had this on the Riverside freeway for over 10 years! The fee is based on the amount of traffic between small change and lots of money.
-- A computer without Windoze is like a choclate cake without mustard
I make 80% of my city income from toll booths. But for some reason my city gets deserted when I have a single 6 toll highway to work. I don't know why!
Ask about Red Ken's congestion charge.
Benn around for a while and was so successful that trains couldn't handle the load and Red had the great idea of charging more for peak time train travel to remove the people who didn't have to use it then.
Uh, bosses tend to want you in in the morning and you want to go home at night. You won't stay at work all day and he won't let you stay home.
I have to admit, I find it fascinating that in the discussion of an article on a technology that applies a variable solution to a variable problem, the naysayers all waffle between two points; all or nothing.
You're absolutely right, sometimes carpooling is inefficient. Sometimes it will only work if you go it alone. But you fail to ask the question, "How often can I get away with it?" Are you and your buddies so inflexible that you can't communicate about what would be a good compromise time for leaving? Surely they have end-of-the-day tasks, too? And maybe, just maybe you can put in the extra effort to not have to stay late?
My point is that generally speaking you could, if you put an ounce of effort into it, find a workable carpool solution. Lots of people do, who recognize that resources aren't infinite - their's or the world's. And if everyone carpooled even 20% of the time that they commute, that's a big difference - a 10% decrease in cars on the road. So why is it that it's such an impossible thing? Is it really that un-doable, or does it just necessitate a change and the acceptance that to-date you haven't been doing it the optimal way?
[Ego]out
So when highway speeds drop due to congestion I get charged more toll, but get LESS value
for the use of the road. Seems bassakwards to me. If it takes me longer to get to work
the toll should DROP to reflect the decreased value of the road.
Most of what you are talking about was phased out in the 1980s.
Yes, there are some subsidies for an ethonal plant to buy more corn, but that is a part of the fuel subsidies.
There are some subsidies given to farm owners not to grow crops and have the land return to natural state. In which if these ended then a lot of area that has rivers, lakes, wetlands, open plaines area, and other assorted types of land will be farmed again. Oh yeah, most farmers will make more money farming. This is not a farming subsidies, per se, this is to make America more beautiful.
So most of what people talk about of farm subsidies have been gone for over 2 decades from the Reagan era.
-- A computer without Windoze is like a choclate cake without mustard
I agree that traffic will shift, but that might just be the thing that forces the government to make EVERY road a toll road by installing GPS in your car, and taxing you on actual miles driven.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
You ever been to Holland? There are thousands of cheap bicycles at the train stations day and night. People have a bike at either end, they ride their bike to the station, take transit to work, grab their bike at the work station, ride to work.
The first claim says "Take the average speed of vehicles on a toll road segment, subtract the average speed of vehicles on a parallel non-toll segment, and put that into a computer to determine a toll as a function of that difference.
The second claim says "Add as a parameter to that function a desired speed on the toll segment, and increase the toll if the average speed on the toll segment is less than or equal to that"
The third claim says that the increase described in the second claim should be proportional (actually, it uses the term "related") to the difference in the first claim.
The fourth claim (which is not dependent on the second or third claims) says "Add as a parameter to that function a desired speed on the toll segment, and decrease the toll if the average speed on the toll segment is greater than or equal to that"
The fifth claim says that the decrease described in the fourth claim should be proportional ("related") to the difference in the first claim.
The sixth claim combines the second and fourth claims
The seventh claim does for the sixth claim what the third does for the second.
The eighth claim does for the sixth claim what the fifth does for the fourth.
There's really something patentable here? Each claim except the first is basically a partial formula for determining a toll on the toll portion of a roadway split into toll and non-toll segments, and the most complex version of it, combining claims 7 and 8, is
IF average speed of toll segment is greater than desired
Toll = Standard toll - F((average speed of toll segment - average speed of non-toll segment)/C1_
ELSE if average speed of toll segment is less than desired
Toll = Standard toll + G((average speed of toll segment - average speed of non-toll segment)/C2)
ELSE
Toll = Standard Toll (and this is merely implied)
(The functions F and G are unspecified, and their existence makes the two factors rather pointless, but that's the language of the claims)
The first claim simply says to use a formula based on the difference in average speeds of the segments to determine the tolls, without going into specifics.
In a sane world, none of this is patentable.
You're a sad and bitter man.
Public transportation is being heralded as the fix-all to society's ills, yet it cannot produce a reasonable amount of coverage to compensate for city sprawl. Your answer is that he's just in the wrong place.
Ever consider who ZONES residential and commercial areas? Who determines where the bus stops are set up?
I suppose if it were to take 20 minutes for the police to get out to you when you call 911 it's your fault for being so far away from a cop?
Well, I can't speak for the GP, but some can't carepool due to a non-strict 9-5 working hours. Or perhaps not access to a carpool. And some can't move closer to their job, because their job is in a very expensive area to live and they have a family to support. Something that gets harder if they are slugged by higher tolls. I don't know, but then neither does the parent, I'm just not assuming its because of one specific reason: that they don't care about the environment.
When I lived on a public transport corridor I'd take the bus even if it was faster to drive. It was marginally cheaper on the bus, but more importantly, it was a nice bus. It was a stress free trip where I could tune out.
Now I live no where near any good public transport (yet, 2009 hopefully it will 'extend' out here). I have two roads into work. I choose to take the one that is tolled, and avoid congestion.
But here is the important point. I realize that in both cases, I was in a position to make that choice. In the first case I could afford to live in an area with good public transport. In the second case I can afford the tolls. If I assumed everyone was able to make the choice but didn't because they didn't care, thats "Holier than thou". Thats assuming that you are better than other people, rather than just in a better position to choose.
I pay higher tolls in the name of less congestion. And I take busses and trains when it doesn't double my trip time. And I say that its my choice to make because I can make it. Not because I'm one of the select few who choose to make it, that the rest somehow need to be charged more to get them to redeem themselves and change their wicked ways.
Overall, the problem of efficient public transportation in a suburban area is not an easy one to solve.
I wonder if any place has tried an "on-demand" bus system. Basically, on-line you enter your source, destination, and time window, and their computer figures out the optimal routes - which could be optimized in different ways, say to maximize passengers per mile or to minimize passenger inconvenience, whatever is considered most important. Then, for example, a bus could pick you up at your front door - pretty close to a specific time they tell you - and drop you off at your destination, after a few digressions along the way to process other passengers.
Amortized over the life of the car, those miles probably cost at most another dollar. So it's still seven times faster, and at least twice as cheap.
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
500 minutes a year = 8 hours, or $160 a year if you value your time at $20/hour.
You'd have to value your time at ~$80/hour to make it worth taking the toll road in that case.
Still, in many areas the toll road chops substantially more off the commute than 10 minutes each way.
I don't read AC A human right
Bill Gates - "Our strategy is to get China 'kinda addicted' to Microsoft's services." Excuse me, a whole country addicted to something? And now this? Services are parasitic!
I have one of these tags and love the "royal road".
That being said.. I think it is almost time that the populace is going to rise up and raise taxes on the well off and build free roads, free bridges, etc. again.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
In unrelated news, Ken Livingstone announced today that he would be joining the ranks of IBM as a "consultant."
Well, how about me then? I live in the Twin Cities out in the southern burbs. The next block over from my house is a park-n-ride bus stop deal, but it's obvious it's for the folks that work in the city centers (Minneapolis or St Paul proper). I work 3 miles from home so a commute is no biggie for me, but most other destinations require a lengthy drive.
I too tried to plan a simple trip off-hours to downtown, say to get dinner or hit the bars in Minneapolis. My best bet is to leave for dinner around 3PM from the park-n-ride, take a 45 minute ride to the MoA, then layover and transfer to a downtown-bound bus. 2 hour ride one-way. The worst part is the schedules are geared for commuters so the stops are far apart downtown-bound in the evening and non-existent after 5PM and on weekends. Coming back is not much better with most routes out to the burbs stopping around 7PM. The best option for me is to drive to MoA and take the train downtown, which still takes 45 minutes for the 12-mile route.
Anyway, yeah I could move, but being on or near the bus line does not necessarily mean that you're going to be able to get around on the bus without a huge hassle. Maybe someday they'll get that commuter rail setup and we'll be able to hop on and be downtown in 20 minutes or so, but I suspect I'll be old enough at that point that my kids will have taken away my keys anyway.
How about charging motorists a percentage of their total asset/cash value, including ALL global assets. It would be a very small percentage but it would hurt everyone equally.
Yeah that does suck. But it's much more rare than people buying houses nowhere near public transit and then complaining that it doesn't come close to their house.
It would be impossible for everyone to buy a house near public transit.
Hell it would be highly impractical in many places to make the existence of nearby public transport a major purchasing concern. You don't get to dictate what houses are for sale, what their prices are, what the local property taxes are, and so on and so forth. If the place that you can afford isn't near a bus stop, that's all there is to it.
If you're going to actually put forward using public transportation as a solution, and in fact blame people for not buying their houses where they can use it, then there's only one solution: Provide more public transportation. When it is in fact easy to be near public transportation, and to be sure that your work place is also near public transportation, THEN you can blame people for moving someplace where they can't make use of it. But with the current state of public transportation in the U.S.? Not a chance.
The enemies of Democracy are
A complex, self-regulating system.
I live in a smallish (sub 500k population) city in the UK. Even here, congestion in the city centre gets quite bad. This means that I don't normally drive through the city centre anyway. However, on the occasions on which I do have to drive through when it's busy, I don't see why I should have to pay for it. If I could avoid going through, I would.
Ok, actually, I'm opposed to paying for public services at the point of use, if there were congestion charging here I wouldn't drive through at all, which I suppose is what they want. I'd be more likely to:
1) drive 3 or 4 times as far to go around the outskirts of the city, which causes more wear on the other roads and is worse for the environment
2) cycle, which is flippin' dangerous
3) not go
I suspect that for many people who have to go into the city centre every day, because it's where they work; (1) is ridiculous because if everyone did it, the problem would just be shifted, (2) isn't practicable for much further out than where I live, or safe (3) isn't a solution because it results in them not having a job.
Those people who can avoid driving in, do. Those who can't shouldn't be penalised for it.
Now, someone do some simulations to show that once a certain level of congestion is met, the number of road users who can be disinsentivized off the roads is at a maximum given only the level of congestion and won't be significantly increased by charging.
FGD 135
And there exist at least 2 UTA-TxDOT research projects (2001-02 and 2003-04) on the exact same topic.
Charging people more for things in higher demand is called "capitalism". Perhaps that is anti-egalitarian, but this particular instance is no more anti-egalitarian then, say, charging people more for higher quality health care, or charging people more for better quality food.
The argument is that these people already paid for the roads (road tolls rarely fund the roads directly, even when that was promised), and so since they've already paid for the roads with their progressive taxes they shouldn't be charged again a rate that becomes regressive.
Now, this argument is silly - the existing rates are already regressive from that perspective. And the Wall Street traders are going to wonder why they can't buy a coffee when they get into work because the barista has to come to work later (or really early) to make her commute cost-effective.
So, the only fair thing to do is to get the government out of the business of running the roads since the government offers no benefit over a private corporation, and it leads to thorny issues like this. Once competition is fair you'll see more things that look like public transit spring up, because true costs will be apparent.
If only the enviro-socialists could understand that Mass Transit is far more important than Public Transit, they could actually get around to saving the planet.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
At least where I'm from (Twin Cities,) the idea of implementing the tolls wasn't to disperse the traffic over a larger area, but disperse it over time. People realized (and who knows why they couldn't realize this before) that traffic was considerably lighter at 7:00 than 7:30, and dramatically ligher than at 8:00 or 8:30.
Sure, we'd love to see people actually carpooling as well, but the stakes will have to be much higher because it's just so easy to complain instead of doing something about it.
Get the environmentalists out of the room, and send them back to Aspen or thereabouts, tyvm.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
That's like saying, "Set up a nationwide network of gas stations before you sell the first car."
If prices are set really high, it will become profitable for private buses to eat the high cost and then charge people for riding a much lower rate than if they drove. The buses, in turn, will actually be efficient because they will be driving on uncongested roads.
(I talk a lot about this in my first journal entry.)
Remember: everyone already is paying a toll: the opportunity cost and aggravation of dealing with congestion. By pricing the roads at market-clearing levels, you allow more efficient organization to emerge.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
Yes. The mother doesn't charge her children because by law, they have no income.
Civics classes teach two theories for level of taxation, namely benefits and ability to pay. But I see a strong correlation between the two theories: those who are more able to pay generally have more (property) to lose and thus have more to gain from government services such as law enforcement.
When money is being used for a variable proxy for time on the road, no good can come of it. It just encourages mission creep.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
What taxes? You aren't paying for gasoline or car taxes, and you still use the road on your bike or while walking. Seems he's paying for your ability to do those activities, too. You have no grounds to bitch, whereas he does. He's already shouldering a burden of taxes for your car-free lifestyle, you want him to pay more now?
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
That's the rub with the so-called 'Capitalist System', which at its core, is the simple disenfranchisement and theft from the poor & economically helpless. That's seems to be completely OK with those who can benefit from the system for whatever reason - with never a qualm about those born less fortunate or clever. But, they ought to take note that the capitalist system requires feeding 'from the bottom' - i.e., the utilization and consumption of the productions of those on the lower levels.
It may be the most efficient economic system ever invented - but it definitely is not fair. Nor is it sustainable forever. It ought not to take a rocket scientist to see where this will eventually lead.
Historically, it always follows a path of subjugation of others less fortunate, economic corruption, and eventual revolution beginning in the lower levels which consumes & destroys the higher levels. It is as inevitable and as predictable as the evolution of a culture in a petri dish!
In a single article we have patents, taxes, freedom and driving.
Not only that, the reviewer managed (through an excellent summary) to work in discrimination too.
This is the best slashdot article evar!
# Create more supply. Build more roads. We've been trying that for a long, long time. I don't think the Jersey Turnpike can get much bigger. Stop listening to the environmentalists when building those roads. # Curtail demand. Many ways to do this, including building more public transit and taxing fuel.
# Raise prices. This affects the poor more than the rich - big surprise there! So does everything else, why are roads special? Both the poor and the rich use them, but rich environmentalists come in and suggest an intervention that only shifts the problem away towards Somewhere Else. Invariably, this leads to mission creep where it is then used for a new form of Revenue Enhancement. See London for an example.
In short, avoid 4 like the plague. Of course, you may take flak from environmentalists, but it's not like they can't be ignored.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Roads are not paid for purely by gas taxes alone. And when I bike, I bike on the provided bike paths (I live in a very bike friendly town) and walk on the sidewalks. Even so I doubt my weight, or the weight of me on my bike, does nearly the same amount of "wear and tear" on the roads as a car does. (I do own a car,I just never drive it because I have no need, and do keep my license tabs current, so I too pay for my share of the roads.) I would also like to add I buy gasoline for my snow blower, lawn mower, and weed whacker - none of which put any use on the roads, and for which taxes are taken to use for the roads.
My point in the whole thread was we all pay for stuff we don't want to at times. Such is the nature of taxes.
"But this one goes to 11!"
Most of the people who went back to their cars did so because BART is such an Astoundingly Ineffective System. BART costs a ridiculous amount of money to run. The vehicular units weigh far too much for the task. Smaller units with short headway, (I hate to wait), scaled by demand, and available 24/7, would make the system serviceable to far more customers. I never saw any security at 0300 HRS on BART because the crowds were too thick. It is not as if nobody wants to ride. Actually the BART cops are pretty fucked up and would probably mobilise to get all the drunks back on the highways if things normalised at 24/7. Buses to feed the BART are a poor idea as well. There was absolutely nothing wrong with the Key Line and the Red Car Line and whatever else used to serve commuters, for their day. (Don't get me started on THAT one.) I envy that you can incorporate BART into your commute rather than 17 miles of hell. I just said adios to a 47 mile joyride down CA-4 among others. It beat heck out of the three-and-a-half hour (each way) bus-to-BART-to-bus thing that I enjoyed when I got my transmission renewed. Small monorails could be much more cost effective than the system we run now. If you are going from point a to b to a, most of us should not need a private vehicle. And some of us, don't forget, never make it home. "What price?" They always say, but no one thinks the solution is worth it. That's what they've been told, and they're sticking to it. A monorail, by its nature tends to mow down far fewer pedestrians and cars. About an x:0 ratio probably. Had we upgraded the old existing system and expanded the modern result to encompass the urban portions of our state, the highway system could have evolved much more effectively. BART took longer to build than the moon rocket. We've come a little bit further techwise but if the politicians take care of it we'll probably continue with what worked okay (profit-wise) since the steam days. BART has some pretty ancient roots. BART service levels are not crippled? ...I disagree. respectfully. ...(face turning red, hard to breath...)
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
It's not quite as bad for me...I can drive to work in ~25 minutes, take bike+train to work in ~45 minutes, or walk+train to work in ~1 hour. But it still discourages me from taking public transport every day. Especially in the winter, it's no fun spending a lot of time in the cold & rain.
sig? uhh, umm, ok
Buses and trains are out of the weather. Go be homeless for awhile and find out how easy or not it is to actually find someplace to crash where you won't freeze or be sozked in rain. I have seen homeless people use them a lot just for a dry and warm place to catch some sleep (I used buses and trains for more than a decade in a large US city), just like they use libraries or cheap movie houses sometimes, if they can scrape up a few bucks, it is still cheaper by far than the cheapest rent you can find.
I'd have to agree on the tone of the document for it is well deserved.
The only concept that comes out of this is it being a new form of Revenue Enhancement. While it may be pushed as some form of environmental "benefit", it is just the same kind of force, just with an "unassailable target".
Instead of a cop hiding behind a speed trap, it's now a congestion charge that hides lawmakers and environmentalists behind an "unassailable target". The difference is that I can avoid a known speed trap, a congestion zone is (by design) unavoidable by all practicality.
If you're a proponent of this kind of stuff, just drive through a state such as Ohio. City-set speed limits for small towns, speed traps the size of large suburbs, and unsafe speed changes (45-25 in unbelievably short distances). That is what your congestion pricing will end up being (on a larger scale) - revenue enhancement. The difference is that if they can't get enough revenue to do transit, they'll end up expanding the zone (even if that still does no good, and they won't remove the increase).
This is only a (regressive) money grab with the feel-good environmentalism touch to it. If only IBM would have used this to deep-six the entire concept, they'd have done a ton of good.
No thanks, but keep the business out of my government.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
qwerty
It's called paratransit, and most municipalities offer it free or at very low cost to the disabled and elderly. The disabled and elderly I've spoken with about it generally aren't thrilled with the service, but I don't think it's computerized or optimized in any way.
No, this is NOT egalitarian.
The problem with a traffic surcharge is that it will provide a dis-incentive for Government to fix the problem. THEY get rewarded for not solving the traffic problem. Hurray!
Imagine my taxpayer joy as I decide between lunch, pissing off my employer and losing my job because I got a 2% raise and the increased tolls and gas prices already sucked up that windfall, and driving through east po-dunk as I circumnavigate the congestion. Wow! Most people do not have an alternative route when it comes to expressways. And forcing people onto back roads is going to cause a lot of problems, which the damn freeways were built to deal with. Can a business function if some people come in at 6, and others at 9am? Sure. The same businesses that should probably have people telecommuting anyway.
Egalitarian would be to put in a sensible rapid-rail system. Or fix the problem.
Egalitarian is ALREADY having gasoline taxes -- those that USE the most gas, pay the most. Want to save money? Drive less. It's already built into the system. Whether I am lucky and don't have to drive into downtown at rush hour, but my neighbor does -- that's a problem for city planners -- it isn't my job to route traffic, and other than find another job, my neighbor is stuck with more bad luck.
If everyone gets their way and makes the user of "public services" pay to play. You will either end up with an "elites only" road, or diminishing returns. Say the real cost is $10 per car. Well, in most places, that would turn the inner city into a ghost town. Traffic would reduce because shopping would go down, meaning fewer people running shops, and less business. Less services for business in an area causes the businesses to relocate. Really, it's the city that benefits by the traffic and they rightly collect the taxes on the businesses and the locals who benefit, as well as on the gasoline purchased.
But heck, I'd love the idea as a person who wants to get rid of cars in most of the cities. Success in this venture would be like AT&T getting successful at filtering copyrighted material; their customers won't need DSL anymore, because a modem will be fine when you don't play games and download videos. These jerks who MAKE the money from the infrastructure keep wanting to shove it onto the worker drone. Well fine. If a city wants to charge too much to enter, then the town or city next door that doesn't will have businesses relocate their because they got rid of their market.
People can get used to a toll. But if you charge variable rates -- you are going to start annoying people.
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
If you live in S.F., you can take Muni pretty much anywhere. If you live outside S.F., you can commute to one of BART's plentiful parking garages instead of into downtown.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
What do you think hotel tax surcharges, rental car taxes, etc., etc. are?
If indeed it's lots of visitors paying the congestion charges rather than locals, I can't see anything happening except them getting even more popular. And the visitors should read up before barging their way into somewhere they shouldn't be driving.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I do not know the situation in your state, but there are some problems with the fuel tax you do not note.
1) Some driving uses taxed fuel for roads that are not supplied with money for the tax in proportion to the fuel used. For example, roads with lower speed limits should be supplied with more $/mile because they use more fuel for each mile.
One leads to :
2) Roads with congestion use more fuel per mile. Thus, the government (or any monopoly road provider funded by gasoline taxes) has an incentive to create more congestion.
I don't want to sound like Ron Paul, but have you really thought through giving the government incentive to provide poor service?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
> Congestion pricing of traffic is emerging as a completely new services market Isn't that just an implementation of the law of supply and demand? Doesn't prior art an obviousness come into play anywhere here?
Currently all the interstate, state route and many local roads construction and maintenance funds come from the federal and state gas taxes. A move to using fuels other than gasoline such as natural gas, biofuels, electric or other alternative sources of vehicle propulsion would shut off the tax funds that build and maintain the nations roads. As a result the federal highway administration under direction from congress and many of the state department of transportations are investigating how to maintain an equitable share of taxes to those who use the road. The fairest system taxes based on miles used as the user that drives the most miles (neglecting vehicle weight) does the most damage to the roadway.
The goal of the investigations currently underway is how to implement mileage based taxing. Some states are investigating requirements that all cars carry GPS and report mileage used back to the state so that bills can then be sent out. Other have investigated large tolling implementations and even other states are investigating tolling without toll booths. Europe has been moving beyond just milage based taxes to congestion based taxes, because the size of the road is dictated by the peak hour rather than the standard flow often times roads can be half the size they are if the peak hours are neglected. Taking the view that the peak hour contributes more costs because of the increased road size needed in addition to the environmental damage and energy waste from stop and go traffic leads to the conclusion that congestion taxes are a good way to share the cost to the users who are impacting the system the most.
What IBM has patented is a system that raises toll rates as congestion increases. Not anything I would call innovative, unless it's actually a patent on a specific technology system rather than a patent on the idea. Implementing this in the US is very unlikely, congestion taxes would probably be quite unpopular in the states. In fact the only places in the US I could even fathom that it would be suggested would be in LA, SanFrancisco or NYC. I do see application of this type of system in the very near future in Europe, most likely in London.
But remember all you US citizens, mileage based tolling will be a reality within the next 20 years as the US moves away from gasoline. It's inevitable as the only way to rebuild and maintain our national highway system is to tax those that use the system rather than just taxing everyone.
If public transportation doesn't reach where the public are, then it isn't public.
Learn to love Alaska
Hey, where'd you get your car? I'd like a free one too. Cost, maintenance, and possibly storage would drive your 55 cents up a bit.
That assumes that the only reason he has a car is to drive it to and from work.
Charge more for something when the demand rises. Why didn't anyone else think of this before? Hell ya, it's a righteous patent.
-- Posted from my parent's basement
This already happens. Hummers and other SUVs are "overweight" vehicles: over 3 tons. As such they pay higher tolls (or ought to, if the toll collectors are alert). Plus, they get worse gas mileage, and so pay a higher gasoline tax per mile travelled. That's one of the reasons why legislatures are starting to revisit gasoline taxation: plug-in electric hybrids aren't paying as much gasoline taxes as other vehicles of similar weight.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
This was the point I was trying to make by being flip with my original comment. Public transportation is wonderful. If it gets you where you need to go. And for some people it really is a workable solution. But most people are happy with their cars, and so there's no public transport near them. Right now a lot of people are unhappy about their commute, but see no viable alternative, because their cities are not putting public transport near them. If we had congestion pricing chances are a lot of people would get really angry and hopefully some of that anger would get directed towards adding public transportation capacity.
Unfortunately, this probably won't help my situation much. The CEO decided to move the company near his house in a rich suburb that doesn't pay taxes for public transportation. So I can't get a bus near my work. The rich will continue to be able to afford to not have public transportation in their neighborhoods, which means that unfortunately a lot of our workplaces won't be reachable by public transport (since most companies are within a few miles of their CEO's house). But that's another issue to address.
That said - you like your roads, you're going to get taxed. State and Federal politicians won't raise taxes ever thanks to the likes of Norquist, so "creative" schemes like this are probably what we're going to see more of. Which is probably good. They make us think about our automotive usage, which sending a huge check to Washington each year probably does not.
Aren't the roads financed by tax money to begin with?
For many years I lived and worked in places that lent themselves to bus commuting. It was great. I enjoyed kibitzing or reading on the way to work and home. When I had to be somewhere out of town during the day I would drive in and pay for parking. But then my employer moved to a suburban location. Instead of 30 minutes on the bus, it would have been 90 minutes minimum on the buses, with a transfer, and it was turn around and go home if the first bus didn't ge to the transfer point in time that I could catch the one bus that went within a half-mile (and that with no walking path beyond the shoulder of a 2-lane 45MPH road) of the new location. So I drove 22 miles each way. No car pool, nobody else going even close.
Now I have moved to another town, and I would be enduring a 47 mile commute. But I telecommute. Drive to client site once a week. The air is cleaner. I'm less stressed. But I still miss having the time to read or socialize that I had on the bus.
Those of you who shrink from the idea of mass-transit because of inflexibility etc are entirely correct in recognizing an issue. It was something I had to deal with. But you probably don't give enough weight to the plus side, because if you've never done it you just don't know why you might like it. (Try it, you'll like it.) If it's available and practical. Too often it's not.
And the walk out to the bus stop is good exercise too. Much more than I get going up a flight of steps to the home-office these days.
To hear the gods laugh tell them your plans.
A friend of mine recently worked out the total cost of his car too. He has to have it for work - it is part of his package and is not optional so it's on a relatively tax efficient lease. It ends up costing AUD $1.10 per kilometer. We will go on a 700km round trip most weekends during the summer. If I thought it was going to cost $770 to do that I might well think again!
Admitedly because he does not get any cash back for not using up his full car allowance he goes for the top-end 4wd which suits his recreational use too, but that's fucking expensive.
dislaimer - his calcs, not mine and I wonder if he has not taken into account the resale after 3 years.
If it were up to me I wouldn't bother with all that fancy tech.
:).
If I really wanted to reduce the number of vehicles entering a city, I'll just increase parking rates by a huge amount and have a bunch of special vehicles/teams that regularly go about removing illegally parked vehicles (have fun paying a lot to get your vehicle back).
Delivery trucks and taxis won't be affected much, but those people who drive in and park for many hours and drive out will be affected.
If you don't want to affect shopping malls you could always tweak the parking rates accordingly.
Can't be that difficult to audit/regulate private car park operators - not like they can pack up and move so easily. And if their car park is bigger than a few spaces it's not going to be easy to hide
Call me a fascist pig or call me stupid, but I think it'll be much cheaper to implement, no need for fancy tech - tech that might not work reliably or might not work with visitor vehicles from other states/countries.
I live in Tucson, I have no car, and it's OK. It is possible for ME at least to have a reasonable quality of life without a car. I walk or ride my bike to work. I take the bus when I need to. The hardest thing is transporting groceries by bike, but it's not too hard either. I'm doing this on purpose of course; I got rid of my car ten years ago and I don't regret it. But it goes against the grain of our culture to be middle aged with no car. I'm not saying it is easy.
I think your list of cities that support car-free life is too short. I would add at least Washington DC. Probably most of the major cities (Chicago, Seattle, Miami...) would be tolerable for the car-eschewing citizen. LA feels like an exception, but I haven't really lived there.
The only way decent public transport is going to be built is if there is a DEMAND for it, and the supply is going to come along later.
We have to do something about the ever increasing effect our lifestyle has on the environment. Only 6 months ago you would still hear the chorus of anti-environmentalists chanting their well-rehearsed nonsense; you don't hear it as much now - I suppose the message is finally sinking in. Perhaps this exact way is not the best, but that is how we usually make progress towards the best compromise: you take a first step, then you realize that there is a better way, so you correct the course a bit.
Also, this is not something that happens in isolation. For example, if it get too expensive to commute to work, more people are likely to begin to work from home. Employers are not idiots, despite what you hear (and see), they know that if it is too expensive to go to work, they will lose some of their best employees - they are the ones who will be able to change job fastest - so they will want to find a solution.
And perhaps somebody will realize that it would be a brilliant idea to place people's homes reasonably near to their work.
Truckin like the Doo-Dah man...
This was the point I was trying to make by being flip with my original comment.
Perhaps you shouldn't have been flip.
In case you want to know where IBM tested this system in the wild, turn your eyes to that beautiful Swedish capital with those Nobel prizes and even more beautiful Swedish people. Even though Sweden is known to be egalitarian, those who seemingly profit most of the tax are wealthy inner-city inhabitants with their SUV's. As long as they stay within the congestion zone, it's free to roam & block the streets.
-- Power corrupts, but PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
I'm a Democratic Republic of Maryland citizen and I don't drive on those roads. I've flown over them, however. I can tell it really sucks. We have our own stupidity in Maryland like the HOV-2 rule on Route 50 that is 24 hours.
..if you look at old pictures of New York or Chicago (probably other American cities as well), it is observed that the streetcar or tram was a staple means of transportation. For some reason, it was thought worthwhile to kill these off-they ran on electricity and were pretty eco-friendly compared to today, when you probably have to take your car even to go 2 miles to the grocery store.(Blame Big Oil and auto companies for this?)
The benefits of public transportation are there to see-take the Delhi Metro for example. It's still under construction,(scheduled for completion in 2010) but individual traffic has been greatly reduced along the routes it operates, and people are all praise for the savings in time and fuel.
When there's very few other options and people are forced to use their cars, traffic congestion is inevitable, and it seems rather cheap to attempt to profit off of it.
"..One hosts to look them up, one DNS to find them, and in the darkness BIND them."
In my area, the public transit system (buses & subway) is actually doing the same thing as TFA points to - raising the prices to discourage usage*. Yes, the public mass transportation system is raising prices explicitly to discourage usage during peak times.
...
Sometimes I just don't follow the logic
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* (the system has raised fares several times in the past few years, but those were pitched as explicitly to deal with trying to balance the ailing budget and pay for needed maintenance; this is fare increase did not include those arguments, and was pitched quite differently than those had been)
The following link describes the General Motors streetcar scandal, which is likely a contributing reason to why the US mass transit system is so poorly developed.
From the article:
The Great American Streetcar Scandal was the sequence of events in which General Motors, Firestone Tire, Standard Oil of California and Phillips Petroleum formed the National City Lines (NCL) holding company, which acquired most streetcar systems throughout the United States, dismantled them, and replaced them with buses in the early 20th century. The scandal alleges that NCL's companies had an ulterior motive to forcibly gain mass use of the automobile among the U.S. population by buying up easy-to-use mass light rail transportation countrywide and dismantling it, leaving populations with little choice but to drive.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy
I don't know what the numbers look like in other countries, but up here in Canuckistan, Statistics Canada (basically neutral/non-partisan organization) did a study a couple years back showing that every single motorist underpays the true cost of operating a car. (i.e., gas taxes etc don't come close to paying for infrastructure) Given that we have way higher fuel taxes in Canada than in the US, I'd guess that in the USA it's even worse.
Another way of thinking about this is that the whole 'business of driving' means those who don't drive are heavily subsidizing those who do.
So for all those people who claim this is a tax grab or a gouging of commuters or people who feel they have a right to drive wherever and whenever they want, how 'bout you table that sentiment 'til you actually pay for the cost of operating your car?
The plural form of "anecdote" is "anecdotes", not "evidence".
The trend I've seen in most north american cities is that the people making decisions about public transit wouldn't be caught dead on a bus.
We need to change the way transit authorities think (and are funded) on this sort of thing. Instead of thinking of transit as an alternative to cars, think of transit as a service that the government can set up who's purpose is to get cars off the road. After all, the government's on the hook for road expansion and maintenance.
'Cause it turns out, private individual cars is a really lousy way to solve the problem of "moving things and people around" in a city. And it's probably easier to deal with this before some calamity like peak oil forces us to.
The plural form of "anecdote" is "anecdotes", not "evidence".
Everyone acting in their individual best interest leads to everyone driving their own cars and clogging the roadways. Let's take that horrible waste of life and see what we can do to cut it down to size.
Public transit is a common suggestion, and nice idea in principle, but it takes a certain level of density to make it work, and most American cities aren't dense enough because they grew to where the land was cheaper, on the assumption of ubiquitous car ownership. Maybe over the span of 75 years or so the outer suburbs and exurbs will wither, but the trillions invested more or less guarantee that it can't happen until the structures start wearing out.
That leaves a few options... commuting at different times, carpooling, slugging, and park and ride style public transit... the latter two depend on businesses to be located in dense clusters which is more often true than residences, but still shakey. Still, it's not a terrible assumption in cities where the traffic is currently worst, so we'll run with it.
Both variable road usage fees and carpool lanes encourage all of the above, but can't fix the problem because in order for the carpool lane to be attractive enough to encourage people to change their habits the surrounding traffic has be substantially slower. Carpool lanes during rush hours may reduce the misery slightly if their usage is in a narrow sweet spot where there are notably fewer vehicles, but actually more people traveling in that lane. That sweet spot can be wider if there are more buses in the carpool lane, but that puts a lower cap on highway driving speed than people are liable to like.
So basically, carpool lanes do help those that can carpool without much difficulty, but they doesn't always help and sometimes hurt other drivers, and when they do help other drivers, it's only so much. So, it's a mixed bag and hard to tune right because you can't set up fractions of a lane for carpool, it's all or nothing.
In contrast, variable rates give you all the flexibility in the world to try an manipulate rates to decrease average travel times to something acceptable. Of course, there's a legitimate question how elastic demand is during peak times, and if this isn't just another way for the government to pick your pocket.
Let's consider the revenue neutral position to try and look at this on its intrinsic merits. Say, that the money raised goes to to reducing gas taxes at the level of government that's paying for the road. Folks who always drive outside the rush pay much less. Folks who still drive during the rush pay much more. Given that road construction/widening is primarily necessary for those who do drive during the rush, and that more maintenance is necessary on these wider roads, that's quite a bit more fair.
Of course, as with anything that asks for people to make decisions out of their pocket, there's concern that it's not fair to the lower middle and lower classes. But as a practical matter, many of those who are poor travel primarily outside rush hours anyway doing shift or part time work. I'd wager this would hit them less hard on average than a gas tax already does. It would hit a lot of office workers (like me) harder, but these are precisely the groups who are generally most able to do their work from home, (I suppose) better equipped to handle the costs when they can't.
You know, here in Canada at least, I don't take the bus because it looks pretty shitty outside (i.e. cold) waiting for a bus that might take up to 10-15 minutes. Top that with frequent stops, a route that doesn't go exactly where I need to go, and a subway system that is severely limited (Toronto) as to where it stops makes me think the only people who use the transportation system are those who cannot afford cars.
When using public transportation is just as painless and fast as taking my car, I will use it. Until then, I'll enjoy being warm and getting to/from my destination directly with no stops.
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