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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!
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.
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
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.
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.
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'd love to see you try that on your commute from Oakland to San Francisco (hint: One bridge near by).
Consider sacred jihand against slashdot's editors
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.
Then you have a deal.
Of course you realize that And, I believe ALL major roads should be toll so that the people who are actually using a road can pay for it. this is already covered by fuel tax. The more you drive (likely predominately on major roads), the more fuel you use, thus the more tax you pay. Also, the heaver your vehicle, the more fuel you are likely to use, thus the more tax you pay.
But go ahead and place toll booths at every major road. Traffic would come to a dead standstill.
-nB
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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!
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007
| ...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.
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.
Incorrect. The people without money, and also the sensible people, will start taking public transportation.
Depends on where you live. There are large cities in the USA that have very poor public transportation. At a former job one of my co-workers was a "flower child" from the 60s and although she had a car, she usually took public transportation to our office. I'd say she could have driven to work in 30-40 minutes most days and driven home in roughly the same time frame. Riding the bus took between 90 minutes and 2 hours each way. While it's certainly cheaper to ride the bus, most rational people would conclude that saving 50-90 minutes each way by driving instead of riding the bus made a lot more sense.
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
What you're saying is that my unwillingness to spend 5 hours commuting to and from work each day using the bus makes me "elitist"?
I'll put it this way. My time is valuable. It is not sensible for me to spend five times as much of it each day using public transportation to commute. You are punishing those of us who simply cannot afford to move closer to their workplaces.
Incorrect. The people with access to public transportation may start using it. The vast majority without an available public transportation system will have to pay the tolls, use the surface streets, change their work arrangements where possible, or get a new job.
Depends how you define saving. You can't read a book, use a computer, watch a movie (yay for portable media players) or think deeply about something while driving, at not legally and sanely. In that sense you waste more time driving than taking a bus as those 40 minutes in the car can't be used for anything else.
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"
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+
Except people can't choose not to use the roads.
*COUGH COUGH buses trains cycling walking COUGH*
Yeah, I know, none of those are available* and/or practical alternatives where you live. Did it ever occur to you that your choice to live somewhere where driving was a necessity for commuting or even everyday chores might in fact entail some cost on your part?
Particularly in 21st century America, just about everyone -- particularly anyone with a job -- has at least some degree of choice about where they live. It's true that in many ways the suburbs and exurbs are a more pleasant choice -- safer, better schools, bigger houses, cheaper land, etc. But the continual build-out of new suburbs and exurbs come at costs, particulary when it comes to the infrastructure needed to get people into and out of and around those suburbs and exurbs. And just as the people who moved to suburbia long ago began to question why they should pay for the problems of the inner cities they left behind, those of us who chose to live in those cities, taking advantage of pre-existing, bought-and-paid-for transportation and transit infrastructure, are starting to question why we ought to pay for your eight-lane suburb-to-suburb beltway highways.
I'm not saying everyone should make the same choices I do. I'm just wondering why people seem to believe they have a God-given right to cheap gas and door-to-door taxpayer-subsidized traffic-free one-person-per-car commuting.
*Actually, public transportation might be more accessible to you than you think. How many people who bitch about toll lanes have ever seriously looked into what sort of express buses and other non-driving options their region provides? I'm not saying you haven't, but I'll bet a lot of people never even think of it.
The Interstate Highway System was conceived of as a way to get from city to city quickly and easily. The germ of the idea came when, before WWII, Eisenhower was given a war-games task of getting a group of soldiers from one coast to the other and it took weeks.
But the vast majority of trips on interstates are trips within a metro region, from suburb to city or suburb to suburb. Their primary effect has been to make the modern car-centered suburb and exurb possible. This may or may not be a good thing, but it certainly wasn't Zombie Eisenhower's intention when the plans for the system were first drawn up.
I do actually think that roads are a perfectly legitimate thing for governments to spend money on; I just question whether they're the most legitimate thing. Why is it that, for instance, so many people think that whether someone gets the health care that determines whether they live or die (or live comfortable or live with constant, chronic illness) is something best left to the free market, but that getting from one outer-ring suburb to another in twenty minutes instead of forty is a pressing reason to spend billions of dollars on asphalt? I'd argue that most people see daily annoyances as things that must be fixed and are willing to ignore real necessities that are needed by other people, or that they don't need right now.
You bought your house in the wrong place. Next time look for bus stops when you buy.
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.
Full disclosure: I live in L.A., which has probably the worst public transportation system of any major metropolitan area in the US.
I would define that time as wasted. Why would I spend 4 hours roundtrip commuting, thus essentially minimizing any time I might have with my wife and kids?
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
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.
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
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.
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.
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