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GPS-Based System For Driving Tax Being Field Tested
An anonymous reader writes "Apparently, since gas consumption is going down and fuel efficient cars are becoming more popular, the government is looking into a new form of taxation to create revenue for transportation projects. This new system is a 'by-the-mile tax,' requiring GPS in cars so it can track the mileage. Once a month, the data gets uploaded to a billing center and you are conveniently charged for how much you drove. 'A federal commission, after a two-year study, concluded earlier this year that the road tax was the "best path forward" to keep revenues flowing to highway and transportation projects, and could be an important new tool to help manage traffic and relieve congestion. ... The commission pegged 2020 as the year for the federal fuel tax, currently 18.5 cents a gallon, to be phased out and replaced by a road tax. One estimate of a road tax that would cover the current federal and state fuel taxes is 1 to 2 cents per mile for cars and light trucks.'"
It seems to me like GPS provides other features than mileage tracking which the government could use.
If we are only concerned about tracking the mileage, there is already nice tool that does just this, couldn't it be used to also display how much it costs us in real time ? ;-)))
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taximeter
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
They could just check the odometer during emissions checking.
Plus, if they go through with something like this, then they'd better eliminate the fuel taxes. (fat chance, I know)
Here I was just wondering what kind of a job I'd need to have in order to need one of these: http://dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.8758 $33 for a GPS blocker/jammer seems like it'd be a lot cheaper than paying tolls.
put the what in the where?
Most people have an EZ-pass equivalent in their car. We also have license plate reading cameras. Ticketing virtually all speeders, at least on highways, is possible now. They will never, ever do this because if you ticket all speeders, no one will speed. They will lose millions of dollars in fines, on top of creating massive anger and traffic clogs that would result in the speed limit being raised to the speed people actually go anyway.
So it's much too good an idea and will never be done.
We fight this kind of crap every year in California. People insist that hybrid cars are screwing us out of fuel taxes and are unfairly using the road. Well if it's so unfair maybe we should quit giving them a tax credit and put that money into the road budget instead. When everyone use hybrids we should raid the fuel tax to compensate. It's pretty simple, and doesn't require the government to contract an agency to build a $500 secured GPS unit to stick in every car.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I work for the DoD. There are those of us that work on "black" projects that have covert everything, including travel. It would be absolutely intolerable to have a record of where a car has been, either personal or rental, for an enemy agent to exploit. If there's a meeting of folks hammering out the requirements for a new fighter jet or littoral cruiser, who goes to the meeting, where the meeting was, what time the meeting was, etc. are all way too valuable to be recorded.
No, this idea is a non-starter for National security reasons. We won't even talk about organized crime getting ahold of it in order to track likely kidnap candidates' usual movements.
Not likely. These are the same fascists who are pushing through a bill that would require you to make your old home "green" before you could sell it.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Side effect: it becomes cheaper to drive a gas guzzler, and more expensive to drive an economy engine:
At current gas tax rates, that trip would cost my truck somewhere around $60 in existing gas taxes.
Existing gas tax would be about $10 in a fuel-efficient car.
Small fuel-efficient cars tend to be driven by lower-income people, who will therefore be hardest hit by this as their economy cars will pay a disproportionate amount of tax, based on per mile rather than per gallon.
So -- this is a regressive tax.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
This concept stinks like crude oil. Probably because it's heavily supported by the oil industry.
A 'miles driven' tax is exactly the kind of problem that allows people to completely externalize a lot of the public the cost of their fuel-inefficient vehicles (pollution, dependence on foreign oil, etc). We need to force people to pay those costs, in order to provide a disincentive to buying inefficient vehicles.
If we're going to switch to a miles-driven tax instead of a gas tax, then let's put a surchage tax on the purchase of inefficient vehicles. Let's make it $100 per rated mpg under 50.
Here's the math:
Say a pickup truck gets 20 mpg (generous), and will be driven for only 100,000 miles over its life. That's 5,000 gallons of fuel -- at federal excise rate of 18.4 cents/gal, that's $920 in gas taxes over the life of the vehicle.
Now look at a truck that gets 15 mpg. Fuel taxes over the life of the vehicle are $1380 (again, assuming only 100k miles driven).
A miles-driven tax, where both trucks pay the same amount, completely removes a big incentive to purchasing a fuel-efficient vehicle. And given that the low mpg rating is typical of heavier vehicles that cause more road wear-and-tear, it's only fair that they pay higher taxes.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
There'd probably be a minor resurgence in the odometer-resetting industry, but fact is most people won't bother. Tying it to your annual vehicle licensing sounds good otherwise... until I had this thought:
When I buy gas with cash, I am absolutely anonymous. It doesn't matter if I drive 10 miles or 10,000 miles in a week. No one can know anything about my driving habits.
Now, recall that it is already commonly considered 'evidence of drug trafficking' if you are caught carrying a large amount of cash. What if 'driving a lot of miles' began garnering similar suspicions? I see the next step as confiscating cars (just as they presently do cash) without a hint of due process, just because your odometer mileage was outside of the norm.
"You drove 5,000 miles a week? Must have been running drugs. No one drives that far every week for any legitimate purpose."
It could go both ways, too.... for people like myself who drive very little (about 3,000 miles a year) -- that is ALSO suspicious: "No one who lives near [insert long-commute city here] drives so few miles, you must be getting your odometer reset!!"
So while it's an improvement over the GPS's invasive tracking, there are still problems that can impinge upon our freedoms, by encouraging scrutiny from looking-for-trouble Big Brother types.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
I already moderated and had to post as AC. But what I suspect is that they also see that over the next 10 - 15 years there is going to be a shift in the technology used to power cars from gasoline to electric for a lot of people. I drive less than 30 miles day and could get by on an electric car on most days and then have a gas powered hybrid car for longer trips. (it's 210 miles from my front door to my dad's house, just outside of 1 electric charge these days.)
Although I could see them taking away the 18.5 cent gas tax for "roads" and replace it with a 50-cents per gallon CO2 tax or something for "emissions controls" plus the mileage tax, which will go towards "roads".
I don't like the GPS idea one bit, I'm just saying checking the odometer does not solve the problem.
I think the problem is a government so out of control with spending and managing people's lives that it requires this much tax.
Mind the frickin' laser...
They certainly did not do so when gas hit $4 a gallon
They told me that if I voted for McCain the government would end up tracking my every move. And they were right!
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
That was my first thought too. I ran the numbers based on the summary and a 12k mi/yr average. With a car that gets 30 mpg, the annual tax comes to $74. With a car that gets 35 mpg, the tax is $63.43. With the distance based tax, the new rate is $120 or $240 per annum with the 1 and 2 cent/mi levies, respectively.
I'll second this as I drove a truck and was an Owner-Operator for a while - had to get away from the keyboard. It didn't work.
Every mile driven through every state has to be reported to that state, and the taxes paid, on a monthly basis. You pay taxes at the pump, and those taxes are applied to the miles you travel on state roads. It doesn't matter if it's a highway or not - they assume that if you're driving in the state, it's a taxable highway, because 53' trailers aren't legal on many small roads and city streets. And what's a few cents for local travel? You do get a refund of taxes paid if the balance is positive, though. Each state has different taxes, though, so keeping track of it can be a pain - but if you do it right, and fuel in a high-tax state near the state line but put most of you miles in low tax states, you end up with a net positive at the end of the month - so it's more convenient.
Some states, most notably New York, charge both a road tax and a fuel tax. No road tax for toll roads - in theory, see the above for assumptions - but a fuel tax is still required. Double taxation? But wait, there's more!
There's also the Federal Heavy Vehicle Use Tax (HVUT). That's a $550/yr tax for road funding. Per vehicle. Even if it never sees the interstate.
There's also the 13% Federal Excise Tax for every purchase of a heavy truck or equipment for that truck - including an APU, for instance, which reduces diesel consumption and emissions by eliminating idling. That tax also is allocated to the highway department.
Toll roads charge per axle - so a tractor-trailer will pay 2.5 times more than a car to use the road. But with all this funding coming in, why would you need a toll road?
Truck driver, plumber, Linux systems engineer.
No, I didn't miss the point, not even slightly. The point is government interference, even Big Brother. The point is that if they actually did want to, they could raise gas taxes. Hell, they haven't been raised in years, and inflation is something everybody understands. Peg it to inflation, make the increases automatic. Most people would bitch but still understand.
The added cost of the equipment in each car -- that won't be cheap. The equipment to read it -- does that happen once a year, once a month, at the gas station ... that won't be cheap. The enforcement hassles, everything you can think of is wrong with this. This is ought to be in the dictionary under "Rube Goldberg".
The tire tax is an interesting idea, and it would catch electric vehicles. Especially if it is not a straight percentage tax, but based on type of tire, so it corresponds more closely to wear and tear caused by different types of vehicles.
Or if they insist on a mileage tax, do it by odometer reading when you renew your registration every year. Pretty simple and quick -- drive up, someone sticks his head in the side window, writes it down or even punches it into the computer, done. You could even do it on the honor system, and add it to the things written down when you get a traffic ticket -- most of the people who would lie are also the types to speed, overstay meters, etc, so they would be caught, and a simple $100 or $200 fine in addition, plus enforced inspection at the next couple of reregistrations, would keep that kind of cheating under control.
But this GPS deal is a boondoggle, nothing less, the most horrendously complicated perverse way of collecting tax for roads, and it is all too easy to think there must be ulterior Big Brother motives.
Infuriate left and right
Here in New Zealand, if you drive, as I do, a Diesel powered vehicle, you already have to pay for your mileage. We buy a sticker at the Post Office that has our current mileage printed on it, and the mileage we are paid up to. For example if buy a new vehicle it comes with a sticiker that covers my first 1000km. If I'm stopped and checked and my mileage is past what I've paid for I get fined. No GPS, no speeding checks, just 3.2c per km. (diesel is about 50c/litre cheaper than petrol so to my mind, this system works)