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Dutch Government To Tax Drivers Based On Car Use
An anonymous reader writes "The Netherlands is testing a new car use tax system that will tax drivers based upon how much they drive rather than just taxing the vehicle itself. The trials utilize a little box outfitted with GPS, wireless internet, and a complex rating system that tracks a car's environmental impact, its distance driven, its route, and what time it is driven as a fairer way to assess the impact of the vehicle and hopefully dissuade people from driving. The proposal will be introduced slowly as a replacement for the current car and gas tax, however it is most certainly controversial and will be a real test of how far environmentally savvy Dutch citizens will be willing to go to reduce the impact of the car."
Isn't this much easier to achieve -- albeit with less accuracy -- via fuel tax? Every time the government here proposes a mileage tax, I can't help but think we already have one. Added benefit of encouraging people to drive more efficient cars.
Putting an environmental impact fee (tax) on fuel would be a more reliable compensation for your impact than GPS. If I sit idling in my car for a few hours I can burn an entire tank of gas without moving an inch.
For what will the GPS tracking *really* be used?
It makes the tax more fair to charge road-users by the mile and the ton over the road, and how would you measure that without a GPS odometer in every car?
Tax the fuel. It's not just Oregonians that use the road.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Why not just tax fuel like everyone else? This messing about with GPS seems ridiculous to achieve such a simple aim.
If they really wanted to be fair they'd find a way that taxes the bicyclists and out-of-state drivers, too.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
No, they will use it to track us. They already implemented a similar system in the public transports network that tracks you every move.
Remember, this is the country that has the most known wiretaps out on its citizens(China and NKorea are good contenders if we would know.).
No really. It's for your own good.
Deleted
are the costs involved with building and maintaining this system. Combined with privacy concerns, possible fraud and system failure makes an fuel tax much more preferable.
Not really the fairest way. Cars create very little wear and tear on the highways (They are like 95% of the volume and responsible for 5% of the wear and tear). The two main externalities of cars are pollution which a gas tax can roughly cover, and congestion, which tolls can cover. Per-mile only makes sense where the miles themselves create the externality like heavy trucks and farm equipment.
FTA: Eric-Mark Huitema, a transportation specialist with I.B.M ... “To do it you need support of the government, and it needs to happen when there is not an election because there’s always a bit of resistance.”
With people like that, we don't need terrorists hating democracy, we obviously have democracy-haters running the place. Not that it's surprising, but it's even more odious when they're so blatant about it.
Take off your tinfoil hat. There is no ulterior motive. Trust us. Ok, let's settle on plain stupidity. A fuel tax is a good measure and it takes in account very well the difference between an SUV and a Prius. Setting up a huge infrastructure in an attempt to go from 'good' to perfectly fair is very misguided. Usually it's the old 'because it has flaws it can't be good and it should be removed.' Then all you need is an example, however rare, where the fuel tax can be considered unfair.
And of course once your every move is being tracked every possible use will be made of that data.
Why not just tax fuel like everyone else? This messing about with GPS seems ridiculous to achieve such a simple aim.
Taxing fuel is pretty obvious. The GPS solution seems a little nefarious and a lot flawed, because they don't achieve anything that a petrol tax doesn't achieve and there is a wealth of other information they could take from it about my habits.
Anything they fit to your car can be modified to report incorrect data, or disabled. When the devices are common because they're mandated it won't take long for someone to figure out how. The same thing happened here with the 100kph limiters for heavy trucks and buses. They are a good idea in theory, but once they were common owners/operators began tampering with them in order to exceed the limit. They do this despite it being illegal.
I drink to make other people interesting!
and how would you measure that without a GPS odometer in every car?
Easy. By taxing tires.
Someone had to do it.
Tax the fuel.
In the Netherlands? Well, it's possible, tax is only some 60% of the price per liter yet. Fuel price in the Netherlands is already high though.
"I'm not much interested in interoperability. I want substitutability. I want to be able to throw your software out."
Electric vehicles perhaps, although then you could just move to taxing tires. AFAIK their degradation is correlated to distance traveled and weight carried. Plus tire wear is probably highly correlated with road wear, which is kinda the point.
You clearly don't live in the Netherlands or surrounding countries.
There is no cheap fuel to get in NL. It wouldn't surprise me if we'd have the most expensive fuel in the world even. Dutch people already go to Germany and Belgium to get cheaper fuel.
Manuals are your last resort only
This plan was canceled in the Netherlands as one of the first acts of the latest government (Rutte-1). I believe they were planning to increase taxes on fuel as a compensation.
I'm a bit surprised to see this article at slashdot. The plans to have tax on milage (kilometer heffing in dutch) are already existing for a very long time here in the Netherlands. The former government was actually planning to introduce this, but the current government killed the project. So for me this isn't really news.
Further I'm very interested to see how such a system can be made robust. GPS signals are very weak and are easily jammed. One weather balloon and GPS jammer under the balloon will stop tax collection for half the nation.
We really need more engineers in politics!
Indeed, and this is because a camera cannot walk about and actually apprehend people. But cameras can be bought from companies who would be very appreciative of a civil servant/MP who authorised their purchase.
Cameras also make it easier to levy fines, which raises revenue.
The headline and the summary are pretty much completely wrong: as the NY Times article explains, the trial was two years ago, but the government cancelled plans to introduce "rekeningrijden" (GPS-based metered driving) last year. So it's not going to happen anytime soon - unless the Netherlands suddenly gets a left-wing government, which is unlikely.
Yes and like Netherlands, Oregon drivers should be incentivized for smoking weed. Because weed makes you stay off the highway, and in your apartment listening to Steely Dan albums where your carbon footprint is low.
If you mod me down the terrorists will have won
Exactly... what's wrong with taxing the fuel?
The idea is to make people use less fossil fuel, to conserve driving when possible, and get eco-friendlier cars.
It's so backwards, as the ultimate goal is to reduce fuel consumption, so let's tax mileage?
Of course, when we all have nice green eco-friendly recycleable electic cars with batteries that don't kill 100 square miles of land... then they have to tax something else.. but that's quite far in the future :)
Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
Aristotele
Trying to get people to stop using cars is basically forcing them to reduce their quality of life... There are simply no viable alternatives to many car uses for a lot of people.
Public transport is useless, its dirty, unreliable, often unsafe, overcrowded (yes i know the roads can be crowded too, but at least you have somewhere comfortable to sit in a car and can stop to take a break), doesn't run all night and is even more useless outside of large cities.
Riding bikes is only practical for short distances, where its not too hilly and where it's safe to do so... This is why so many people ride bikes in holland, the population is densely packed, the ground is flat and there are cycle routes everywhere. In other places, cyclists are expected to share the roads with large dangerous vehicles and aren't allowed to ride on the sidewalk - even if the sidewalk is empty and the road is full of vehicles, thus slowing down the vehicles (causing them to waste more fuel) and increasing the danger for the cyclist.
Taking away people's personal transportation is a terrible thing to do, having your own car massively increases your quality of life and this is not a new thing, having your own horse has done this for hundreds of years and now people are trying to force us to take a massive step backwards.
Lack of personal transportation will force people to live in overcrowded ghettos, since public transport is not profitable/practical without a high population...
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People will just keep running their old tires as long as they can, long after the point at which they become unsafe...
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There is NO WAY IN HELL he would have a tracker in his car because if anyone was able to break into the system it would make it easier for similar people to track, find, and do god knows what else, to his family. They could _know_ that his car was away from home and his wife's car was at home. They could _know_ that all vehicles were away and therefore the house was empty. And let's not even start to tell me the system is secure because we all know there is no such system!
There are just so many ways the information could be miss-used and abused, when a far simpler way to 'tax by the mile' is to put tax on the fuel.
Tax on fuel: You drive a lot ... you pay more. You drive an inefficient vehicle, or drive inefficiently, you pay more. Simple and cheap to setup, and cheap to run.
Eclectic beats from Leeds, UK
handmadehands.co.uk
There is a thing called an odometer. It's in every car. There's nothing wrong with requiring a car inspection every year and taxing mileage based on the odometer is a much cheaper and simpler and less intrusive way.
If they want to track you, they've already got your cell phone.
This GPS stuff is idiotic.
Compared against the possibility of receiving a bill at the end of the year for my mileage, I'd rather pay the tax on the gas. At least that way, it's amortized over the whole year rather than a lump sum. Quite aside from that, cars that don't have NL plates still use the roads, and they wouldn't be taxed at all under the proposed system, which is hardly fair to the locals.
You can buy gasoline across state lines, too, so that is no way to guarantee the money goes to your state. Further, what if your vehicle doesn't use gasoline or diesel? You get to use the roads without helping to pay for them, which is a large part of the problem.
Many states already require odometer reporting and it's a federal crime to tamper with them. Many states also have compulsory liability insurance for car owners. Solution: Have the insurance companies require odometer reporting and include state taxes in their costs. The reason this is better than an annual check (at inspection time) followed by a bill is the tax may add up to a hundred dollars depending on how much you drive (gasoline tax equivalent for California would be about 2 cents/mile). Car insurance usually has a monthly payment system to spread out the financial burden.
Sure it's not perfect but it's better than a simple fuel tax and the invasive GPS solution.
=Smidge=
Suppose you could use the information from such a system to find a missing child. You would have to do it. Imagine an episode of "Law and Order: Special Minor Child Victims Unit" where the cops are complaining about privacy advocates are blocking GPS info that would rescue a child (especially a blonde blue-eyed girl). Yes, you could get a court order, but there's no TIME for that!
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
Doesn't easily extend to electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles. And as vehicle efficiency increases and alternative vehicles become more popular, your tax revenue drops while your costs to maintain the roads remains the same. Gasoline and diesel are also used in non-vehicle engines (generators, farm and construction equipment, small engine tools, etc) which would be paying this tax while not contributing to road maintenance expenses.
Taxing actual road use makes the most sense. You can scale it by vehicle weight and class (since fuel use is not linearly proportional to vehicle weight, while road damage is), create residential, commercial and industrial tiers if you want since a heavy truck that gets 12MPG does more damage than a large car that gets the same. It takes the state of maintenance of the vehicle out of the equation (poor fuel economy due to poor maintenance).
If the goal is to reduce fuel use (and I agree with that goal), we should STILL tax nonrenewable carbon fuels.
=Smidge=
Yes, it was proposed in Oregon. I emailed the elected official that proposes it, and said that he will go to prison if he continues. That seems to have made a difference. I think people in that office recognized that what I said made sense.
The proposal is pure government corruption, partly based on the extreme ignorance of technology of most people who are leaders now. In Oregon, the elected official was given "campaign contributions" from a company that makes GPS tracking devices.
Think about it. GPS location is PURELY a voluntary system. If there is any incentive to cheat, it cannot function. A little aluminum foil on the GPS antenna prevents tracking. What happens if an Oregon car is shown to have been driven in Mongolia during the month? Was that someone cheating, or a technological failure?
What happens if someone drives through streets broadcasting fake GPS satellite signals? Wow! All those cars were in Mongolia at the same time!
See my comment on February 15, 2005, 1) Dupe of a dupe. 2) Stupid. 3) Corrupt.
The fuel taxes/levies are a constant. This proposed system takes congestion on roads and times of use into consideration. Per the article the drive from Eindhoven airport to the city center(?) costs 5 EUR during rushour. That is a 15-30m drive for something like 10km. Off-peak I can do that trip in under 10m on my bike. In the current system the variable costs for this trip is approx the same for all vehicles alike (when using the same fuel type and mileage): approx. 0.5l of fuel.
The theory is that putting a higher price on driving during rushhour will result in less people on the road at the same time, people that can avoid the rush hour premium will do so. At the same time the fixed costs of owning a vehicle is reduced (yearly road taxes) and the taxes on buying a car should be abolished (BPM http://www.vdsautomotive.nl/en/zakelijk/bpm-calculator ). Overall this would be a more fair system for use based taxation, but the main fear people have is that levies on fuel, the road tax and BPM will remain making driving more expensive. Only a small minority will oppose this for privacy reasons.
The average tire pressure on a car tire is 32 psi, the average pressure on a large truck is well over 60 psi, most run over 100. I was told by a highway engineer years ago that one large truck creates the same amount of wear and tear as thousands of cars, especially if it's overloaded. It is my understanding that large trucks and environmental effects are responsible for the vast majority of all damage. If you start looking at the damage closely you'll start to notice that most of it seems indicative of the dual tires that trucks run, or the long trailers they pull. For example in urban environments where the rear wheels track out of the standard path of a tire on a turn.
It's about trying to reduce traffic queues by making it more expensive to drive at peak times.
Cobblers. Look at why there's a lot of traffic on the roads at peak times:
1. People getting to/from work.
2. People getting the kids to/from school.
This accounts for a huge amount of peak-time traffic - and neither employers nor schools care if it costs a bit more to be on the road at 08:30 instead of 10:00, that's the driver's problem. This is revenue raising, pure and simple.
So basically it's an electronic toll road...
As for privacy/tracking: I'm in two minds. If the data is anonymized (only distances traveled are freely accessible, the 'places visited' is separate) and proper court procedures are in place then this *could* help catch an awful lot of criminals.
OTOH, we know that the chances of it being done properly are somewhere between slim and none so we should oppose it.
This sort of system *is* coming though because almost 100% of people are going to switch to electric cars - no more gas revenue.
No sig today...
How are they supposed to get to work when the cost of a 1 bedroom apartment costs $500,000 downtown?
What about families who need to pick up their kids from Soccer Practice? Vactions etc?
This is Europe folks and the cost of living is very expensive compared to a cheaper place. People who live out in suburbia do so because it is cheaper to live. Now they will be taxed just to show up from work because living close to work is too expensive. Screwed if you do and screwed if you don't.
If I were dutch I would be throwing a fit!
http://saveie6.com/
7 mins by car is surely doable by bike no?
Who cares if there is no gas revenue for electric cars. It's not like they are actually harmful to anything. Wear on the road is computed based off the axle weight to the fourth power. Comparing them to a semi truck is like worrying about that fly that just landed on your arm, when there is a gorilla sitting on your back.
This sort of system *is* coming though because almost 100% of people are going to switch to electric cars - no more gas revenue.
Surely you jest? We are a very, very long way from even 10% of people switching to electric cars. The main obstacle will be twofold:
1) We don't have nearly enough powerplants. As nuclear is being phased out after Fukushima, natural gas and coal are the main options for new powerplants. There goes your environmental argument.
2) The electricity grid has nowhere near the capacity needed. You would have to dig up all the local roads everywhere and lay new power mains, and you would have to upgrade many of the large power lines and distribution stations as well.
Net social-economic impact: negative a few hundred billion dollars, and more CO2 produced.
for i in `facebook friends "=bday" 2>/dev/null | cut -d " " -f 3-`; do facebook wallpost $i "Happy birthday!"; done
The electronic toll road was essentially the plan from de late 80's-early 90's. First by numberplate recognition on the highways, later by blackboxes in cars scanned by toll ports. The latest GPS/GSM boxes are to store the information localy and to only upload the totaleds bill. But the justice department already floated the idea that these boxes can be tapped (remote) for detailed information when needed. The same department was slapped when it was found out that ANPR data was being kept and mined for possibly criminal data unrelated to the original purpose. When caught the response was: well we have change this irritatng privacy law then to allow us to do that we want.
The stated purpose is actually to make road users pay for the roads they use. Fuel consumption does not come into that calculation at all, as fuel consumption has nothing to do with the cost of maintaining roads.
I do have to admire that slippery slope you got going on there though. Freedom yeah! Down with socialism!
That's because if the courts do as much as giving the criminal a stern look the Belgians (who think Europe is their empire) say it's against human rights and award them 98 million quid.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."