Slashdot Mirror
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."
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)
No really. It's for your own good.
Deleted
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.
and how would you measure that without a GPS odometer in every car?
Easy. By taxing tires.
Someone had to do it.
It's not less accurate, it's completely correct. Fuel-based taxation is the perfect solution, and every country I'm aware of already taxes fuel heavily. To add another tax on top of it is either really ignorant (unlikely) or an attempt by the powers that be to further and unfairly lighten the wallets of their citizenry, wrapped up in an "environmentally-conscious" sugar coating. Fighting this unfair tax would now mean that you're an anti-environment reactionary doing the bidding of the dirty oil companies.
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."
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.
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.
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
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.
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=
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 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!