I think that would only be a relevant statistic if most people in a city were regular riders.
If the growth in the number of residents that become cyclists outpaces the growth in population, then it makes sense that the accident rate would also outpace population growth.
You can take "technically" out of that sentence - bikes have the same right to the roads as cars do (except in certain specific situations).
Whenever I see a bicyclist say those words, he almost never follows them with "and the same responsibilities to obey the law". It's always in the context that bicyclists want to be treated by drivers as the law says they must, but them following the vehicular laws isn't important.
If you're in the SF bay area, let me know, I'll meet you for a weekend ride and show you that there are cyclists that *do* follow laws as much as they expect cars to respect them.
You say "*BANG*, I've got a car driving 2 feet behind me" during a commute to work on city streets. So? There's a car two feet behind that car, and another one two feet behind him. It's called "rush hour", or in some smaller town, "rush minute". Part of commuting and quite legal.
If you've got cars stacked up 2 feet from each other, then you're in stop and go traffic that's moving at a crawl - bikes aren't slowing you down, they are reducing the number of cars in front of you.
You in particular may be very fastidious in obeying traffic signals and rules of the road, but since almost none of the riders I come across in this town bother with such trivialities it is impossible not to paint the entire riding population with the same brush.
Yes, some cyclists obey the law, some don't. Some car drivers obey the law, some don't. Yet we all have to share the same roads.
In fact, to keep from killing many of your compatriots, it is necessary to assume they are going to ignore the law. A bike approaching the street you are on from a side street with a stop sign? Assume he isn't going to, assume he's going to actually speed up to challenge you for the right of way, and then he's going to either lay over in a sharp turn or side-step into the crosswalk to try to invoke the pedestrian in a crosswalk laws on you.
That's one of my biggest pet peeves - I can maintain a stopped trackstand for only a few seconds before i've got to unclip and put my feet down - when a car has the right of way at a stop sign, I wish they would just take it because then I can get through the intersection faster. Encouraging cyclists to take the right of way when they don't have right of way just further encourages them to not respect right of way laws.
I'm driving at a speed that is safe for the automobile traffic around me....most of us are.
That appears to be a problem with your driving. You don't drive at a speed that's safe for the automobile traffic around you, you drive at a speed that's safe for the road you're on, and apparently you're on a road that's frequented by cyclists. If you were on a limited access highway, maybe you could get away with your style of driving, but anywhere else you need to drive at a safe and prudent speed and expect obstacles in the road - bikes, pedestrians, stalled cars, dogs, cows, etc. I once narrowly avoided a refrigerator that was left in the middle of the road after it fell off a truck.
We aren't expecting to have to slow quickly or stop for a slow moving, non-motorized vehicle suddenly appearing in the middle of the road.
I wouldn't lump all drivers in with yourself, not all drivers have such little control of their vehicle they fear running over cyclists.
Face it...the roads are built and meant for motorized vehicles. It is the smaller bicycles that have to be on the lookout and use judgement on when it is save to ride and on what roads.
Actually, many roads were first built because of lobbying by cyclists -- it wasn't until cars came later that bikes were pushed off to the shoulders.
You can go on and on all you want on laws and insurance, etc....but what good is that going to do for you when racked up in the hospital for months, and that's even if you survive a duel with a 3000+ lbs metal vehicle going about 3-4x as fast as you are?
Oh, I understand my mortality when I'm on my bike, and since I know i'm not going to change the laws of physics, I've continued to encourage my legislators to write laws that hold cars more responsible when they are at-fault in collisions with cyclists. If car drivers thought they might face jail time for side swiping a cyclist, or hitting a cyclist "because I didn't see him" or "I was going too fast to stop", then perhaps they'll drive a little more carefully.
Hopefully it's just a temporary problem and self-driving cars will make car-bike collisions much less common.
I'm cool with bicycles except in the mornings when everyone is trying to get to work....you're passing someone, and BANG, you have to hit the brakes when you see a damned bike in the road with heavy traffic slowing shit down, when you're trying to make it to work.
What a coincidence, I'm cool with cars except when I'm trying to bike to work. I'm biking along a road, staying as far to the right as I safely can (avoiding broken road edges, parked car doors, etc), and suddenly *BANG*, I've got a car driving 2 feet behind me. Cars have their place and all, but I'm just trying to get to work, can't the car drivers leave earlier or later in the day?
I've likely almost killed a few idiots that I almost didn't see, especially in areas where the sun glare hits you in the early morning or late afternoon.
Perhaps you're driving too fast for conditions if you've "almost killed a few". Speed limits are *maximums", driving below the speed limit when conditions warrant it is always legal. Another option would be to pull off the road and wait until conditions improve to the point where you can see safely - a good rule of thumb is that if you can't see a human shaped object on the road, then you can't see well enough to drive.
I know bikes "technically" have the same right to be on the road as cars, but let's be realistic in this day in age....there are times when it is NOT safe to be on a bike on a public road without a specific bike lane that is out of the main traffic lanes.
You can take "technically" out of that sentence - bikes have the same right to the roads as cars do (except in certain specific situations). Trust me, cyclists would like more bike lanes too, but car drivers whine about loss of lanes and/or parking everytime one is contemplated.
I like to ride a bike for exercise, but I'd damned sure not be out on the road during rush out without a being on a motorized vehicle.
Bikes aren't just for exercise - try commuting on one.
This needs to be put into context. Raw statistics don't do anyone any good, and can actually be misleading sometimes.
I wish they'd collect and publish more details about the accidents. Every day I see bikes doing all sorts of unsafe behaviors - running stop signs/traffic lights, riding on the wrong side of the road, hopping from road to sidewalk and back again, and worst of all, riding in dark clothes with no lights or reflectors -- what are those bikers thinking? Even when I'm on my bike, the darkly clad unlit cyclists are exceptionally difficult to see, I don't know how they expect cars to avoid them. Pedestrians are the same way - they wear dark running clothes, have no reflective materials, and cross the road in front of you and expect you to stop.
So I'd like to see stats for bikes that get into accidents while doing something stupid than those that ride more responsibly.
Where I live... Sonic requires the bundling of telephone service with their internet service. I can obtain internet service from Comcast without telephone service for a lower price. And, Sonic's voice service uses obsolete analog telephone technology.
Because of their cost structure, there'd be a very small price break if they unbundled voice - not enough to make up for having to support a separate product.
Another word for "obsolete analog telephone techology" is "reliable". Living in earthquake country, I'm happy to have a POTS line that's powered from the telco central office. The free international long distance (to selected countries) is also a nice touch.
I've found Comcast to be too unreliable to count on for working from home. Sonic has been rock solid so far. I'm paying Sonic about the same rate for 14/1mbit service as I was paying Comcast for a promotional rate on 50/10 service, and it's well worth it. I don't miss the extra bandwidth from Comcast as much as I love Sonic's reliability. Plus it's nice to support a small ISP that provides real service - if you call their NOC you can talk with a real engineer, not a far away service rep that only knows how to follow their script that always starts with rebooting the cable modem and my computer.
The end is near my ass. I'm in Los Angeles and I still only have one option for broadband access at any reasonable speed -- and it's Time Warner Cable. The end is nowhere near until we somehow break the monopolistic (or duopolistic) stranglehold these bastards enjoy in any given market. Apparently this stranglehold is in large part perpetuated by political deals these ISPs have made with local government (e.g., the City of Los Angeles) wherein the city gets kickbacks from the ISP for rights of way, etc. Because local governments are dependent on these kickbacks to support their budget, there is no competition. It's a form of payola.
If you're in a Sonic.net coverage area, check them out. I'm 6000 feet from the CO, and get 14mbit down, 1.3mbit upstream -- no monthly bandwidth caps, and their pricing includes a real analog phone line (not VoIP) with unlimited long distance. For about double the price, you can get business DSL that bonds 2 lines to give you about double the speed.
I was getting 50mbit/10mbit from Comcast, but dropped them after moving to Sonic because once a week I'd see latency and packet loss so severe that the line was unusable.
Obama has castrated the military by letting in faggots. I'm surprised they slept without chastity belts on what with the fanny bandits now allowed to publicly flaunt their perverted lifestyle.
While I hate to dissapoint you, gays were in the military long before Obama took office.
So you are saying that the hippies are in favor of having a 6000 lb SUV paying the same rate as they do for their Prius?
6,000 pounds is pretty heavy even for an SUV. Unless you are going to count tanks like the H1, which hardly anybody drives. Most SUVs that are actually on the road today are in the 4,000-5,000 pound range. The Prius is hardly even a lightweight by comparison. Although about 1/4 of the overall cubic dimensions of an average SUV, they way about 2/3 of what an average SUV weighs.
Ford Expedition curb weight: 5,801 lb (2,631 kg) (standard) 6,071 lb (2,754 kg) (EL) Cadillac Escalade: Curb weight 5,800 lbs Chevy Suburban: Curb weight 5820 lbs
All are fairly common large SUV's, so it hardly seems like an exaggeration to refer to "6000 pound SUV's"
Oh, and for comparison, the Toyota Prius weighs 3042 lbs.
If they were just consumer products, maybe, but the risks with an unsolicited firmware update on business NAS are large enough that they probably won't want to touch it.
Any business that leaves its NAS accessible from the public internet is unlikely to notice an unsolicited firmware update (and just as unlikely to know that it's been hacked and used to serve up malware).
Smug Hippie - - - I like that..... Anyway, back to the little device that tracks your mileage: "Oops I don't understand why it's not working any more. I try to keep the dog/kids/mother in law/whatever from dropping that wrench on it".. Solves that recording/tracking issue. There. Wasn't that easy? Politicians- always an idiotic proposal- kind of like OBAMACARE.
Sir, we noticed that your tracking device is inoperable. "Per Motor Vehicle Code section 802.1.b, it is your responsibility to ensure that the device is operable each time you start your car. Will you be paying your $500 fine by cash, Check or Credit Card?"
As a smug hippie, I'd rather see gas taxes rise proportional to the average MPG of cars on the road. The higher the average MPG, the higher the gas tax, keeping revenue constant, and making low mileage cars less and less attractive.
So basically, no matter good your gas mileage is, you pay the same lump amount? I don't see how that encourages better gas mileage. Or did you mean inversely proportional? If so, that is the way it already works.
The overall gas tax rate would rise as the average fleet gas mileage of cars on the road rises. Not on an individual basis -- the tax wouldn't be based on the mileage of my car, but of all cars.
So drivers of more fuel efficient vehicles would still be rewarded because they'd be paying less tax than if they had a less efficient vehicle, yet the state would still get the same amount of revenue even as more people switch to fuel efficient cars.
Have you found that traffic can be "fixed"? In my experience, traffic solutions are temporary - once traffic is free flowing again, more people will use that route (i.e. by buying houses that are farther away), so there is never a "fix", just a temporary reduction.
To get your petrol there for your gas tank to hold, they have to push VERY heavy trucks along a lot of public roads. Large oil powered or coal powered stations take it by pipe or rail, avoiding most of that.
So add the tax on to the trucker getting the petrol to where you want it and that tax must remain on the gasoline you use.
If it's really about road maintenance/wear.
(note: you also need to cover the costs of policing and the costs of accidents at least to the cost of the road)
That would seem to reward someone that lives close to a refinery at the expense of those that live farther away regardless of their actual road usage. My gasoline comes in by boat (as crude oil) and is refined around 25 miles from where I live, while someone that lives farther inland might have their gas trucked 100 miles or more.
So, tax the employers based on the number of on site employees. Businesses would be encouraged to expand telecommuting, so you reduce the road wear and fuel consumption by getting rid of a bunch of commuting. This would also have the added benefit of reducing your cost of living. You could either get the nicer house like your coworker while shortening your commute to the distance between your bedroom and home office, or, if your job cannot physically handle telecommuting, you get reduced housing costs because the people who could telecommute will frequently choose the nicer house father away, so the cost of housing goes down with the lowered demand.
Really, you would want it to be a tax on the (total number of employees - telecommuting local residence). This way, the employers are not encouraged to move the jobs out of the state.
I'm not sure what makes that tax scheme less likely to driver employers out of state - and it would disproportionately affect employers that require on-site employees (like manufacturing).
Employers already have a strong financial incentive to allow telecommuting - office space is expensive, yet the low adoption rate of regular telecommuting suggests that it's not yet a viable alternative to on-site work. People used to say that video conferencing would finally make telecommuting a reality, but even now that every laptop has a camera and everyone can video conference from anywhere, it's still not a substitute for face-to-face work.
So now we have state specific border check points to determine the movements of citizens? Wow.
Only if you care to stop. Most people probably won't since the 1 cent/mile tax means you'd need to be on a pretty long out-of-state trip to make it worthwhile. Those that live in border towns and frequently cross the border might be able to apply for a permanent waiver by testifying that they spend x% of their miles over the border.
The real problem with this approach is that it unfairly (based on road wear & tear) penalizes those who have bought more economical vehicles in the last few years. You bought a Prius or Leaf? Thanks for trying to help the environment, oh, and fuck you, pay up your tax, hippie bastard. This method ACTIVELY incentives vehicles that meet the minimum requirement for fuel economy. EVERYONE else gets to pay the higher rate. How much higher? Over 2x. It's been a long time since I remember taxes going up by 100% without anyone complaining/changing their voting.
But road wear is only loosely related to mileage, while being very closely related to vehicle weight.
A Nissan Leaf weighs 3300 lbs, while a 22/18mpg NIssan Murano SUV only weighs 500 lbs more, and a 36/27mpg Nissan Versa weights 1000 lbs less than the Leaf.
So I guess the question is... is the gas tax supposed to pay for road maintenance/wear, or is it supposed to reward high MPG and/or EV cars?
It seems that a mileage based tax with a multiplier for road weight would be the most fair. Though since some sources say that road wear is proportional to the cube of the weight, it's unlikely that they would institute a truly fair tax or the Murano owner would be paying 8 times more tax than the Versa owner. (I'm not saying that's a bad thing, it just seems politically unfeasible)
Cars are renewed every 2 years in Oregon and I suspect a lot of cars change hands during a 2 year period. Who ends up being responsible for the tax?
I don't know how titles work in Oregon, but I have to report the current odometer reading when I sell a car in California. Even if that's not required in Oregon, it seems like a simple way to take care of change in ownership.
Again people, this is OREGON, not California, there are NO YEARLY INSPECTIONS. You don't even get inspected when you renew your registration.
Sure, you could spend a fortune to institute them, but the DMV can't keep up with their current workload as it is. Go there for one simple thing when the open, and wait there for hours. If you're lucky, you get out in time for lunch. (Ok, it's not always that bad, but it's still pretty much on target.)
California inspection stations are privately owned and are no more overwhelmed with workload than any other service station. Do some states have only DMV owned inspections stations?
just tax electricity. Everyone benefits from roads, and you don't need to track were people are going.
OTOH, Oregon is the bastion of 'We want X! what we have to pay for it? that's an outrage!"
I have a 5 mile commute that I do by bike 80% of the time.
One of my coworkers has a 50 mile commute that he does by car 100% of the time.
I paid much more for my house than him (purchase price was twice as much for about 1/2 the square footage) just so I'd have a shorter commute - he traded off a larger cheaper house for a longer commute.
He's getting much more benefit out of the roads than I am, so isn't it fair that he should be paying more? We all benefit from roads, but we wouldn't need the 8 lane freeway that he travels on if the roads were only used for transport and not for commuting.
I agree that the state shouldn't be tracking where people are going, but some sort of use-based tax seems more fair. Toll roads seem fair, but they are used for tracking too - my toll transponder is used by the state to track traffic patterns even when I'm not on a toll road.
What if I take my car and drive across the country and back?
You stop at the border inspection station and let them record your odometer reading? If you're going on a 20 mile trip to a border town you probably wouldn't bother, but if you're going on a longer trip, it's probably worth the effort.
They could check the odometer reading when you get your annual inspection. Or when you get reregister your car. If the tax is reasonably small, people won't try to avoid it.
In Oregon, the gas tax is 30 cents per gallon. If you drive 12,000 miles per year and get 25 miles to the gallon then you pay over that year about $150 in gas tax. Would people pay $100-200 for the annual inspection to cover the inspection and the road usage tax?
The annual inspection fee should be around $10 if that. I paid $40 in California to have my car put up on rollers for a smog test with results sent electronically to the DMV, so a simple odometer recording should cost *much* less.
No annual inspections, nor inspections when renewing registration. I suspect you're thinking of California.
Then let car owners self-report mileage every year when they renew their registration. Do random inspections of some small percentage (or send them to a service station for inspection) with a high enough fine for under-reporting to make it unattractive.
I'm willing to wager that if they tried that tack, the smug little hippies who suggested this little tracking device would quickly want it shut down.
I don't think it's the smug little hippies that are pushing for this -- they are already driving high MPG hybrids or Electric vehicles and enjoy making the gas guzzlers pay higher taxes.
As a smug hippie, I'd rather see gas taxes rise proportional to the average MPG of cars on the road. The higher the average MPG, the higher the gas tax, keeping revenue constant, and making low mileage cars less and less attractive. A weight based tax can be added to car registrations so EV and Hybrid owners aren't off the hook for road maintenance costs. Gasoline powered vehicles aren't going away for decades so maybe in 15 years they'll have to look at a mileage based tax again (and if self-driving cars become commonplace. they can self-report their mileage).
How are the numbers read from the device that plugs into the car computer?
If it has a simple numeric display that the inspection agent reads and records every year, that seems to have little potential for abuse or privacy violations. But if they electronically read the device, then who knows what information it's reporting. It could be tracking every time you exceed the highway speed limit. Or might be tracking every panic stop. Or it could be recording how agressively you drive. Or recording what time of day you drive. Or any number of things that may be a privacy invasion.
It's not clear how this basic device handles driving on out of state roads, and if it doesn't have any special handling for this, then it seems that it could easily be replaced with an annual odometer reading.
If nothing else, this device will spur innovation in car computer hacks or OBD passthrough ports that restrict the miles passed through to the device.
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How about bike accidents growing faster than population growth for context?
http://www.coloradoan.com/article/20131022/NEWS01/310220052/Fort-Collins-bike-vs-car-crash-rate-outpaces-city-growth
I think that would only be a relevant statistic if most people in a city were regular riders.
If the growth in the number of residents that become cyclists outpaces the growth in population, then it makes sense that the accident rate would also outpace population growth.
You can take "technically" out of that sentence - bikes have the same right to the roads as cars do (except in certain specific situations).
Whenever I see a bicyclist say those words, he almost never follows them with "and the same responsibilities to obey the law". It's always in the context that bicyclists want to be treated by drivers as the law says they must, but them following the vehicular laws isn't important.
If you're in the SF bay area, let me know, I'll meet you for a weekend ride and show you that there are cyclists that *do* follow laws as much as they expect cars to respect them.
You say "*BANG*, I've got a car driving 2 feet behind me" during a commute to work on city streets. So? There's a car two feet behind that car, and another one two feet behind him. It's called "rush hour", or in some smaller town, "rush minute". Part of commuting and quite legal.
If you've got cars stacked up 2 feet from each other, then you're in stop and go traffic that's moving at a crawl - bikes aren't slowing you down, they are reducing the number of cars in front of you.
You in particular may be very fastidious in obeying traffic signals and rules of the road, but since almost none of the riders I come across in this town bother with such trivialities it is impossible not to paint the entire riding population with the same brush.
Yes, some cyclists obey the law, some don't. Some car drivers obey the law, some don't. Yet we all have to share the same roads.
In fact, to keep from killing many of your compatriots, it is necessary to assume they are going to ignore the law. A bike approaching the street you are on from a side street with a stop sign? Assume he isn't going to, assume he's going to actually speed up to challenge you for the right of way, and then he's going to either lay over in a sharp turn or side-step into the crosswalk to try to invoke the pedestrian in a crosswalk laws on you.
That's one of my biggest pet peeves - I can maintain a stopped trackstand for only a few seconds before i've got to unclip and put my feet down - when a car has the right of way at a stop sign, I wish they would just take it because then I can get through the intersection faster. Encouraging cyclists to take the right of way when they don't have right of way just further encourages them to not respect right of way laws.
I'm driving at a speed that is safe for the automobile traffic around me....most of us are.
That appears to be a problem with your driving. You don't drive at a speed that's safe for the automobile traffic around you, you drive at a speed that's safe for the road you're on, and apparently you're on a road that's frequented by cyclists. If you were on a limited access highway, maybe you could get away with your style of driving, but anywhere else you need to drive at a safe and prudent speed and expect obstacles in the road - bikes, pedestrians, stalled cars, dogs, cows, etc. I once narrowly avoided a refrigerator that was left in the middle of the road after it fell off a truck.
We aren't expecting to have to slow quickly or stop for a slow moving, non-motorized vehicle suddenly appearing in the middle of the road.
I wouldn't lump all drivers in with yourself, not all drivers have such little control of their vehicle they fear running over cyclists.
Face it...the roads are built and meant for motorized vehicles. It is the smaller bicycles that have to be on the lookout and use judgement on when it is save to ride and on what roads.
Actually, many roads were first built because of lobbying by cyclists -- it wasn't until cars came later that bikes were pushed off to the shoulders.
You can go on and on all you want on laws and insurance, etc....but what good is that going to do for you when racked up in the hospital for months, and that's even if you survive a duel with a 3000+ lbs metal vehicle going about 3-4x as fast as you are?
Oh, I understand my mortality when I'm on my bike, and since I know i'm not going to change the laws of physics, I've continued to encourage my legislators to write laws that hold cars more responsible when they are at-fault in collisions with cyclists. If car drivers thought they might face jail time for side swiping a cyclist, or hitting a cyclist "because I didn't see him" or "I was going too fast to stop", then perhaps they'll drive a little more carefully.
Hopefully it's just a temporary problem and self-driving cars will make car-bike collisions much less common.
I'm cool with bicycles except in the mornings when everyone is trying to get to work....you're passing someone, and BANG, you have to hit the brakes when you see a damned bike in the road with heavy traffic slowing shit down, when you're trying to make it to work.
What a coincidence, I'm cool with cars except when I'm trying to bike to work. I'm biking along a road, staying as far to the right as I safely can (avoiding broken road edges, parked car doors, etc), and suddenly *BANG*, I've got a car driving 2 feet behind me. Cars have their place and all, but I'm just trying to get to work, can't the car drivers leave earlier or later in the day?
I've likely almost killed a few idiots that I almost didn't see, especially in areas where the sun glare hits you in the early morning or late afternoon.
Perhaps you're driving too fast for conditions if you've "almost killed a few". Speed limits are *maximums", driving below the speed limit when conditions warrant it is always legal. Another option would be to pull off the road and wait until conditions improve to the point where you can see safely - a good rule of thumb is that if you can't see a human shaped object on the road, then you can't see well enough to drive.
I know bikes "technically" have the same right to be on the road as cars, but let's be realistic in this day in age....there are times when it is NOT safe to be on a bike on a public road without a specific bike lane that is out of the main traffic lanes.
You can take "technically" out of that sentence - bikes have the same right to the roads as cars do (except in certain specific situations). Trust me, cyclists would like more bike lanes too, but car drivers whine about loss of lanes and/or parking everytime one is contemplated.
I like to ride a bike for exercise, but I'd damned sure not be out on the road during rush out without a being on a motorized vehicle.
Bikes aren't just for exercise - try commuting on one.
This needs to be put into context. Raw statistics don't do anyone any good, and can actually be misleading sometimes.
I wish they'd collect and publish more details about the accidents. Every day I see bikes doing all sorts of unsafe behaviors - running stop signs/traffic lights, riding on the wrong side of the road, hopping from road to sidewalk and back again, and worst of all, riding in dark clothes with no lights or reflectors -- what are those bikers thinking? Even when I'm on my bike, the darkly clad unlit cyclists are exceptionally difficult to see, I don't know how they expect cars to avoid them. Pedestrians are the same way - they wear dark running clothes, have no reflective materials, and cross the road in front of you and expect you to stop.
So I'd like to see stats for bikes that get into accidents while doing something stupid than those that ride more responsibly.
That 472 million didn't come out of their pocket..
It came out of their CUSTOMERS...
You know.. People. All those investors who handed over cash and said make it grow... They got boned.
Oh, so you mean the same pockets that the $12M fine comes out of?
Where I live... Sonic requires the bundling of telephone service with their internet service. I can obtain internet service from Comcast without telephone service for a lower price. And, Sonic's voice service uses obsolete analog telephone technology.
Because of their cost structure, there'd be a very small price break if they unbundled voice - not enough to make up for having to support a separate product.
Another word for "obsolete analog telephone techology" is "reliable". Living in earthquake country, I'm happy to have a POTS line that's powered from the telco central office. The free international long distance (to selected countries) is also a nice touch.
I've found Comcast to be too unreliable to count on for working from home. Sonic has been rock solid so far. I'm paying Sonic about the same rate for 14/1mbit service as I was paying Comcast for a promotional rate on 50/10 service, and it's well worth it. I don't miss the extra bandwidth from Comcast as much as I love Sonic's reliability. Plus it's nice to support a small ISP that provides real service - if you call their NOC you can talk with a real engineer, not a far away service rep that only knows how to follow their script that always starts with rebooting the cable modem and my computer.
The end is near my ass. I'm in Los Angeles and I still only have one option for broadband access at any reasonable speed -- and it's Time Warner Cable. The end is nowhere near until we somehow break the monopolistic (or duopolistic) stranglehold these bastards enjoy in any given market. Apparently this stranglehold is in large part perpetuated by political deals these ISPs have made with local government (e.g., the City of Los Angeles) wherein the city gets kickbacks from the ISP for rights of way, etc. Because local governments are dependent on these kickbacks to support their budget, there is no competition. It's a form of payola.
If you're in a Sonic.net coverage area, check them out. I'm 6000 feet from the CO, and get 14mbit down, 1.3mbit upstream -- no monthly bandwidth caps, and their pricing includes a real analog phone line (not VoIP) with unlimited long distance. For about double the price, you can get business DSL that bonds 2 lines to give you about double the speed.
I was getting 50mbit/10mbit from Comcast, but dropped them after moving to Sonic because once a week I'd see latency and packet loss so severe that the line was unusable.
Obama has castrated the military by letting in faggots. I'm surprised they slept without chastity belts on what with the fanny bandits now allowed to publicly flaunt their perverted lifestyle.
While I hate to dissapoint you, gays were in the military long before Obama took office.
So you are saying that the hippies are in favor of having a 6000 lb SUV paying the same rate as they do for their Prius?
6,000 pounds is pretty heavy even for an SUV. Unless you are going to count tanks like the H1, which hardly anybody drives. Most SUVs that are actually on the road today are in the 4,000-5,000 pound range. The Prius is hardly even a lightweight by comparison. Although about 1/4 of the overall cubic dimensions of an average SUV, they way about 2/3 of what an average SUV weighs.
Ford Expedition curb weight: 5,801 lb (2,631 kg) (standard) 6,071 lb (2,754 kg) (EL)
Cadillac Escalade: Curb weight 5,800 lbs
Chevy Suburban: Curb weight 5820 lbs
All are fairly common large SUV's, so it hardly seems like an exaggeration to refer to "6000 pound SUV's"
Oh, and for comparison, the Toyota Prius weighs 3042 lbs.
If they were just consumer products, maybe, but the risks with an unsolicited firmware update on business NAS are large enough that they probably won't want to touch it.
Any business that leaves its NAS accessible from the public internet is unlikely to notice an unsolicited firmware update (and just as unlikely to know that it's been hacked and used to serve up malware).
Smug Hippie - - - I like that..... Anyway, back to the little device that tracks your mileage: "Oops I don't understand why it's not working any more. I try to keep the dog/kids/mother in law /whatever from dropping that wrench on it".. Solves that recording /tracking issue. There. Wasn't that easy? Politicians- always an idiotic proposal- kind of like OBAMACARE.
Sir, we noticed that your tracking device is inoperable. "Per Motor Vehicle Code section 802.1.b, it is your responsibility to ensure that the device is operable each time you start your car. Will you be paying your $500 fine by cash, Check or Credit Card?"
As a smug hippie, I'd rather see gas taxes rise proportional to the average MPG of cars on the road. The higher the average MPG, the higher the gas tax, keeping revenue constant, and making low mileage cars less and less attractive.
So basically, no matter good your gas mileage is, you pay the same lump amount? I don't see how that encourages better gas mileage. Or did you mean inversely proportional? If so, that is the way it already works.
The overall gas tax rate would rise as the average fleet gas mileage of cars on the road rises. Not on an individual basis -- the tax wouldn't be based on the mileage of my car, but of all cars.
So drivers of more fuel efficient vehicles would still be rewarded because they'd be paying less tax than if they had a less efficient vehicle, yet the state would still get the same amount of revenue even as more people switch to fuel efficient cars.
My own experiences trying to push highway improvements is most people consider traffic a fact of life rather than something that can be fixed. Worse still, some idiots like John Prescott push congestion as government policy to make mass transit more attractive.
Have you found that traffic can be "fixed"? In my experience, traffic solutions are temporary - once traffic is free flowing again, more people will use that route (i.e. by buying houses that are farther away), so there is never a "fix", just a temporary reduction.
To get your petrol there for your gas tank to hold, they have to push VERY heavy trucks along a lot of public roads. Large oil powered or coal powered stations take it by pipe or rail, avoiding most of that.
So add the tax on to the trucker getting the petrol to where you want it and that tax must remain on the gasoline you use.
If it's really about road maintenance/wear.
(note: you also need to cover the costs of policing and the costs of accidents at least to the cost of the road)
That would seem to reward someone that lives close to a refinery at the expense of those that live farther away regardless of their actual road usage. My gasoline comes in by boat (as crude oil) and is refined around 25 miles from where I live, while someone that lives farther inland might have their gas trucked 100 miles or more.
So, tax the employers based on the number of on site employees. Businesses would be encouraged to expand telecommuting, so you reduce the road wear and fuel consumption by getting rid of a bunch of commuting. This would also have the added benefit of reducing your cost of living. You could either get the nicer house like your coworker while shortening your commute to the distance between your bedroom and home office, or, if your job cannot physically handle telecommuting, you get reduced housing costs because the people who could telecommute will frequently choose the nicer house father away, so the cost of housing goes down with the lowered demand.
Really, you would want it to be a tax on the (total number of employees - telecommuting local residence). This way, the employers are not encouraged to move the jobs out of the state.
I'm not sure what makes that tax scheme less likely to driver employers out of state - and it would disproportionately affect employers that require on-site employees (like manufacturing).
Employers already have a strong financial incentive to allow telecommuting - office space is expensive, yet the low adoption rate of regular telecommuting suggests that it's not yet a viable alternative to on-site work. People used to say that video conferencing would finally make telecommuting a reality, but even now that every laptop has a camera and everyone can video conference from anywhere, it's still not a substitute for face-to-face work.
So now we have state specific border check points to determine the movements of citizens? Wow.
Only if you care to stop. Most people probably won't since the 1 cent/mile tax means you'd need to be on a pretty long out-of-state trip to make it worthwhile. Those that live in border towns and frequently cross the border might be able to apply for a permanent waiver by testifying that they spend x% of their miles over the border.
The real problem with this approach is that it unfairly (based on road wear & tear) penalizes those who have bought more economical vehicles in the last few years. You bought a Prius or Leaf? Thanks for trying to help the environment, oh, and fuck you, pay up your tax, hippie bastard. This method ACTIVELY incentives vehicles that meet the minimum requirement for fuel economy. EVERYONE else gets to pay the higher rate. How much higher? Over 2x. It's been a long time since I remember taxes going up by 100% without anyone complaining/changing their voting.
But road wear is only loosely related to mileage, while being very closely related to vehicle weight.
A Nissan Leaf weighs 3300 lbs, while a 22/18mpg NIssan Murano SUV only weighs 500 lbs more, and a 36/27mpg Nissan Versa weights 1000 lbs less than the Leaf.
So I guess the question is... is the gas tax supposed to pay for road maintenance/wear, or is it supposed to reward high MPG and/or EV cars?
It seems that a mileage based tax with a multiplier for road weight would be the most fair. Though since some sources say that road wear is proportional to the cube of the weight, it's unlikely that they would institute a truly fair tax or the Murano owner would be paying 8 times more tax than the Versa owner. (I'm not saying that's a bad thing, it just seems politically unfeasible)
Cars are renewed every 2 years in Oregon and I suspect a lot of cars change hands during a 2 year period. Who ends up being responsible for the tax?
I don't know how titles work in Oregon, but I have to report the current odometer reading when I sell a car in California. Even if that's not required in Oregon, it seems like a simple way to take care of change in ownership.
Again people, this is OREGON, not California, there are NO YEARLY INSPECTIONS. You don't even get inspected when you renew your registration.
Sure, you could spend a fortune to institute them, but the DMV can't keep up with their current workload as it is. Go there for one simple thing when the open, and wait there for hours. If you're lucky, you get out in time for lunch. (Ok, it's not always that bad, but it's still pretty much on target.)
California inspection stations are privately owned and are no more overwhelmed with workload than any other service station. Do some states have only DMV owned inspections stations?
just tax electricity. Everyone benefits from roads, and you don't need to track were people are going.
OTOH, Oregon is the bastion of 'We want X! what we have to pay for it? that's an outrage!"
I have a 5 mile commute that I do by bike 80% of the time.
One of my coworkers has a 50 mile commute that he does by car 100% of the time.
I paid much more for my house than him (purchase price was twice as much for about 1/2 the square footage) just so I'd have a shorter commute - he traded off a larger cheaper house for a longer commute.
He's getting much more benefit out of the roads than I am, so isn't it fair that he should be paying more? We all benefit from roads, but we wouldn't need the 8 lane freeway that he travels on if the roads were only used for transport and not for commuting.
I agree that the state shouldn't be tracking where people are going, but some sort of use-based tax seems more fair. Toll roads seem fair, but they are used for tracking too - my toll transponder is used by the state to track traffic patterns even when I'm not on a toll road.
What if I take my car and drive across the country and back?
You stop at the border inspection station and let them record your odometer reading? If you're going on a 20 mile trip to a border town you probably wouldn't bother, but if you're going on a longer trip, it's probably worth the effort.
This.
They could check the odometer reading when you get your annual inspection.
Or when you get reregister your car. If the tax is reasonably small, people won't try to avoid it.
In Oregon, the gas tax is 30 cents per gallon. If you drive 12,000 miles per year and get 25 miles to the gallon then you pay over that year about $150 in gas tax. Would people pay $100-200 for the annual inspection to cover the inspection and the road usage tax?
The annual inspection fee should be around $10 if that. I paid $40 in California to have my car put up on rollers for a smog test with results sent electronically to the DMV, so a simple odometer recording should cost *much* less.
No annual inspections, nor inspections when renewing registration.
I suspect you're thinking of California.
Then let car owners self-report mileage every year when they renew their registration. Do random inspections of some small percentage (or send them to a service station for inspection) with a high enough fine for under-reporting to make it unattractive.
I'm willing to wager that if they tried that tack, the smug little hippies who suggested this little tracking device would quickly want it shut down.
I don't think it's the smug little hippies that are pushing for this -- they are already driving high MPG hybrids or Electric vehicles and enjoy making the gas guzzlers pay higher taxes.
As a smug hippie, I'd rather see gas taxes rise proportional to the average MPG of cars on the road. The higher the average MPG, the higher the gas tax, keeping revenue constant, and making low mileage cars less and less attractive. A weight based tax can be added to car registrations so EV and Hybrid owners aren't off the hook for road maintenance costs. Gasoline powered vehicles aren't going away for decades so maybe in 15 years they'll have to look at a mileage based tax again (and if self-driving cars become commonplace. they can self-report their mileage).
How are the numbers read from the device that plugs into the car computer?
If it has a simple numeric display that the inspection agent reads and records every year, that seems to have little potential for abuse or privacy violations. But if they electronically read the device, then who knows what information it's reporting. It could be tracking every time you exceed the highway speed limit. Or might be tracking every panic stop. Or it could be recording how agressively you drive. Or recording what time of day you drive. Or any number of things that may be a privacy invasion.
It's not clear how this basic device handles driving on out of state roads, and if it doesn't have any special handling for this, then it seems that it could easily be replaced with an annual odometer reading.
If nothing else, this device will spur innovation in car computer hacks or OBD passthrough ports that restrict the miles passed through to the device.