If this transition goes foreword, I don’t think it is realistic to assume that it will simply translate the existing gas tax into a mileage tax on a numerically equivalent basis. This new system will open the door to a whole new world of fee structures that will make your phone bill seem like a walk in the woods. The price per mile for driving could change with every revolution of your wheels.
What I am suggesting about the ultimate full application of this system as a traffic management device on page 1 of this thread is only my opinion and assumption, which I wrote in 2005. As far as I know, nobody has published anything that comes to the same conclusions. However, when you connect all the dots, I don’t think it is far fetched at all. It’s inevitable.
The concept of installing GPS computers as mandatory equipment in all vehicles for the purpose of collecting fees per mile driven as a replacement for fuel tax per gallon is not my theory or assumption. That idea is clearly under development in many states and countries, and may only be a few years away. However, there is already a growing public backlash to it for two specific reasons:
1) It is perceived as a tax increase.
2) It is perceived as being too much “Big Brother” because the government will know where you drive and when you drive.
Of the two, it is the perception of “Big Brother” in your car that has people the most worried. It is closely related to the apprehension of the current On Star system, and to the concern about computer chips being secretly embedded in cars to record driver information, as well as the so-called “smart license plates,” which are under development. At this time, the objective for this new system is not intended to increase taxes. It is only to recoup what is considered to be tax avoidance by increasing fuel efficiency of cars. The states argue that every new mile per gallon you get is basically a tax-free mile to drive on roads that cost money to provide
As for the rest of my theory about the ultimate application, all of the components are individually under consideration and being tried in several test applications. So once we have the basic tax-by-mile proposal developed, it will be inevitable to combine it with all of these other traffic control and energy conservation measures. This is truly a marriage made in heaven.
A large part of the objective will be traffic management that will have the effect of increasing roadway capacity. This will undermine the current argument that we have hit a dead end with highway capacity. Also, the comprehensive, automatic traffic law enforcement will bring in enormous amounts of new revenue. This new revenue combined with the savings of manual law enforcement and traffic court costs will more than offset the cost of this new system.
Just a couple more thoughts about this future of transportation and my mention of a vehicle external overlay control system with its relationship to HSR.
Through the railfan lens, HSR is like Christmas. It validates everything that train buffs have known all along about the mistake the country made when it dumped passenger trains. But in actuality, the current HSR agenda has nothing to do with the national passenger rail vision that led us into the streamliner era of the 1950s. Instead, the primary stated purpose for HSR today is environmental:
1) To reduce our national dependence on oil.
2) To reduce emissions of CO2.
The current HSR agenda is as much about cars as it is about trains, because the car culture must become less attractive than rail for rail to succeed in its environmental mission. This is the backdrop that opens the door for this new GPS-remote control overlay for motor vehicles. It moves us toward the environmental goals of HSR without taking us out of our cars, giving time for the transition to full HSR.
People like the freedom of driving compared to rail, so the new vehicle controller will take freedom out of driving and replace it with control, thus making rail more attractive. It will level the playing field between highway and rail. Therefore, in pursuit of the goal of getting people out of cars and onto rail, the new vehicle controller system will inevitably include the objective of energy efficiency.
Eco Driving is the name of a new energy conservation discipline that is bound to be imposed on all of us with the authority of this new automatic GPS system. It is really only one step beyond the external speed control concept the I mentioned in a previous post, so it is natural to include it. Just like wind powered electric HSR, Eco Driving is all about reducing our dependency on oil and limiting CO2 emissions.
Right now, Eco Driving is being encouraged as a voluntary personal practice for drivers. However, the point of this fuel conservation practice is not just to save money for drivers. The main point is to serve the greater good of society, and as such, there is every reason to make it compulsory. All that is needed is a method to enforce it. What could be better than simply building it into your car through the automatic GPS external driving overlay system?
Here is a link to fourteen Eco Driving tips where it proclaims its mission of “Turning commuters into lean, green driving machines.” This link opens a podcast on Eco Driving:
http://www.ecodrivingusa.com/#/news-and-events/?type=single&post=219
One of the Eco Driving tips involves your use of air conditioning in your vehicle. The podcast moderator patronizes the listeners with this little poem concerning air conditioning when it is desired in hot weather:
If you’re driving forty or below,
Do we really want the state telling us whether our windows should be open or closed? We could have the decision controlled automatically for us with the new GPS system.
One of the main components of Eco Driving is slow acceleration. Minimizing top speed is another one. Remember when we forced to drive under 55 mph to save fuel? We had to put up new speed limit signs and get used to poking along insufferably on freeways that could accommodate 100 mph. With this new vehicle controller system, a central authority will control our top speed. It could turn the national speed up and down according to the market price of gasoline. So, in times of high gas prices, we might be limited to say 40 mph, just to lower demand and bring the market price down for the greater good.
Another way that this system could produce fuel conservation is by what is known as conservation pricing. In a normal market, when you buy more of something, you get a better price. With conservation pricing, it is just the opposite. It is currently becoming popular with residential water purchase from municipal systems, and will soon be making its way to other utilities such as gas and electricity. Here is an explanation of the concept as applied to water service:
http://www.newwa.org/PDF/BMP%20-%20Conservation%20Pricing%20July%2009.pdf
Conservation pricing is closely related to another concept called utility decoupling. U.D. encourages utilities to promote conservation for the greater good. However, doing so causes a utility to loose revenue because they sell less electricity or gas. So with U.D., the state allows the utility to raise the rates or assess a flat fee on customers to make up for lost revenue to the utility. The net effect is that the customer uses less electricity or gas. But the reward to the consumer is a society that consumes less, rather than a direct financial benefit of lower energy bills to the consumer. The core rationale for such non-free market approaches such as conservation pricing and utility decoupling is the need to conserve resources for the greater good of society. Here is a link to utility decoupling:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123378473766549301.html
Motor fuel is subject to the same conservation motive, but the individual gas pump metered purchase offers no way to keep track of the broader consumption pattern needed to impose conservation pricing and/or decoupling. However, the new GPS external vehicle management system opens the door wide to the introduction of conservation pricing and/or decoupling. While the GPS management system is basically tracking vehicle location, it could easily track fuel consumption as well. And in addition to pricing driving by the mile and varying that price according to roadway demand to manage traffic flow, the system could also vary the price according to how much gas you are using over a period of time.
When you add this level of sophisticated vehicle management to cars, it will achieve the stated main objectives of HSR better than HSR ever could. So while this new system starts out as a method to get people out of their cars and into HSR, it ends up making HSR obsolete.
BucyrusWhen you add this level of sophisticated vehicle management to cars, it will achieve the stated main objectives of HSR better than HSR ever could. So while this new system starts out as a method to get people out of their cars and into HSR, it ends up making HSR obsolete.
I's be now kicking myself---a couple of years ago some folks in the U.K. were suggesting that a way of eliminating passenger rail altogether was this very type of GPS based system. You did say something to the effect awhile back that it would virtually render obsolete any passenger based system although I don't know to what extent that'll happen.
There may be just enough resistance to make it rather difficult to push it across----then again, we do have some who are looking for a political system---
Any argument carried far enough will end up in Semantics--Hartz's law of rhetoric Emerald. Leemer and Southern The route of the Sceptre Express Barry
I just started my blog site...more stuff to come...
http://modeltrainswithmusic.blogspot.ca/
The second part of the title to this thread "ways to move about the country" is a most telling part. We do not need Balkanization of the US. A very important advantage IMHO is that the US and Canada to the north has been a tightly co-ordinated transportation systems. Be it water, rail, Highway, or air at various times of the 19th - 21st century. We do not need "fifedoms" and "dont come into my back yards" The ability of everyone to communicate through telegraph, then our excellent telephone and internet connections has speeded up everything. I believe it is most important that we increase citizen's mobility and I do not see any other way other than eventually expanding HSR. My only examples are the NEC, California, and Pacific NW corridors and their unemployment along those corridors. I may be wrong but .............?
Here is a link describing the basic motor vehicle tax-by-mile concept.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/02/20/driving.tax/
It seems to suggest that the federal government has ruled out the idea for the time being, although some states are interested in pursuing it. Apparently Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood floated the idea, which has sparked a bit of controversy over the intrusion into privacy of drivers. The article does mention that congestion pricing is planned for inclusion in the mileage tax system. Congestion pricing is already a part of the High Occupancy Vehicle lanes that are being built on a widespread basis today.
This tax-by-mile system of course is just the basic kernel of the full-blown control overlay system that I believe will eventually come to fruition. As evidence of my prediction of this, the article does mention that countries such as Germany and the Netherlands are exploring the application of emerging technologies that will be able to monitor fuel consumption, the type of vehicle, and level of emissions. It says that these technologies are not quite ripe for U.S. application, but are maturing rapidly.
Meanwhile, the basic technology seems to be developing mainly for commercial vehicle applications in the U.S. for the purpose of fuel consumption management, driver logging, driver performance, etc. Here is a link to that application:
http://www.guardmagic.com/index.html
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