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The general idea of charging road users partly in proportion to miles traveled makes a lot of sense. But why, every time this is proposed, do people talk about
by jefftk 5y ago
The general idea of charging road users partly in proportion to miles traveled makes a lot of sense. But why, every time this is proposed, do people talk about fancy tracking mechanisms? Why can't we just use odometers?
I mean, yes, the odometer cannot measure how much of your mileage is in Virginia versus other states, or how much is on what kinds of roads, but it is so much cheaper to implement that I would expect it to still work out much better?
- corty 5y agoBecause in such schemes, tracking peoples' movements is the actual intent, collecting fees is just a nice side-effect.
- aww_dang 5y agoTracking as a prelude to restricting and controlling movement.
- yardie 5y agoI'm purely guessing here. But roads are owned by different government agencies: federal, state, county, municipal, HOAs, and private. And those different agencies might have different ideas on how they want funding. If you drive primarily on town streets, which you pay for through property taxes, your odometer won't know to charge you less. This is based purely on my experience on trying to add bike lanes in my city. It was fairly easy to get it done on our sidestreets, the city owns those, but major streets are federal or state owned and will take years due to bureaucracy.
- cfn 5y agoBig trucks use odometers to enforce driver regulations and there is a whole semi-hidden market for tools and fixes that disable the odometers, even electronic ones. Menaing, they are easy to interfere with. I still agree with the other's posters that tracking is conveniently useful for other things.
- collegeburner 5y agoThis is like people who argue that tax fraud and money laundering justify banning cash to leave only trackable means of transaction. Tampering with an odometer is illegal and though some people will defraud that doesn't justify another step towards a surveillance state.
- cfn 5y agoAnd I totally agree with you. I was just pointing out that odometers are easy to fool.
- throaway46546 5y agoI have an old car and I can just unplug the speed sensor and the odometer stops turning.
- jefftk 5y agoOk, but that's already illegal (since we need accurate mileage for used car sales)
- throaway46546 5y agoYes, but people break the law all the time.
- jefftk 5y agoHaving your odometer connected costs ~$1k/y in depreciation, and people don't generally disconnect it. Do you think they'll start for the opportunity to save an additional $100/y?
- throaway46546 5y agoOlder cars don't depreciate as much. Mine are pretty much done depreciating. I also understand that it is possible to flash the ECU on some newer cars to change the mileage. I just checked and according to the NHTSA cars over ten years old aren't even required to have a functional odometer (you just have to disclose it when you sell it). I'm not sure how common odometer fraud is, or would be under your proposed law, but the bigger the incentive the more likely I think it would be to occur. You are right though most people would comply with the law.
- dtech 5y agoThat is already done on a large scale, through gas tax. However, it doesn't differentiate much between locations or vehicle types.
- IdoRA 5y agoA lot of people in the NOVA area are commuting to DC/MD and vice versa. It seems like you’d need to be able to fairly exclude resident out of state driving for the proposal to be viable?
- jefftk 5y agoWhy? We don't do that with the gas tax.
- guiltygods 5y agoYou need location info in addition to distance since roads and infrastructure are owned and maintained by various agencies. The solution could be to build upon EZPASS. Have the EZPass readers in every signboard or lamppost along the highways. They can read and record distance travelled along a particular highway so that revenue can be attributed to appropriate agency.
- jefftk 5y agoThis is a proposal to replace the gas tax, which doesn't give you that information today. So I don't see how it's required? We could divide the money how we do today, or could sample road usage to estimate an appropriate division. We don't need per-car level data.