In principle, having road charge be a combination of mileage and axle weight makes an incredible amount of sense - it taxes the factors which contribute to road wear.
Unfortunately, these proposals all seem to end up at "let the government location track your vehicle at all times", which is a privacy disaster - a disaster even worse than the current widespread use of automatic license plate readers. Unless such conditions are removed these programs are gross curtailments of freedom which should be opposed.
It should be simple enough to use the odometer. If the vehicle drives significantly outside the country or on private roads, then a GPS-based odometer seems simple enough. I'm sure a 1GB SD-card can geofence the public road network of most countries so that the taxed odometer rolls only when on taxed roads.
Doesn't seem like a privacy nightmare, and this kind of system is more practical than an online server-based one, given that mobile signals are especially uncommon when off-roading or roaming internationally.
The odometer lets the owner know whether the car needs maintenance.
Also, it determines the resale value of the car, and in this context modifying a car's odometer is a crime.
If you start fining people for having certain odometer readings, you're doing a lot of damage to the idea that modifying the reading should be a crime.
In general, the more purposes you want something to serve, the less effective it's going to be at each of those purposes.
I’m not certain I agree with the premise that mileage is a good indicator of road wear.
I do about 30k km in a typical year. My families live far, so a return trip is around 4000 km.
If we visit our family 3x/year, we’ve effectively exhausted this “10k mile” thing (I don’t live in the UK, but the point still stands), however very little of our actual mileage would be in our home country. To be precise, only 300km out of 2000.
If I go in other directions, the math gets even worse. I can leave the country in 30km and add 800-3000km of mileage for a scuba trip.
The amount of damage you do to the roads is exactly proportional to how many miles you drive on the roads. Where the roads are doesn't matter.
What you're describing is a billing detail - how do ensure the right chunk of those fees goes to the owners of those roads? And that leads to the conundrum I posed - without tracking your location at all times there's no way to prove what number of miles were in one municipality versus another.
The key question I see here is: how would a vehicle be tracked?
There are two options:
1. A dongle with GPS, mobile connectivity and some other features would be installed to all vehicles. This makes it easy to implement the system, but would be a logistical nightmare.
2. The government could receive information directly from the manufacturers, but that a) can be a privacy nightmare, b) would work only on cars manufactured after 2016 or so, and c) is insanely complex to implement, due to differences and incompleteness of various manufacturer's API implementations (source: I worked on one such system).
One solution that comes to mind is to use the same technology that already exists for traffic violations: when a vehicle enters or leaves the motorway it would get its licence plate scanned, and a fee would be applied to that vehicle's account. The owner can then be charged in a number of different ways - immediately, or periodically, or after a certain threshold was reached - whichever is the most practical.
Fuel duty works out at about 5p/mile. Slightly more for thirstier vehicles, slightly less for lighter vehicles.
There is zero need to implement anything for petrol or diesel vehicles, which nicely eliminates the "pre-2016" problem (How many 10 year old electric vehicles are there? Not enough to worry about). I'd be inclined to provide a government API, and require the manufacturers to provide the data in a specified format. Make it part of type approval for use on the UK roads.
Not impossible, nor should a VIN + Mileage number be particularly risky for privacy concerns - the number should be pushed regularly, to prevent wind-back tricks.
15p/mile has got to be a joke though. That'd be the equivalent of setting fuel duty to £1.50/litre - it would immediately shag what's left of the economy.
> I'd be inclined to provide a government API, and require the manufacturers to provide the data in a specified format. Make it part of type approval for use on the UK roads.
Knowing how this industry works, good luck making something like this a reality, especially in a single country. Even if the EU tried enforcing something like that (with the UK piggybacking on it), it is still a small portion of the market.
Sadly, this is not a technical problem, but a political one. That said, I agree with you, and we can always dream.
True, but that is a general mileage - it doesn't tell you where it was made. I.e. how much of it was made abroad, how much was on local roads and how much on motorways etc.
The title of this article is misleading. The proposal is to charge by distance, since electric cars mean gas taxes don’t work anymore. That is the problem they are looking to solve.
It would be helpful if those who are opposed to this solution propose their own which addresses this specific problem.
I can think of a couple others, neither of which are great:
1. All freeways become toll roads.
2. Increase the gas tax even more, basically explicitly subsidizing electric vehicles.
This makes no sense, this should be combined w/ the weight of the vehicle. Also, what about people who live in rural areas and do school runs or work further.
Imagine the following: "Sorry matey, we can visit granddad and grandma this xmas because we would "exceed our quota" and had to pay a lot of money!"
People who read the article don’t need to worry about this happening. As the article explains, it’s a fee per mile, not a flat fee that kicks in at the 10000th mile.
If you could afford the first 9800 miles, you can afford the other 300 miles to get to grandma’s for Christmas.
Monitoring mileage will open up whole new areas of business, from remote monitoring devices on the car's computer with network connectivity to human/manual car inspection. If this goes through it could be a good opportunity for some high-tech businesses. The iot angle would be interesting.
They already have a monitoring system... TPMS. Four distinct IDs for every vehicle passing a location makes for a good fingerprint (they've been using this for years to estimate traffic levels)
Add in something like Flock license plate reading and you now know which vehicle it was.
Readit News
Unfortunately, these proposals all seem to end up at "let the government location track your vehicle at all times", which is a privacy disaster - a disaster even worse than the current widespread use of automatic license plate readers. Unless such conditions are removed these programs are gross curtailments of freedom which should be opposed.
Doesn't seem like a privacy nightmare, and this kind of system is more practical than an online server-based one, given that mobile signals are especially uncommon when off-roading or roaming internationally.
The odometer lets the owner know whether the car needs maintenance.
Also, it determines the resale value of the car, and in this context modifying a car's odometer is a crime.
If you start fining people for having certain odometer readings, you're doing a lot of damage to the idea that modifying the reading should be a crime.
In general, the more purposes you want something to serve, the less effective it's going to be at each of those purposes.
I do about 30k km in a typical year. My families live far, so a return trip is around 4000 km.
If we visit our family 3x/year, we’ve effectively exhausted this “10k mile” thing (I don’t live in the UK, but the point still stands), however very little of our actual mileage would be in our home country. To be precise, only 300km out of 2000.
If I go in other directions, the math gets even worse. I can leave the country in 30km and add 800-3000km of mileage for a scuba trip.
What you're describing is a billing detail - how do ensure the right chunk of those fees goes to the owners of those roads? And that leads to the conundrum I posed - without tracking your location at all times there's no way to prove what number of miles were in one municipality versus another.
Dead Comment
There are two options:
1. A dongle with GPS, mobile connectivity and some other features would be installed to all vehicles. This makes it easy to implement the system, but would be a logistical nightmare.
2. The government could receive information directly from the manufacturers, but that a) can be a privacy nightmare, b) would work only on cars manufactured after 2016 or so, and c) is insanely complex to implement, due to differences and incompleteness of various manufacturer's API implementations (source: I worked on one such system).
One solution that comes to mind is to use the same technology that already exists for traffic violations: when a vehicle enters or leaves the motorway it would get its licence plate scanned, and a fee would be applied to that vehicle's account. The owner can then be charged in a number of different ways - immediately, or periodically, or after a certain threshold was reached - whichever is the most practical.
There is zero need to implement anything for petrol or diesel vehicles, which nicely eliminates the "pre-2016" problem (How many 10 year old electric vehicles are there? Not enough to worry about). I'd be inclined to provide a government API, and require the manufacturers to provide the data in a specified format. Make it part of type approval for use on the UK roads.
Not impossible, nor should a VIN + Mileage number be particularly risky for privacy concerns - the number should be pushed regularly, to prevent wind-back tricks.
15p/mile has got to be a joke though. That'd be the equivalent of setting fuel duty to £1.50/litre - it would immediately shag what's left of the economy.
Knowing how this industry works, good luck making something like this a reality, especially in a single country. Even if the EU tried enforcing something like that (with the UK piggybacking on it), it is still a small portion of the market.
Sadly, this is not a technical problem, but a political one. That said, I agree with you, and we can always dream.
It would be helpful if those who are opposed to this solution propose their own which addresses this specific problem.
I can think of a couple others, neither of which are great:
1. All freeways become toll roads. 2. Increase the gas tax even more, basically explicitly subsidizing electric vehicles.
If you could afford the first 9800 miles, you can afford the other 300 miles to get to grandma’s for Christmas.
> this makes no sense
Indeed.
Frankly, it's overdue for them to pay their fair share and for the rest of the world to stop subsidizing them.
We've been subsidizing cars and rural lifestyles for so long that people feel entitled to them, but it certainly doesn't have to be that way.
Add in something like Flock license plate reading and you now know which vehicle it was.