Looks to me like a system ripe for hacking and fraud that will turn ordinary citizens into criminals.
The test setup is an electronics package outfitted with GPS, wireless internet, and a rating system algorithm that tracks the following things:
- The car’s environmental impact
- The distances driven,
- The route,
- The time it is driven
Supposedly, calculating all this together for a tax is a “fairer” way to assess the impact of the vehicle. Of course the whole idea is to discourage people from driving.
According to the article, 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.
Personally, I think it has FAIL written all over it since people really don’t want their personal vehicles to be like taxicabs with meters tracking everywhere you’ve driven. I wonder how long it will be before some citizen takes a hammer to the meter. The more tech savvy will just figure out a way to hack it or fool it.
Amy Moritz Ridenour says:
August 13, 2011 at 10:08 pm
Oh, but don’t you know they’ve thought of that? The US version is supposed to only report the total mileage driven, to reduce fears of government monitoring … yeah, like that will allay the fears.
This one’s a total non-starter in the US, it’s a joke to think Americans would accept that. I mean, what will they do when the unit dies because ‘my kid spilled battery acid on it’? Buy me a new one?
The not so pretty part is that electric cars are getting a free ride, because gas taxes maintain the roads but they pay little, maybe nothing. Obviously, not equitable. This gps is supposed to be a solution to that, but the solution is worse than the problem. I think it should be a flat “no-gas” tax applied at the time of purchase.
At California’s current gas tax rate of $0.70 per gallon, if a car gets 25 mpg that’s about three cents per mile, or $30 per thousand miles driven. Car goes a hundred thousand miles in its average lifetime, say, call it $3,000 flat tax per electric vehicle … seems fair to me.
Otherwise we end up with all-electric cars and no way to maintain the roads, can’t have that.
Love the irony,
w.
Well i escaped that openair prison years ago, but that idea came up in another form a few years ago already and was shot down as totally idiotic. Then it was just to collect roadtax. Cost billions of euro’s to setup a test project.
The proposed law was pretty fierce: 4 years prison for tampering with the device.By comparison: manslaughter gets you maximum 2 years with probation. It’s now a lame duck idea.
This idiotic derivative will go the same road, again some weirdo green cult’s dream.
So write this up in the: funny but unrealistic
High fuel prices in the UK are having the “desired effect”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2011/jul/08/tax-revenue-drops-as-drivers-cut-back-on-petrol
“The government has lost almost £650m in tax revenue in the first 12 weeks of this year thanks to a drop in the amount of petrol and diesel being used by British motorists compared with the same period three years ago, according to the AA.”
When the country has a massive hole in its finances our government seems to be doing everything it can to make things worse.
Appart from the direct lose of revenue high high fuel prices also increase industries transport costs keeping inflation high. This together with ever increasing gas and electricity prices does not bode well for the British economy.
What these morons haven’t figured out yet is that people have a limit to their tolerance and the environmental impact they need to worry about is the type brought on by the Unabomber and Anders Behring Breivik.
The way they are pushing people with loss of freedoms, privacy, and fraudulent carbon taxes for zero valid reason means every kid on the block – not to mention the odd adult – is pretty soon going to want to blow the front out of a government building…
The first enterprising person to sell jammers over the internet will be the next billionaire.
The only possible reason for the government to prefer a system like this is if they intend taxing certain routes more heavily. Otherwise fuel tax is a much simpler and more effective “solution”.
If they intend taxing routes differently, they will encourage vehicles onto other (certainly less suitable) routes. It will be like the smoking bans all over again. I never used to be bothered by smoke from the bar next door but all the smokers in the street now means I can’t have my windows open. Pretty soon that street will also be full of cars and trucks using it as a rat-run to avoid taxes. Genius stuff. Thanks for that.
Anyway, a bit of tin-foil wrapped round the unit will end its spying.
I think the reason for hare-brained schemes like this one is that they’re already taxing fuel to the maximum they safely can.
Its already of the table in the Netherlands, Any political party openly supporting this or similar plan is comitting political suicide. And this has been going on for decades already, how to squeeze even more money out of the holy milkcow also known as the family car.
This plan had TransLink 2.0 written al over it. TransLink being the company behind the Dutch electronic public transport card(1), wich is way over budget, costing much more to operate then anticipated and can be hacked with ease, even by my 68 year old mother with her aging laptop, a simple certain type of USB cardreader (2) and some software from the internets.
(1) A bit like the British Oystercard or the cards in use in Japan, but not as convinient and a lot more expensive, not to mention flawed and insecure.
(2) Clever chaps buy a bunch of empty cards, load them with 50 or 100 euros, and resell them for about 17.50 to 20 euros.
Arizona CJ says:
GPS based? Easy to defeat; block the GPS signals. A simple metal shield will work nicely, and the thing will never know it’s left the garage. (try using a GPS indoors; they often can’t get a signal).
or, cut the power lead. Or fry the damn thing with microwaves from a microwave oven (simply rig the door sensor so it can run while open, and aim), or a ton of other ways. A hammer would be my first choice, or just feed the thing a high voltage charge and fry it, etc.
CAR says – you have no GPS signal – you have 30 seconds to get reception or the car will stop.
Wonder what happens if you are stuck in a tunnel in a traffic jam ???
Lovely, so IngSoc. Of course it’s not about taxing road use, there’s lots of taxes and payments on that. Regarding electric cars (at least here in Portugal) these will be taxed at charging points — I should have seen that coming.
Of course there’s something like 80% tax in petrol at 8 dollars a gallon, approx. But there’s an entire gold mine in selling or renting the devices, and creating Yet Another Tax on Someting Already Taxed. (Example: when we buy a new car it is taxed for import — an illegal tax, but the tax revenue is bigger than the what the EU fines the government every year for applying it — and for CO2 emissions and finally, on top of all that, 21% VAT.)
Ruined or tampered with the device? “No problemo”, you pay another device and an hefty indemnization / fine / whatever. Or lose your driving license or get shot in the back of your head or something.
No politician can’t resist authoritarianism. Now you’ll say, “but you voted for them”, and that opens another, entire, big can of live worms.
I remember this being suggested a couple of years ago in the UK. SF writer Charlie Stross was full of scorn in his blog, and gave several reasons why it wasn’t practical–including the likelihoodcertainty that within weeks of such a system being set up, you’d be able to download dodgy software for a mobile phone to generate an alternate GPS signal…
This is done in the UK already with 65% of the price of road fuel as tax. The more you use the more tax you pay. and the car needs taxing every year as well. I pay £255 pa just to have the car legal to drive.The cost goes to £450 pa if you drive a very large engined car.
@ur momisugly Don K
Last I checked LPG had duty on it, though here in Oz it’s a lot lower. There’s no reason for it to stay lots lower and every reason to expect tax to shift from one fuel to another, and in fact I think the rate on LPG did go up last month as a result of last year’s budget. This is to be expected and has happened before and will happen again. When I was a kid (in Britain) diesel was quite a bit cheaper than petrol, but by the time I was actually driving a diesel powered car rates of duty had caught up and diesel was actually more expensive than plain old unleaded – still was when I left the UK several years ago. The same will happen to LPG, and then it’ll be CNG or whatever the next fuel is. Electricity? Same again. I’ve always had to pay either VAT or GST, which amount to the same thing, on my electricity bill, so if I had an electric car my bill would be higher the more I drove it. Not only that but it would be higher still the more I loaded the car with people or cargo. Sitting in traffic wouldn’t cost in the same way that any kind of internal combustion engine does (unless switched off, of course) but then it doesn’t emit anything or use up any more of whatever went to producing the electricity to begin with. And of course there’s still the cost of the driver’s time, so traffic congestion is and always will be its own disincentive.
Whatever is powering my car is by the by – if my use of it rises roughly in proportion to the amount I drive then I’m going to be paying more for driving more and paying more for a heavier or less efficient vehicle, just as I am now.
“What’s YOUR solution`to equitably funding highway maintenance in the 2030s and beyond?”
The thing is that fuel duty and other transport taxes, at least in the UK and Oz, don’t go into funding maintenance and construction, and I don’t think they have for years. It might be ring fenced where you are but I’m used to it all going into the same pot as almost all other tax and road building and maintenance coming out of the same pot. I’m pretty sure the same applies in the Netherlands and everywhere else in the EU (assuming the EU hasn’t imploded thanks to the various debt problems of some of its members by the time this comment is approved 😉 ) and I’d bet that that would still be the case if distance based charging ever happens. I’m not suggesting it’s equitable, but I am saying that arguably there is less need for equitable funding of roads in the future when there isn’t now (UK motoring taxes are several times greater than expenditure, making them at least partly Pigovian) and hasn’t been for a while.
Time over distance gives you speed , can anyone see them not to using this check for speeding ?
Meanwhile lets remember that for the UK there has NEVER BEEN any tax change for motorists that has not netted the government INCREASED REVENUE.
But your right you can image the black market in ways around this idea , perhaps the tinfoil will be useful after all.
The role of the Green Socialist in the Netherlands, but also in the rest of Europe is quite big. Nonetheless there was quite an opposition against this way of taxing and the plans were skipped.
The real problem is that the budget of most European countries are handled by greenies who socialize to much with the money they can spend.
Currently we pay for petrol € 1,60 per litre, which is about USD 2,25 or USD 8,50 per US gallon or USD 10,20 per Imperial gallon. Eighty percent of this price is tax. As a result of this I consider drivers of a Chrysler 300C, Mercedes S Class, Audi A8, Jaguar XJ, Cadillac Escalade or BMW 7 series as socialist.
(Now you can wonder what our ministers drive – I give you a hint, it isn’t a Toyota Camry 2.2)
It’s even more curious as to why this is popping up in The Netherlands when you consider the Dutch are major users of bikes. There is something like 10 bikes for every car in the country. Therefore the car is already a very low player in environmental impact.
Dare I say it but I suspect some Government boffin has run some calculations that shows they can extort more money from their citizens this way?
Mailman
Another useless invention of government. By the time they fully implement it, the bureaucrats will stumble upon the fact there’s no need for people to drive to the gulag or even to drive between gulags. That’s what mass transit is all about.
The plan was cancelled [when the current Dutch government was elected] last year, as the NYT article states.
algorithm that tracks the following things:
The car’s environmental impact -OK
The distances driven, -OK
The route, -my fascist detector is beeping like crazy
The time it is driven -OK
Josualdo says:
No politician can’t resist authoritarianism. Now you’ll say, “but you voted for them”, and that opens another, entire, big can of live worms.
Except in Australia – 60% voted against the current Government – but they are now in power.
That’s Democracy.
Who needs a Dictatorship
I wonder how it would cope with a 5 minute session with a demagnetizer?
The first attempt to introduce a similar but lass advanced system has failed already.
But as long he Green Control Freaks are in power they will continue to try.
Ahem,
Before you rush to blame the UK government for high fuel prices you may like to check out this graph:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business/market_data/commodities/143908/twelve_month.stm
Methinks the drop in fuel usage has a lot to do with the increase in its price…
The only way to make this completely equitable is to require that each PASSENGER, along with the driver, have a GPS, so that not just the vehicle, but those being transported in it are logged.
By logging all of the persons in the vehicle you can ascertain the actual total environmental impact of the vehicle and its operation.
Since bicycles are a significant user of the roadways, and by their existence influence traffic patterns and flow as cars and trucks must alter their speed and direction, so too should bicycles be equipped with GPS devices.
I think California will be the first state to adopt this brilliant scheme to thwart Global Climate Warming Change, by requiring all residents to be chipped with RFID devices, a far more practical and inexpensive way to achieve the ultimate goal and avoid a police state.
/sarc off
Mailman says:
It’s even more curious as to why this is popping up in The Netherlands when you consider the Dutch are major users of bikes.
That’s exactly why this is popping up! There are a lot of people who do NOT own a car, and they want others to stop using their car. Not suprisingly, they also wanted the tax money to be spent on public transport.
It’s the same as when the Party for the Animals (pvdd) suggested higher taxes on meat: they are mostly vegetarians themselves.
Basically it’s “Let’s tax the things I do not use to pay for the things I do use”.