Road rage...

[alexpgp]

Recently, LJ friend eastexpert posted a link at the BBC reporting on a 'Pay-as-you-go' plan for highway taxes, where the government's vigorish would be collected on the basis of mileage driven (to replace existing fuel and road taxes), at rates "varying from 2p per mile for driving on a quiet road out of the rush hour to £1.34 for motorways at peak times." Of course, in order to make the system work, every car in the country will have to be equipped with a device that records where the car has been and at what time.

In chasing down a link from another of eastexpert's posts, I ran across a related article (here, but in Russian) about how Oregon is considering a similar plan, explaining that - in Oregon's case at least - the reason for the shift away from fuel-based taxes to mileage-based tax is overly excessive adoption of fuel-efficient cars by drivers. (Dig it: Oregonians don't consume enough fuel to fill the tax coffers!) If the pilot program goes through, look for GPS to become a standard device on cars in Oregon and other "progressive," tax-hungry jurisdictions.

(I mean, c'mon, the obvious attraction of being able to further manipulateincentivize citizen behavior - the Oregon plan also would penalize drivers for rush-hour traffic on major arteries - and to have a fairly detailed record of car movements - to combat terrorism, naturally - is probably going to make this attractive to a lot of states, if not the Feds.)

It would appear George Orwell's vision of 1984 wasn't wrong; he was just off by a generation and a couple of orders of magnitude.

Cheers...

Comments

And here's an even more cheery thought.

[astroprisoner.livejournal.com]

I'm sure it's only a matter of time before a place like Oregon adopts it, but soon afterward (if not before) look for California to adopt it too. California has just the right combination of budget problems and residents who are all for big government, plus is already suffering more from the "improved gas mileage" impact on tax collection.

And California is such a big auto market that once they adopt the tracking system, it'll be easier for the auto makers to just install the equipment on all cars, so the tracking ability will come to all of us.