Joshua Gans mentions an RAC plan to tax based on distance travelled where the data is collected by GPS, and also mentions that there needs to be some 'distance' pricing to account for congestion. The answer must be no. The government does not get to track us, certainly not by GPS. It is bad enough having to travel through political boundaries - even now the US wants to fingerprint people as they leave - allowing that kind of domestic surveillance through GPS collected taxation; no. Liberty must come first.

I am willing to put up with congestion if it is the price of liberty. Another way will have to be found by theorists, economists and policy makers.
More reading: Tags, Joshua Gans, Tax, Petrol, Congestion
Cam Riley: South Sea Republic. Freedom, liberty, equity and an Australian Republic.

Comments
  • Vee . # . 1/1
    It would just be another way of marginalising the regional and rural electorates/voters because they have further distance to travel.
  • The colossal privacy issues aside, it strikes me as a very complicated idea with little actual reward.

    I am not an economist, of course, but I hardly see the point of all the hoop jumping with installing GPS devices in millions of existing cars, centralised price setting for roads, offsets for fuel efficient cars - presumably with inspection regimes to give an individualised rating for each car - blah blah blah.

    Why would you bother? A fuel tax per litre already imposes a penalty for low fuel economy. By and large the fuel tax already imposes a fee for highway use. By and large the fuel tax already imposes a fee for emissions.

    I don't know if it would impact the rural driver as much as the previous commenter believes - I imagine that most rural roads are relatively off-peak for most of the day anyway and would have considerably lower fees. It does, however, promise to be an awfully complicated beast in order to achieve such parity.

    I'd much rather support cheap or free motor ways to clear up congestion on suburban roads, cheap public transport and a congestion fee on entry into the major CBD areas. Aside from the public transport point - rail in Sydney is already cheap - the opposite approach to inner city congestion to that taken by the current government. Red Ken in London has demonstrated that a congestion fee can work.

    Efficiency? No, I don't think so; there'd be a lot more red tape to support such a scheme than the RAC would be willing to admit to. And the liberty thing is probably the lesser concern here; the idea is just plain dumb. a
    • adam . # . 1/1
      Red Ken's congestion plan involves hundreds of security cameras tracking the license plate of every vehicle crossing in and out of London. There's no clear gateway either, but hundreds of smallish roads at the congestion charge border. Seems to me a GPS is almost equivalent and possibly even cheaper.

      I think a sticker would have been a better solution. Track the cars that don't have them.

      The Oyster card, the London Transport smartcard, also tracks every journey made by its user.