Maine Launches Study to Track Drivers via GPS

“The reward: $895 and the opportunity to speak their minds about the highway tax experiment to a researcher..

The true reward, paying for the speeding tickets, running red lights, and any other violations where the GPS can fix your location/speed/time.

Seriously, taxes are necessary. If we want roads we need to pay a tax, but the taxation needs to be simple. Coming up with a scheme such as using a GPS is truly Orwellian and raises a multitude of oncerns beyond simplistic statement that this will be confined to raising money for the road system.

Even I have a limit to how far government can go with “innovative” taxing. If current taxation is insufficient raise the tax, don't play games. Paying the tax at the pump is simple and cheap, and would not involve supporting a whole new expensive bureaucracy.

There is an incredibly easy alternative for this: just make it part of the state inspection. The infrastructure for reporting to the DMV is already there, and it would be just another box on every car's annual inspection.

The only problem is that each locale would complain that it wouldn't get a cut of the mileage from vehicles passing through.

But how would you know that the miles driven were driven in Maine? If someone drives cross-country, they shouldn't have to pay Maine for that trip.

Actually, MikeRT has a very insightful comment that I was debating commenting on. But you asked!

I will assume that the GPS will either have an internal recording device that is read at the time (as MikeRT's suggested) the annual inspection. Alternatively, the devices could actively communicate with existing telecommunications towers, such as cell phone towers.

My planned comment to MikeRt was that when you got home from your vacation you would be getting a whole pile of bills from little communities that you never knew that you passed through. All the bills of course (as a convenience feature) would be rounded-up to the next dollar or some multiple of that dollar.

If this GPS system is instituted, a method of recording your travels is a must. If you live in the DC metro area you are consistently passing through Maryland, Virginia, and DC so you know that each state is going to demand their fair share.

I blogged about this issue back in January, acknowledging the privacy concerns raised by Cord but also pointing out that the way we currently fund roads is profoundly stupid: At best, gas taxes reflect aggregate driving (total gas consumption being a rough proxy for total miles driven), but not the specifics of which roads are used when, nor do they give drivers an incentive not to drive during peak times, etc. More importantly, the current funding system protects a government monopoly in road construction and operation, since only a limited number of roads can be operated private and toll booth technologies impose significant annoyance and time costs on users.

If, instead, we had a technology capable of metering driver's use of specific roads at specific times, we could do away with gas taxes that crudely fund a government monopoly and instead charge true user fees. Large-scale privatization of roads would suddenly become feasible and road operators could compete with each other to offer better, less congested and safer roads through a common metering system. Even without government taxes to deal with pollution externalities, this system would be good for the environment by giving users a financial incentive to avoid driving at peak times, traffic jams being a major contributor to emissions of carbon and other emissions.

The libertarian solution is to get government out of the picture, but that doesn't mean rejecting all “tracking of drivers” as inconsistent with driver privacy:

If roads weren't run by government monopolies, this kind of change would have happened a long time ago. Although many people associate toll booths with road privatization, no private business would ever choose a technology as cumbersome (and costly) as toll booths if they had the option of using a system as seamless and invisible to the user as GPS-tracking or even existing transponder-based systems (e.g., E-Z Pass,FasTrak). Maybe there's a more efficient or privacy-friendly option out there, or at least on the horizon. I don't know, but I suspect competing road operators would figure it out.

Some drivers might still be uncomfortable with the idea of a private company having access to their driving data, but that private company would have a strong incentive to compete for privacy-sensitive drivers by offering strong data protection policies (such as data anonymization and retention limits), which would of course be enforced under the FTC's existing “unfair & deceptive trade practices.”

But because government has virtually monopolized the road system, we're stuck with a terrible choice:
<ul>
<li>Continue to use a “pricing” (tax) system from the 1950s when modern satellite and computer technology offers us clearly superior alternatives that could reduce congestion and pollution and perhaps even save lives; OR</li>
<li>Risk putting the data created by those modern technologies directly into the government's hands.</li>
</ul>
It's a hard choice. I don't know what the right answer is—other than privatizing the roads, enforcing corporate privacy policies strictly under existing law, and increasing Fourth Amendment protections against government access to user data kept by companies. Since road privatization is unlikely to happen in an era when we are (re)nationalizing core industries through bailouts, I suspect that we'll end up having to choose either technology (with all its benefits) or privacy, when we should be able to have both.

Berin, you are absolutely correct: “At best, gas taxes reflect aggregate driving (total gas consumption being a rough proxy for total miles driven), but not the specifics of which roads are used when, nor do they give drivers an incentive not to drive during peak times, etc.”

There comes a point, in any data collection scheme, were it just isn't worth the time, money, and effort to account for all variables. What about someone driving a Vespa or a small car versus a Hummer? Our tax code is also an unfortunate example of this endless quixotic quest to be fair to everyone when in reality you can't be. The solution is to implement an approximate (simple) solution that is more or less fair. (PS: traffic counts are taken so road usage is known.)

As for privatizing the roads: MAJOR mistake. Private industry simply can't be trusted. Witness the games played with our financial system by private enterprise. We will obviously be at odds on this issue, so I will end here.

And I am not saying that they should. A California driver should not have to pay Virginia, but rather should have to pay both the state and the federal government. Since the federal government already pays for a significant percentage of the interstate infrastructure that shippers use, I don't think most states really have any grounds to complain that they aren't getting “their cut” when someone from out of state uses their infrastructure. That's especially true since their residents likewise use neighboring states' infrastructure as well.

That wouldn't be “egalitarian” to the smaller states in some cases, but so what? They already get massive subsidies from other states, and so they have no right to complain when the other states get to keep money closer to home which my suggestion would allow.

As for the enforcement, what I would propose is that you go get an inspection, they count your miles, and then they give you an annual tax bill which is divided over a 12 month payment cycle so you have an entire year to plan ahead and budget for paying for your road use fees.

And I am not saying that they should. A California driver should not have to pay Virginia, but rather should have to pay both the state and the federal government. Since the federal government already pays for a significant percentage of the interstate infrastructure that shippers use, I don't think most states really have any grounds to complain that they aren't getting “their cut” when someone from out of state uses their infrastructure. That's especially true since their residents likewise use neighboring states' infrastructure as well.

That wouldn't be “egalitarian” to the smaller states in some cases, but so what? They already get massive subsidies from other states, and so they have no right to complain when the other states get to keep money closer to home which my suggestion would allow.

As for the enforcement, what I would propose is that you go get an inspection, they count your miles, and then they give you an annual tax bill which is divided over a 12 month payment cycle so you have an entire year to plan ahead and budget for paying for your road use fees.

And I am not saying that they should. A California driver should not have to pay Virginia, but rather should have to pay both the state and the federal government. Since the federal government already pays for a significant percentage of the interstate infrastructure that shippers use, I don't think most states really have any grounds to complain that they aren't getting “their cut” when someone from out of state uses their infrastructure. That's especially true since their residents likewise use neighboring states' infrastructure as well.

That wouldn't be “egalitarian” to the smaller states in some cases, but so what? They already get massive subsidies from other states, and so they have no right to complain when the other states get to keep money closer to home which my suggestion would allow.

As for the enforcement, what I would propose is that you go get an inspection, they count your miles, and then they give you an annual tax bill which is divided over a 12 month payment cycle so you have an entire year to plan ahead and budget for paying for your road use fees.