Dutch Government To Tax Drivers Based On Car Use 500
An anonymous reader writes "The Netherlands is testing a new car use tax system that will tax drivers based upon how much they drive rather than just taxing the vehicle itself. The trials utilize a little box outfitted with GPS, wireless internet, and a complex rating system that tracks a car's environmental impact, its distance driven, its route, and what time it is driven as a fairer way to assess the impact of the vehicle and hopefully dissuade people from driving. 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."
Movement won't be a reliable measure (Score:5, Insightful)
Putting an environmental impact fee (tax) on fuel would be a more reliable compensation for your impact than GPS. If I sit idling in my car for a few hours I can burn an entire tank of gas without moving an inch.
For what will the GPS tracking *really* be used?
Re:This was proposed in Oregon (Score:4, Insightful)
It makes the tax more fair to charge road-users by the mile and the ton over the road, and how would you measure that without a GPS odometer in every car?
Tax the fuel. It's not just Oregonians that use the road.
Re:Seems like a lot of effort (Score:2, Insightful)
Why not just tax fuel like everyone else? This messing about with GPS seems ridiculous to achieve such a simple aim.
If they really wanted to be fair they'd find a way that taxes the bicyclists and out-of-state drivers, too.
Re:This was proposed in Oregon (Score:2, Insightful)
No, they will use it to track us. They already implemented a similar system in the public transports network that tracks you every move.
Remember, this is the country that has the most known wiretaps out on its citizens(China and NKorea are good contenders if we would know.).
They gotta know where you are all the time (Score:5, Insightful)
No really. It's for your own good.
Antidemocratic (Score:5, Insightful)
FTA: Eric-Mark Huitema, a transportation specialist with I.B.M ... “To do it you need support of the government, and it needs to happen when there is not an election because there’s always a bit of resistance.”
With people like that, we don't need terrorists hating democracy, we obviously have democracy-haters running the place. Not that it's surprising, but it's even more odious when they're so blatant about it.
Re:This was proposed in Oregon (Score:4, Insightful)
Take off your tinfoil hat. There is no ulterior motive. Trust us. Ok, let's settle on plain stupidity. A fuel tax is a good measure and it takes in account very well the difference between an SUV and a Prius. Setting up a huge infrastructure in an attempt to go from 'good' to perfectly fair is very misguided. Usually it's the old 'because it has flaws it can't be good and it should be removed.' Then all you need is an example, however rare, where the fuel tax can be considered unfair.
And of course once your every move is being tracked every possible use will be made of that data.
Re:Movement won't be a reliable measure (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed. The car's location will be known to the authorities 24x7. Combine that with the fact that all your movements with public transportation are soon tracked with the chip-card, and it means that the government knows where you are any time of the day unless you're walking.
Re:This was proposed in Oregon (Score:4, Insightful)
Exactly... what's wrong with taxing the fuel?
The idea is to make people use less fossil fuel, to conserve driving when possible, and get eco-friendlier cars.
It's so backwards, as the ultimate goal is to reduce fuel consumption, so let's tax mileage?
Of course, when we all have nice green eco-friendly recycleable electic cars with batteries that don't kill 100 square miles of land... then they have to tax something else.. but that's quite far in the future :)
Dissuade from driving cars? (Score:3, Insightful)
Trying to get people to stop using cars is basically forcing them to reduce their quality of life... There are simply no viable alternatives to many car uses for a lot of people.
Public transport is useless, its dirty, unreliable, often unsafe, overcrowded (yes i know the roads can be crowded too, but at least you have somewhere comfortable to sit in a car and can stop to take a break), doesn't run all night and is even more useless outside of large cities.
Riding bikes is only practical for short distances, where its not too hilly and where it's safe to do so... This is why so many people ride bikes in holland, the population is densely packed, the ground is flat and there are cycle routes everywhere. In other places, cyclists are expected to share the roads with large dangerous vehicles and aren't allowed to ride on the sidewalk - even if the sidewalk is empty and the road is full of vehicles, thus slowing down the vehicles (causing them to waste more fuel) and increasing the danger for the cyclist.
Taking away people's personal transportation is a terrible thing to do, having your own car massively increases your quality of life and this is not a new thing, having your own horse has done this for hundreds of years and now people are trying to force us to take a massive step backwards.
Lack of personal transportation will force people to live in overcrowded ghettos, since public transport is not profitable/practical without a high population...
Re:This was proposed in Oregon (Score:3, Insightful)
People will just keep running their old tires as long as they can, long after the point at which they become unsafe...
Track my car? Just Say No! (Score:5, Insightful)
There is NO WAY IN HELL he would have a tracker in his car because if anyone was able to break into the system it would make it easier for similar people to track, find, and do god knows what else, to his family. They could _know_ that his car was away from home and his wife's car was at home. They could _know_ that all vehicles were away and therefore the house was empty. And let's not even start to tell me the system is secure because we all know there is no such system!
There are just so many ways the information could be miss-used and abused, when a far simpler way to 'tax by the mile' is to put tax on the fuel.
Tax on fuel: You drive a lot ... you pay more. You drive an inefficient vehicle, or drive inefficiently, you pay more. Simple and cheap to setup, and cheap to run.
Re:This was proposed in Oregon (Score:4, Insightful)
There is a thing called an odometer. It's in every car. There's nothing wrong with requiring a car inspection every year and taxing mileage based on the odometer is a much cheaper and simpler and less intrusive way.
If they want to track you, they've already got your cell phone.
This GPS stuff is idiotic.
Re:This was proposed in Oregon (Score:5, Insightful)
Compared against the possibility of receiving a bill at the end of the year for my mileage, I'd rather pay the tax on the gas. At least that way, it's amortized over the whole year rather than a lump sum. Quite aside from that, cars that don't have NL plates still use the roads, and they wouldn't be taxed at all under the proposed system, which is hardly fair to the locals.
Re:They gotta know where you are all the time (Score:4, Insightful)
You are working on the assumption that the system will send location information to the government.
Sounds like the box has all the info it needs to calculate the cost, needing only to send that information to its base.
I'm not saying that is how it will work, but there is no reason to jump to conclusions.
Re:They gotta know where you are all the time (Score:4, Insightful)
Good for you! Keep up the optimism. You must still be young.
Re:This was proposed in Oregon (Score:2, Insightful)
"There's no political will to increase the fuel taxes, and no easy mechanism to apply them to electric cars.
And there shouldn't be. If the stated purpose of the tax is to decrease fuel consumption then taxing electric vehicles is contrary to the stated goal. The purpose of the tax is obvious; to enrich the state, period. There is no altruistic reason. And if the purpose of life is to serve the state, what kind of life is that? At what point do Europeans decide that a particular level of taxation is too much? 50%? 75%? When does one say "Well, now that's over the line?" What would be the harm in simply turning over one's income to the state and letting the state dole out what every one needs, according to their means? Which of course would be 100% since the state would be confiscating all our money?
Re:This was proposed in Oregon (Score:2, Insightful)
This sort of system *is* coming though because almost 100% of people are going to switch to electric cars - no more gas revenue.
Surely you jest? We are a very, very long way from even 10% of people switching to electric cars. The main obstacle will be twofold:
1) We don't have nearly enough powerplants. As nuclear is being phased out after Fukushima, natural gas and coal are the main options for new powerplants. There goes your environmental argument.
2) The electricity grid has nowhere near the capacity needed. You would have to dig up all the local roads everywhere and lay new power mains, and you would have to upgrade many of the large power lines and distribution stations as well.
Net social-economic impact: negative a few hundred billion dollars, and more CO2 produced.
Re:This was proposed in Oregon (Score:4, Insightful)
The stated purpose is actually to make road users pay for the roads they use. Fuel consumption does not come into that calculation at all, as fuel consumption has nothing to do with the cost of maintaining roads.
I do have to admire that slippery slope you got going on there though. Freedom yeah! Down with socialism!