User pay per km

[malnar]

Had a rare need to drive in peak hour this morning (don't know how they do it every day) & was jumping around the talk radio stations. Neil Mitchell 3AW Melb said our Deputy Prime Minister yesterday said the Govt is looking into pricing per km (Fin Review artice was mentioned). This is apparently in response to electric vehicles coming on line & the need to maintain revenue given e vehicles pay no petrol excise.

An interviewee from an infrastructure think tank said that the 30 odd cents per litre petrol excise is for building roads which I don't think is directly correct. I think it goes into general revenue.

Somehow the figure of 10c per km was arrived at. The callers were hysterical about the injustice & inequity of it all & of course Neil Mitchell said "push bikes" should not be exempt from paying.

I would anticipate people like N Mitchell classifying electric cars and bicycles together as "fuel free vehicles" which must be taxed on parity with the guzzlers.

[march83]

Cents per km per kilogram makes more sense, right? Even if it were just approximate weight by vehicle class. I'll more than happily pay my share which should be somewhere in the order of 0.5% of the rate for cars. I mean, if all we had to do was build infrastructure to allow bikes to get around then the spending would be much lower - it's those damn cars forcing us to spend the extra! Where do I send my 2.5c for my daily commute?

I guess the government will give me some sort of free Garmin GPS with de-personalized uploading facilities in order to track this sort of thing, right? And they can totally trust me to make sure to keep the battery charged I guess without a screen the battery would last a lot longer.

User pays systems on the road are interesting and all, but the requirement for roads is significantly driven by our need to transport food around - whether you drive or not, you rely on roads in order to stock the shelves at the local supermarket. Additionally Colesworth and the like are making profits by using said roads. Everyone needs to pay so an exclusively user pays system is imbalanced.

[uart]

H
An interviewee from an infrastructure think tank said that the 30 odd cents per litre petrol excise is for building roads which I don't think is directly correct. I think it goes into general revenue.

Somehow the figure of 10c per km was arrived at.

It's actually more like 39 cents per litre (39.6 on normal unleaded and about 35.9 on E10) in excise, and yeah most of it goes to general revenue.

Even at 39c though, that 10c per km charge is equivalent to a car that gets only 3.9 km/L (26L/100km)! My Prius gets nearly 25 km/L (4 L/100k), that's an equivalent of only 1.6 cents per km in excise.

An average passenger car these days gets about 8 L/100 km, and at that rate the per km charge should only be about 3 cents per km.

BTW. Some state in the US went down this route and specifically penalized cars (petrol cars, not electric) that were too efficient. Some of these were later repealed but I'm not sure if all of them.

[uart]

Cents per km per kilogram makes more sense, right? Even if it were just approximate weight by vehicle class. I'll more than happily pay my share which should be somewhere in the order of 0.5% of the rate for cars.

Yep, the rego levy for passenger cars has always been based on TARE weight, so it would be totally consistent to do the same for this charge (and otherwise pedestrians would have to pay). That means weight of bike excluding rider, so 1/200th (0.5%) sounds about right. Wow finally an incentive for a super light weight bike .

[Leaf T]

I was in the mood for some self flagellation once but another injury prevented it. I tuned into 3aw's whinge maestro Neil Mitchell which was far more effective anyway. Win win.

[Jmuzz]

I think smart GPS logging tolling is a 100% certainty over the next couple of decades.
Toll based on car/truck/bike type and purpose, scheduled commute window, time of day, time onroad, distance, which road, which lane, premium speeds.

Australia won't do it first though so doesn't really matter.
UK will probably do it first, London is already most of the way there. Perhaps China too, they already have heavy tolling and zone restrictions and privacy issues don't exist (since already low privacy).

When Aus does consider that path there will be others to copy and all the theoretical arguments won't apply since there will be existing examples. Samsung or someone will be pumping out millions of tracker boxes so won't cost much to equip every vehicle.

[Nate]

You dont have a pay per use system for public infrastructure & services - it simply doesnt work.
There was a great paper from an economics guy a while ago which went into the depths of it - but its just not the way public infra works.

You all chip a bit in depending on the benefit to society.
Spend $2 on a bike lane & get a $4 benefit to society (Syd council numbers when they did their bike lanes a while ago)

Otherwise we'd never have xray & ct-scan machines either!

[Thoglette]

I think smart GPS logging tolling is a 100% certainty over the next couple of decades.

I'm simply amazed that the insurers of logistics companies have not already insisted on this.

Unless, of course, they are also benefiting from drivers breaking the rules.

[march83]

You dont have a pay per use system for public infrastructure & services - it simply doesnt work.
There was a great paper from an economics guy a while ago which went into the depths of it - but its just not the way public infra works.

You all chip a bit in depending on the benefit to society.
Spend $2 on a bike lane & get a $4 benefit to society (Syd council numbers when they did their bike lanes a while ago)

Otherwise we'd never have xray & ct-scan machines either!

Can you link the paper, or discussion of? While I agree with you in principal, what about things like public transport? Imagine the trains if they were free? The current network couldn't deal with the extra demand leading to a poorer service for everyone - people would tolerate a lesser service to save money which is not ideal. I feel like some "usage fees" are better considered as "shaping fees" - a train ticket is a financial incentive to reduce load on the network and distribute it elsewhere (cars, buses, bikes); a road usage fee is a financial incentive to reduce load on the network rather than to directly pay for its upkeep.

Of course these sorts of fees are regressive and hit the poorest hardest, but that's what rebates and deductions are for...

edit: not arguing for usage fees, just pointing out that they're not necessarily stupid.

[AdelaidePeter]

You dont have a pay per use system for public infrastructure & services - it simply doesnt work.

But don't many public services work exactly that way? e.g. water, electricity, gas, phone, mail, ambulance, public transport... (though public transport is subsidised, and maybe some others too).

Otherwise we'd never have xray & ct-scan machines either!

They're paid for by insurance, albeit public insurance here (Medicare).

That said, I don't think it's viable for road usage yet, simply because of the amount of infrastructure required (a detector on every road?)

[uart]

I think smart GPS logging tolling is a 100% certainty over the next couple of decades.

Yeah I've got to admit that I'm not looking forward to it, but I cant really think of any other way to levy these road usage charges once electric cars appear in large numbers.

You can't really put the levy on electricity directly, because people use it for so many other purposes. Not to mention charging from solar installations.

One alternative though, maybe just add it onto rego based on the expected km travelled for that year? TBH this would be my preference.

[bychosis]

I think smart GPS logging tolling is a 100% certainty over the next couple of decades.

I'm simply amazed that the insurers of logistics companies have not already insisted on this.

Unless, of course, they are also benefiting from drivers breaking the rules.

I'd be very surprised if the businesses don't already have it installed on most vehicles. Heck, even Domino's pizza drivers have it. It is cheap and effective in managing your fleet. Some industries there is some backlash from drivers about big brother watching over them, but those business with profit priority over driver well being will have it installed regardless of the 'privacy' issues.

[Comedian]

I think smart GPS logging tolling is a 100% certainty over the next couple of decades.

I'm simply amazed that the insurers of logistics companies have not already insisted on this.

Unless, of course, they are also benefiting from drivers breaking the rules.

I'd be very surprised if the businesses don't already have it installed on most vehicles. Heck, even Domino's pizza drivers have it. It is cheap and effective in managing your fleet. Some industries there is some backlash from drivers about big brother watching over them, but those business with profit priority over driver well being will have it installed regardless of the 'privacy' issues.

Any type of GPS logger is likely to be quite difficult. It's one thing when a fleet is owned by a business and they choose to install something. It's another thing when the government mandates the installation of something into a private vehicle for taxation purposes. The first thing Joe average is going to do is try and bypass it so you are going to have to have monitoring and penalties. All of this complicated by the certainty that all vehicles are different. There are so many reasons why it's a nightmare.

It's going to be tempting for governments to tax key routes - because they have all they need now to do that. The concern is that this will encourage people away from main routes. It's a nightmare. Perhaps the government will move to control charging of electric cars - but that is full of problems too.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-01-15/e ... ng/9235564

Perhaps we should just forget about the fuel tax and see it as an electric car subsidy because they are pretty good for many things.

https://www.solarquotes.com.au/blog/ele ... subsidies/

[Thoglette]

That said, I don't think it's viable for road usage yet, simply because of the amount of infrastructure required (a detector on every road?)

Of course it's viable. A large number of people provide that data to Google and Apple every day. And anyone who's worked on a large industrial site recently will tell you, IVMS is mature and cheap, if you want to DIY.

Can you link the paper, or discussion of?

Where to start? Probably the easiest place to look (outside any economics text book pre-Regan) would be search engine in The Conversation.

While I agree with you in principal, what about things like public transport? Imagine the trains if they were free?

One doesn't have to imagine. Over on the socialist side of the rabbit proof fence, many major cities have free public transport within the city limits. And all major sporting events now include "free" public transport.

I feel like some "usage fees" are better considered as "shaping fees" - a train ticket is a financial incentive to reduce load on the network

Yes, but we don't apply "usage fees" to cars - instead we set them as a sunk cost (rego, insurance, depreciation, garage).
Cab fares, on the other hand, are immediate. And come a whole lot closer to capturing the real cost.

Finally, most public transport is at capacity for maybe 4 hours out of 24. At the same time the roads are chock-a-block. Your fee can not do any useful shaping at this point.

If we spent a fraction of what gets spent on roads and car parks (never mind cleaning up the mess and accidents) on pubic transport there'd be no "capacity problem" to deal with. Which nicely links in with....

An interviewee from an infrastructure think tank said that the 30 odd cents per litre petrol excise is for building roads which I don't think is directly correct. I think it goes into general revenue.

Don't think. Read and research

But you are correct: it goes to general revenue. As a population we (very, very) roughly sponsor roads by about $1K per motorvehicle, per year.

That excludes the cost of "free" parking which we include in every building and at every school, shopping precinct or roadside. Data on the direct cost of this is hard to find. But it's at least a few percent of the cost of construction work. What's that worth each year?

Nor does it pay for the roughly 1/4 of hospital bills ($17Bpa) which are associated directly with road trauma. Best estimate says that the "cost of road trauma" is somewhere north of $40B (the west). That's about $2000 per MV per year.

Everyone has slightly different numbers (and choses to include/exclude differnt things) but by and large there's agreement on the statements above - most road related organisations have some sort of publication (e.g. AAA cost of road trauma 2017) summarising the points. BITRE and ABS are also useful sources of raw data.

Then we could look at the indirect costs: obesity, pollution, loss of habit, opportunity cost on land use......

[AdelaidePeter]

That said, I don't think it's viable for road usage yet, simply because of the amount of infrastructure required (a detector on every road?)

Of course it's viable. A large number of people provide that data to Google and Apple every day. And anyone who's worked on a large industrial site recently will tell you, IVMS is mature and cheap, if you want to DIY.

I was thinking enforcement. How do you ensure every car has a GPS, and stop people from removing or disabling it? That's why I was imagining that every road would need a detector, to detect vehicles without a sensor. As comes up on this board from time to time, it's hard enough to ensure that every car is even registered.

[Jmuzz]

Any type of GPS logger is likely to be quite difficult. It's one thing when a fleet is owned by a business and they choose to install something. It's another thing when the government mandates the installation of something into a private vehicle for taxation purposes. The first thing Joe average is going to do is try and bypass it so you are going to have to have monitoring and penalties. All of this complicated by the certainty that all vehicles are different. There are so many reasons why it's a nightmare.

It's pretty simple, just a box on the dash or even externally on the numberplate, even simpler if it has an external GPS antenna which can poke out from under bonnet, getting thin 12v wire to it is really no drama.

GPS watches with RF uploads are the size of 2 50c coins (and half of that is battery) and under $200. You can rivet that onto numberplate easy and signal would be fine.

Tamper evident is pretty easily done by a high-tech computer device, and it would be a criminal offence to tamper with the government property device. Open it and it's going to know and pop it's tamper fuse which will show in its signing codes during uploads.

Like I said Australia will not be the leader, just a follower of the tech when it is an established mass produced device costing $50.

A country which has already given up road privacy and accepted things like Congestion Charge and trackers in trucks will do it first and get the bugs out of the system, produce the devices in the tens of millions, then others will follow.

[BJL]

I'm be interested to know how everyone thinks the billing system for this would work. Would it be a monthly charge, 6 monthly, annual or what?

Also bear in mind that GPS is not always accurate. It hasn't been unknown for a cyclist to ride 1000's of kilometres over vast tracts of ocean in a single ride because of one or two dodgy readings. These occasional bugs are going to have to be sorted out without having to go to court and try to prove to a magistrate that you didn't drive 500km out to sea and back. Because I'm sure the dimwitted bureaucrats will just look at it and say 'The GPS said it happened so it must have, NEXT'

[Jmuzz]

I was thinking enforcement. How do you ensure every car has a GPS, and stop people from removing or disabling it? That's why I was imagining that every road would need a detector, to detect vehicles without a sensor.

Every car would be required to provide a monthly billing upload (that's assuming a system which isn't a live networked privacy spy).
Numberplate readers in safety cams and police cars would be feeding the database with when and where every car is seen (happening right now, not future).
Based on that database alone the system knows a minimum travel distance and premium location/time tolling that the car is expected to meet.
Eg when ABC-123 reports it only did 200km, but has been seen in Newcastle-Canberra-Newcastle then that's instantly busted as a defrauded device.

There are other easy techy solutions too. Eg 50m range radio (standard wifi chip) which can handshake with any camera pole or police car it gets close to.
"ABC-123 I have visual on you, provide handshake response to code 5353739253", no/invalid reply or tamper indicated and the cops machine starts beeping and telling him to pull over ABC-123.

[Jmuzz]

Also bear in mind that GPS is not always accurate. It hasn't been unknown for a cyclist to ride 1000's of kilometres over vast tracts of ocean in a single ride because of one or two dodgy readings.'

That's just lazy processing, eg Strava refusing to filter out obvious 5000w KOMs in cars and 800kmph planes which intersect segments..
It's easy to filter when someone bothers to apply basic logic.
Newer stuff is using accelerometers to verify movement and keep track in tunnels too, so it's a decreasing issue.

Ideally a system would preserve privacy by only uploading the billing summary to govt. With actual logs available to the owner to review, if they challenge the billing then they are going to have to share the full logs (which would be signed with encryption keys to gaurantee no tampering) or at least snippets so the filtering can be fixed and billing recalculated.

[Comedian]

Any type of GPS logger is likely to be quite difficult. It's one thing when a fleet is owned by a business and they choose to install something. It's another thing when the government mandates the installation of something into a private vehicle for taxation purposes. The first thing Joe average is going to do is try and bypass it so you are going to have to have monitoring and penalties. All of this complicated by the certainty that all vehicles are different. There are so many reasons why it's a nightmare.

It's pretty simple, just a box on the dash or even externally on the numberplate, even simpler if it has an external GPS antenna which can poke out from under bonnet, getting thin 12v wire to it is really no drama.

GPS watches with RF uploads are the size of 2 50c coins (and half of that is battery) and under $200. You can rivet that onto numberplate easy and signal would be fine.

Tamper evident is pretty easily done by a high-tech computer device, and it would be a criminal offence to tamper with the government property device. Open it and it's going to know and pop it's tamper fuse which will show in its signing codes during uploads.

Like I said Australia will not be the leader, just a follower of the tech when it is an established mass produced device costing $50.

A country which has already given up road privacy and accepted things like Congestion Charge and trackers in trucks will do it first and get the bugs out of the system, produce the devices in the tens of millions, then others will follow.

That bit in red there is the magic bit that I think you might find could be quite tricky... It won't be pretty easy. You'll have to immobilise the car if it isn't operational. What if it can't get signal? What are you going to do in tunnels or areas of poor GPS? How's it going to phone back the charges? How's it going to know if the immobiliser has been bypassed? How are you going to agree on a standard that all vehicles have these devices fitted and must be built and compliant despite their differences? What are you going to do if a manufacturer says "we aren't prepared to make changes to a vehicle sold world wide for this market"? How are you going to get all states and territories to agree? What will happen to existing LEV's? Will they just be exempt..

While I agree a "high tech computer device" to do all this isn't too hard to do I'm pretty sure all the little details will see this stuff being a long way off. All through computer history tricky people have found a way to bypass virtually anything - and when there is big money involved people will give it a red hot go.

Like I said I reckon it's going to be a lot easier for them to charge significant roads or by taxing areas with technologies they have now..

[find_bruce]

Tamper evident is pretty easily done by a high-tech computer device, and it would be a criminal offence to tamper with the government property device. Open it and it's going to know and pop it's tamper fuse which will show in its signing codes during uploads.

That's a whole lot of handwaving - you don't need to tamper with the device, just block the GPS antenna - faraday had that sorted in 1835 & yes they have been used successfully to block tracking in fleet vehicles

[Thoglette]

What if ..

All been solved.

What if you loose your opal/smartrider/e-tag/whatever? What if it stops working? What if you'd rather have a paper ticket ? etc etc

Same questions, same answers, same admin and burdens of proof. And brought in with the carrot and stick. It'll start as a discount on your rego or insurance or tolls...and end up that you'll need "club" rego to run an MV without it.

As the OP noted, the problems are political, not technical.

Which'll all change if the tollway companies put two-and-two together. After all, every road is now a toll-road!

[Jmuzz]

That bit in red there is the magic bit that I think you might find could be quite tricky... It won't be pretty easy. You'll have to immobilise the car if it isn't operational. What if it can't get signal..

There is no need to immobilize, it would just show a discrepancy vs any checkpoint cameras and it will show in any police car handshake system.
Good luck when police impound the box on the spot and send it for review.

All through computer history tricky people have found a way to bypass virtually anything

Who is bypassing Samsung Knox? Is the FBI able to crack iPhone encryption yet?
Nobody is probing these modern chips, too small, designed for security. Not like old 8 bit AVR microprocessors you can send to Russia for reading.

Add accelerometer movement tracking. Not going to fool that with an antenna shield or jammer, less accurate but it still knows and may record more distance rather than less.
Especially when the upload data reports the percentage of time with movement and a blocked GPS and that gets flagged as abnormal and sent for repair/inspection.

Add inter box location sharing over local radio (wifi) and even with a blocked GPS it knows where it is within 50m if another unblocked car is around.

[uart]

GPS that simply measures distance travelled is one thing, but a full wifi system of monitoring you at all times is going too far for my liking (in terms of privacy). What is wrong with the much simpler idea of just adding the charge to your rego (based on expected km travelled, with credit/debit for next year in the case of dependencies).

[Jmuzz]

Lacks ability to dynamic charge based on road and time, charging for parking on road, obsoletes speeding cameras, solves fake plates, can ban/tax backstreet rat running.

It has already happened, London is basically a tollroad, regions of China are tolls every road/district.

The system will expand in those places, trackers offer a lot more capability than cameras (especially when fake plates become an issue). So a tracker system wins as the best system for government, therefore it will happen.

Others will follow copying the existing mass produced system. Phones with GPS and radio and accelerometers are $30, how much do you reckon a box with just those features will cost when production runs are in the tens of millions?

The device can maintain privacy, it can have map and rates inside and just spit out the bill signed with key.
Of course privacy loss would creep in, and in China's case privacy would never exist at all.
But that privacy is already gone, every safety cam, speed camera, highway patrol is already logging plates. Not long until that is every police car and every traffic watch camera.