A reader asks

Bern,
I have been following this Skymeter thing for some time now, and I have few questions:

1: Could your in-car meter cost be 100% offset or set to a nominal amount such as $10 if tied to location based services or couponing?


ABSOLUTELY!  That is the whole reason for adding multiple, desirable user services such as automatic, ticket-free parking payments and pay-as-you-drive insurance.



2:  Is there a model whereby a smartphone could replace the need for your telematics unit?


Not exactly, although the smartphone will be integrated for auditing, couponing and several other elements and services. Why can such a replacement not be 100%?  There are two critical difference between the telematics needed in the connected vehicle and smart phones.

First, payment telematics for road, parking and PAYD insurance must be attached securely to ensure correct metering for payment.  You can leave your phone at home or off.  This class of technology acts like an electronic license plate or a taxi meter.  It is not transferable or moveable, as is the in-car unit for the Toronto’s 407 or the E-ZPass in the US, which charges at a point and is replaceable by a license plate reader.  So doing it your way, but with these constraints would make it like the attached, in-car-phones of 15-20 years ago -- a step backwards.

Secondly, the driver is in a bit of an adversarial relationship with a road-use | parking | insurance meter, unlike your collaborative relationship with your navigation device or smartphone. Hence the road use meter must operate without user intervention and must always be correct to within a tiny error tolerance (e.g., 0.1%).  The GPS sensors on your smart phone cannot do that.  Skymeter can because it has several other sensors and processors that would make your smart phone about 50% bigger (for now – and to anticipate your next question – sure that will come, someday, as well).

The location-precise telematics we have developed we call Financial-grade GPS (FGPS).  What is in your smart phone and your Garmin is Navigation-grade GPS.  FGPS means: always accurate, non-reputable, low transaction cost, and private.  Just like your Visa card but not like your smart phone (which missing both “always accurate” [with respect to location] and “non-reputable”). The part we developed will disappear behind your rear-view mirror and your smart phone (or a dashboard display) will be your interface. AND your telco provider will be handling your payment.  So a Skymeter = the meter, your smartphone = the app interface, and a telco = the service provider.  But inside the Skymeter-smartphone combination are several other apps such as safety, in-car signage, other traveler apps, couponing, rewards, parking loyalty programs, and many others -- the smartphone app-model, but for automobility-related apps.

3: Could your parking fees be paid for by businesses that want to encourage you to park near them?

ABSOLUTELY.  That is an included capability. This is where the smart phone can play a role, although there are several ways to affect this. Remember your great uncle who does not like cell phones?  BUT you need the accuracy and non-refutability of FGPS to avoid cheating.



4: I think [Google | Facebook | Apple] is going to pay for your parking. Do you agree?


Well, I think your local retailer might want to pay for your parking (as an earned reward) and folks like Google | Facebook | Apple will fight over ways to help them.

Dutch transportation bombed back to the Middle Ages?

The history of road tolling can be seen to parallel the history of civilization.  A couple thousand years ago, in the Stone Age of tolling, the emperor would set some trusted tax collectors at the side of the road to block passage and collect a toll. Much later in the Bronze Age of tolling, local lords erected small huts that evolved into the toll booth and coin counters of the Iron Age of tolling. Then passing through the Dark Ages of fuel taxes and the Renaissance of microwave and video cameras, we arrive, finally, at the Modern Era infrastructure-free satellite tolling.

Throughout this history, as in many facets of human development, we cling to the past, afraid to abandon old habits.  In fact, like adherents of ancient religions suitable for darker times of plague and crusades, far more vehicles today slow or stop to pay tolls at booths or coin counters or have their plates read by cameras, than enjoy free flow satellite tolling.

Less than 0.1% of all the vehicles on the planet have thus far made the leap from the Renaissance to the Modern Age and these are the million trucks so equipped in Germany, Switzerland and Slovakia. Until a few months ago, the Dutch were poised to push this figure to almost 1% – an enormous leap, if you think about it.

But all that changed presumably because of America’s war in Afghanistan.  Early in 2010, the Dutch government collapsed over an Obama-requested reversal regarding Dutch troop withdrawal. That halted the “Kilometerheffing” system, which was to be based on Modern Era satellite technology.

The proposal of the new, minority government is to increase fuel taxes, which is known to have no lasting effect on congestion. Even newer proposals call for privacy-invasive video cameras instead of privacy-protecting GNSS OBUs which were designed to keep personal location data personal.

Does this mean America has bombed the Dutch transportation reform jaggernaut back to the Middle Ages?

I originally thought that, but now I don’t. The real reason is in the way humans prefer risk. We are more willing to gamble when it comes to losses, but we are risk adverse when it comes to gains. And in this politicians are no special case.  Drivers prefer to risk continuing to lose more time to congestion than to risk the promised gains of congestion pricing. Politicians prefer to risk the failing efficacy of fuel taxes to risking the potentially greater gains of road-use charging.

Professor Jens Schade (Dresden University) specializes in acceptability of transport pricing strategies. He shows that losses are psychologically at least two times more powerful than equivalent gains. This means that for the new Dutch politicians to continue their predecessors’ programming, they need to percieve that the potential gains of GNSS-based road-user tolling (both in terms of transport efficiency and job-retention) are more than twice as great as the potential losses of raising fuel taxes and putting in a few video cameras. Clearly they don’t.

Green, small, smart, congested

We hear touted as a solution to our car-woes that cars will get cleaner – all the way to electric and fully sourced from solar and wind. 

We note that there is some trend, however minuscule, toward smaller cars.  Ones that fit two to a parking spot. Some places have more of them than others.

There are even ideas to put two to a lane.

 

Now, even the god Google is in the fray with cars that look to be able to drive themselves. In this way cars can bunch closer together.

Each of these improvements will make the private automobile more useful, less polluting, more desirable, more ubiquitous and our roads more congested.

Pollution-free, convoys, two to a lane. More. But roads cannot be supplied effectively as fast as we can populate our fleets. This is so because of space, politics, money, and environment.

Space, not automotive innovation is the limitation; there is no lack of automotive innovation. But we do lack the courage to manage demand.

The market makes cars better by satisfying demand.  The market could make mobility better by managing demand with time-distance-place pricing.

Duped by the Hollywood Tracking Myth

In response to the Lost: Dutch Courage blog that has upset many people, comes the most unfortunate (and commonly believed!) of all responses…

Bertram said...

One thing you failed to mention: the road pricing scheme would [have been] enforced with GPS-powered black boxes in each vehicle. No matter what you think of mobility management, you should be very worried when the government starts collecting detailed whereabouts data on the majority of its citizens.

As a non-driving Dutch citizen I'm glad the scheme is gone... had it been implemented with cameras to charge motorists when they accessed certain zones I would have been emphatically in favour of the scheme, but the way it was proposed was just too Orwellian to trust the government with.

The fact that Bertram is a non-driver, means that he likely carries an unfair portion of the burden of unfettered congestion. If he is mobile, even under the care of others, he would tend to shoulder a share of the financial (hidden tax) and health cost. He would tend to be stuck in traffic when he uses bus, bike, carpool, ambulance, etc.

Bertram has been misled by conspiracy theorists, as have many others, including some planners describing these systems. GPS by itself cannot track you.  Only additional capabilities to return your whereabouts to a service outside your vehicle can track you.  Bertram is assuming, as do many that road-pricing system look like tracking systems for trucking-logistics – an especially foolish way for a government to deploy a GPS-based road-use charging system. The International Working Group on Data Protection in Telecommunications has been vey clear about this: [1] preservation of driver anonymity using either “smart clients” or “anonymous proxy”, [2] that personal data including location data always remain under the control of the driver, [3] that off-board location record keeping is not required, [4] that detailed trip data be fully and permanently deleted from the on-board system as soon as charges have been settled, [5] that the system is prevented from creating movement profiles and function-creep, [6] that processing of personal data for additional purposes only be possible with clear and unambiguous consent from the individual, [7] and that system enforcement not require or capture any personal data unless there is evidence that the driver has committed a violation of the road pricing system.

Remarkably, what is little considered is that GPS IS THE ONLY TOLLING TECHNOLOGY THAT CAN BE FULLY ANONYMOUS.  Cameras capture the whereabouts of your vehicle whenever they see your vehicle; DSRC and RFID do the same. Even the fuel tax tracks you if you pay for your gas with a credit card, since your gas transaction has a time and location stamp. GPS can do its job entirely inside your vehicle never sending ANY location information outside of your vehicle. Ironically, the technology Bertram is mortally afraid of is the only one that can guarantee him the anonymity he desires (and has a right to).

Now Bertram and many others will continue to believe what the press and his friends tell him.  Conspiracy is far too fascinating and Government trust is on the wane. Nonetheless, I would entreat Bertram to find out more for himself. What Bertram COULD do is [1] assume road-pricing will one day happen (it will); and [2] set up a citizens' watch-dog to ensure his government conforms to the IWGDPT guideline. It is always better to arm yourself than sit quaking in your armchair.

Freedom of movement is a basic human right.

This will get you started.

Notes from a reader

Not long after I posted yesterday's eulogy to the Dutch road-pricing system, the following arrived. It was too good to leave buried in the comments...

I normally have a poke at the mindless UK media – which one week will report how dreadful it is that cars are killing people by crashing into each other, emitting noxious fumes and warming the planet – and the next will celebrate the latest setback for common sense (repealing the London congestion charge, canceling the LRUC project, discontinuing the TIF initiatives).



Last week the Labour party elected its new leader. His speech was mainly themed on how Labour will win the next election, rather than how any policies will benefit the citizens, who will not get to vote again for about five years. Meanwhile the ruling party declares that it will “end the war on the motorist”, the first manifestation of which is to cause cancellation nationwide of speed camera partnerships at local levels. We have some real wars going on, for example in Afghanistan, which have killed about 300 Brits. In the same time, road deaths have killed about fifty times as many people. Politicians don’t know which war to fight, and content themselves with populist pronouncements to feed media expectations.



London has a Mayor who thinks that putting a few thousand bikes out for hire will really make a dent in the massively larger vehicle population. In the same week that he confirmed the abolition of the Western Extension Congestion Charge, thereby freeing the inhabitants of Kensington & Chelsea from the tyranny of road charging, I noticed an interesting feature on that borough’s website. This site offers suggestions for walking and cycling routes which are planned to avoid the areas of heavy pollution and careless London drivers. Health advice is that, in a growing vehicle population, attempting to walk or cycle by a convenient route is quite likely to lead to a premature death by one means or another.

Lost: Dutch Courage

On 12 November 2009, Ferry Smith, a senior representative of the Royal Dutch Touring Club, ANWB (similar to the CAA or AAA) spoke at a Toronto conference called Transport Futures, in support of the Dutch road user charging (RUC) program, called "Kilometerheffing" (kilometer-pricing) or as his talk and the Dutch program was titled in English: “Paying Differently for Mobility”.

Just hours before a decisive vote was to be cast by the Dutch Parliament, Mr. Smith talked about how much effort and collaboration had gone into this programme, especially related to the supportive efforts of the ANWB.

Although confident the vote would pass, he admitted it was not guaranteed. Someone asked what he thought would happen next if the vote failed. His answer: “We’d be set back 10 years”, meaning the effort would start all over and they would take until 2020 to regain the place they were now.

Later that day, the vote passed making the Dutch road pricing system a virtual certainty.

On 20 February 2010, the Dutch government collapsed ostensibly over a military issue (troop withdrawal from Afghanistan). With it came a complete freeze of the “Kilometerheffing” system. Transport staff reassigned, consultants laid off.  All thrust instantly into suspended animation.

Remembering what Ferry Smith had said, and noting that the number of delayed, withdrawn or canceled RUC programs in the EU had outnumbered the deployed ones, I wrote a rhetorical piece about Governments not being able to toll roads on 24 June 2010.

At the end of September 2010, the new Dutch coalition government released its plan. The big picture is reduced administration, reduced social programming, reduced arts and culture, new restrictions on immigration, burqas and forced marriages, reduced defence, development and payments to the EU, increased law-and-order by way of increased penalties and more officers, some adjustments in education and a break in business taxes.

The road-pricing matter was delegated to the fine print and finally buried:

“There will be no road pricing. Instead, the variable cost of driving is increased through fuel tax. The fixed costs are reduced proportionately. The government is investing 500 million euros in infrastructure, both roads and rail”.

Talk of a new superhighway is included, all while neighbouring Belgium was talking of a copy-cat kilometerheffing system. Quelle honte!

So begins the Ferry Smith Decade in the Nederlands.

~~~~~

Analysis
To be fair, while the Dutch fuel-tax-fixed-tax swap is revenue neutral (that hopeful prayer and false-hope offering to the voter) it does have the driver notice the new road-use charge for the first three or four weeks, at least. Vehicle kilometres traveled will recover almost immediately – and I do mean this in terms of mere weeks.  While drivers sigh with relief, they will have no relief.  Nothing will change. Both their pocketbooks and their congested roads will remain unchanged.

There is an odd added perk: increased speed limits.  Like offering free candy to a diabetic. One disappointed, anonymous, online pundit adds: “I will only be able to speed late at night when the roads are not congested.”  Darwin award, for sure, since I suspect he may drink first in celebration.

Another comic side effect is that the expression “kilometerheffing” originally imbued with some affection by the road-use charge promoters has been cheaply appropriated to describe the new fuel tax increase and fixed tax decrease.

All government doublespeak.  Orwell by not being Orwell.

I have no bone to pick with the new coalition government agenda. The conservative-liberal agenda ebbs and flows will always continue. Rather I point out that this is just more evidence that Departments of Transport cannot directly approach an all-at-once tax shift from the congestion-blind fuel tax to the congestion-sensitive road-use-charge. There is never sufficient time in a single administration of a democratic nation, and there is almost never sufficient continuity of courage or vision.  Ex-Transport Minister, Eurlings (Nederlands), may have had this courage-vision combination and even the benign support of his then-government, but to design a solution that could not proceed – in-progress and automatically – into a subsequent administration is the kiss of death. Look at the Brits. They swap out Secretary of Transport (a posting that is evidentially a way-station to a better portfolio) almost annually. No one holding such a temporary position and who needs some degree of acceptability lest they remain stuck in the post, would dare stick out his neck (Alistair Darling excepted, but that was before Britain’s most effective road-pricing voice, Peter Roberts, soured the whole thing – now the DfT works under more secrecy than does the CIA – so goes Roberts’ brand of uninformed democracy). I am not faulting the DfT. I am commending them for finding a way to proceed. AND I mourn the loss of intelligent debate.

The only way to avoid this quagmire is to approach the eventual shift by building the charging platform by other means. Note that one of the more repeated online comments on hearing that the Dutch road-pricing system will be replaced by a fuel-tax hike was “good thing, because a fuel-tax hike will save all those billions on a road-pricing system.”  Here is a way to proceed. 

~~~~~

On 2010.10.07 13:30, Paolo Pezzotta commented:

Bern, 

As you know from my posting when you first noted the likelihood of Dutch national VMT [TDP] tolling, I noted that there was a vast difference in truck tolling home-based-vehicle (auto) tolling. These are vastly different markets serving vastly different functions relative to the economy and urban systems and the politics are consequently vastly different. You thought it was a slam dunk. I thought it might provide some surprises. I was right.

We all should catch on this and try to learn something from this fact.

Jerry, 

You are confusing two very different things. Cordon pricing schemes do in fact push folks off the road (predominately lower income folks)- that is their function, see London and Stockholm plans. VMT pricing will do the same. Less cars will “go through” as a result. That is the objective. Neither will provide sufficient funding to meet a market’s needs. Both will massively misallocate capital. The public knows what it is doing. It is the technocrats that need to come up to speed.

These notions should be abandoned. Driver based funding strategies have done a great deal of damage, institutionally, physically, competitively.

Paolo -- Jerry is right that CP can provide faster, safer, cleaner trips to more (not fewer) vehicles.  BUT that is only when the schema is designed to move the trips to off-peak times.  The problem is that we have a Secretary of Transportation who used the phrase "coerce drivers out of their cars". Incidents like this tell me that even people who should understand CP, do not. -- Bern

On 2010.10.07 03:06, Jerry Bridgman commented: 

The weary, angry cynicism of the cited blogs may be hiding from you the possibility the CP product you are offering is deficient! Ideally reducing congestion would provide faster, safer, cleaner trips to more (not fewer) vehicles. Engineer that and you might have a salable product.

On 2010.10.06 11:45, Allen Greenberg commented:

I appreciate your highlighting of the near-impossibility of implementing a mileage-based user fee system within the single term of a political champion.  I had not thought of it quite that way, but it makes perfect sense, and thus—as you note--alternatives need to be sought.

On 2010.10.06, 09:05 Jack Opiola commented:

I am afraid you give Alastair Darling too much credit. After the debacle of Byers, his predecessor over the Hatfield Train accident and the reneging on the Public Trust set up for the rail network in the UK, PM Darling was posted to Transport to keep it out of the press and put a tight lid on Transport. He was magnificently effective in positively doing absolutely nothing in his tenure as Transport Minister, which is probably why they rewarded him with Treasury where he again efficaciously provided negative value to the post and the UK.

I am afraid you misread his actions. By consolidating the HMCE efforts for truck tolling into a larger UK road pricing agenda, he was killing it, not promoting it. His Deputy Minister was released to promote the technology investigation but the PM with stodgy  influences could never see outfitting 33 million vehicles with any technology, let alone a GNSS or DSRC hybrid for road pricing.

The £49 billion in fuel excise tax annually is a treasure chest that Treasury will never surrender. After all, less than half returns to Transport (all transport) and the rest funds Government's other platforms.

I am afraid the poor (literally)  British drivers are already overtaxed with a blunt financial instrument that fails to address congestion, limit car usage nor provide sufficient supply-side measures to address the manifest problems. Whilst Mr. Peter Roberts may be misplaced in his expression of love for motoring, his outrage may be better targeted to express exasperations at a government that continues to rip off its drivers and pay them back for their contribution with niggardly transport policies and practices. While a VMT approach - that is an approach that replaces the fuel excise tax with a fair, equitable, reliable and sustainable solution - may be the solution, I cannot envisage the past or current UK Politicians ever giving up the goose that is providing such a wonderful golden eggs as provided by the gas tax.

Toronto Council Candidate hears that parking is like prostitution

This video is hilarious. A pair of local voters tells Ward 30 candidate Liz West that cars are like hookers.*  If you push them off one street they show up on the next. Does that makes GM and Ford pimps? And you and I johns? 

Wonder if we will ever figure out that parking is a serious problem?

* surely this was taped a few days before the prostitution laws were struck down.  Maybe they'll strike some parking laws down next.

Would Rossi's tunnel become a funnel to hell?

Yesterday, mayoral candidate Rocco Rossi set out an idea for a tunnel to funnel more cars more quickly into downtown Toronto. The online comments looked to be over 90% negative. Similar to the comments in response to tolling (and this tunnel would be tolled!). Zoooooom.  Screeeeeetch.  Craaaaaash.  Burrrrrrn.

Likely this idea was suicidal out of the gate, but I am glad he brought it up. It highlights once more the corner we have painted ourselves into with transit negligence, free-parking, and unfettered entitlement to tax-payer subsidized roads.

A toll on the Rossi Funnel could help pay for the new roadway – and keep it free flowing. But that would keep free roads 427 and DVP congested. Just as the 407 leaves the 401 congested. This tunnel would be a victim to triple-convergence within 18 months of opening:

• spatial convergence: drivers who formerly used alternative routes during peak hours switch to the improved expressway;
• time convergence: drivers who formerly traveled just before or after the peak hours start traveling during those hours; and
• modal convergence: some commuters who used to take public transportation during peak hours now switch to driving, since it has become faster.

You can’t fix congestion with a new piece of roadway.

Even on opening day, it would do nothing to relieve downtown congestion without attention to parking.  In fact it will make it much worse.  If we fixed the parking problem by pricing it right, we could get the city out of debt and then build funnels.  Actually, if we priced parking right, you wouldn’t need the tunnel.  We could bail the city out of debt instead of burying it further.  People drive their cars for three reasons: they are cheap, transit is terrible, and the personal vehicle is, well, personal.  If we addressed the first two, congestion would evaporate and our municipal debt could be addressed.



The Wheel: From Mobility to Connectivity

The automotive experience is undergoing rapid change. Having essentially evolved into a local area network of computers on wheels, the automobile is now poised to become an Internet node. One kind of intelligent transportation system (ITS) – known as the Connected Vehicle – based on 4G networks will provide new levels of traveler services, convenient payment services, real-time safety features, low-cost infotainment, and new types of social computing applications. In aggregate these will serve to optimize mobility, reduce congestion, make driving safer, healthier and more enjoyable, and make payment for road use, parking and insurance fairer and more convenient.

Skymeter's contribution to the Connected Vehicle consists of private and anonymous payment services based on Financial-grade GPS (FGPS) applications. These services will permit drivers to pay only for the insurance they need by paying per mile or kilometer traveled, only for the parking they occupy by paying by the minute, and only for the roads they use by replacing fuel, registration and property taxes with time-distance-and-place fees, allowing lower rates for off-peak driving.

Paying only for what we use is not only fairer to the consumer of roads, parking and insurance, but has the powerful effect of putting more control over the cost of mobility into the hands of the driver. How often have you sat in congestion on a roadway burning more in fuel and fuel tax than you would have if the road were uncongested? How often have you returned to your parked car with money still on the meter – or worse, how often have you returned a few minutes late to be greeted by a $25 or $40 parking fine? How often have you taken transit, a shared ride, a sick day, or a week’s vacation but paid your automotive insurance anyway? Have you ever parked your Smart Car beside a Cadillac Escalade only to pay exactly the same parking fee?

Road authorities say they need more money while motorists say they pay too much in fuel taxes. Insurers want to raise rates but motorists say insurance costs too much. Parking fees continues to climb while drivers cruise to find cheap spots.  We say it is expensive to drive, but the problem is we pay the wrong way.  We pay for roads by the tank full, insurance by the year, and if you can rationalize all the ways you pay (and don’t pay) for parking you deserve the Nobel in micro-economics.

Connectivity will help alleviate this mobility problem in three ways. Strong connectivity is important for fixing how we pay for mobility, enabling fairer and more transparent ways to pay only for what we use. Connectivity enables the information we need to choose less congested routes and times, to find parking spots and without circling and hunting. Most importantly, connectivity enables the network effect of dozens of other applications related to safety, traveler services, and infotainment that provide motivation for the innovation and markets that will drive the costs of delivering payment services down to 2% or 3%  – a rate that closer to the collection of fuel taxes (1%) than to the current collection costs of insurance, tolls and parking fees (10%-70%).

What we are about to see is that the Connected Vehicle will provide a critical platform for correcting the key economic problem of wrong-payment for mobility – a problem that gives rise to increasing funding unsustainability and congestion.

Dialogue Mapping and Congestion

I have mentioned, earlier, “Wicked Problems” as a thought paradigm useful in thinking about congestion, road-pricing and the use of road-use metering for allocating road use fees, in this blog over the past months.  Here, here and here.

We are often called to address these kinds of problems in debates, studies or academic conferences.

This talks about the failure of conferences for advancing solutions for really entrenched problems. This says conferences about congestion and road funding, however necessary, may not produce sustainable results soon enough.

This talks about a powerful way to reach a rational consensus about a problem before attempting to derive solutions. This says that we may not be able to reach a shared understanding of the problem if we continue business as usual.

Here is a short article about the application of Dialogue Mapping to Traffic Congestion.

No New Math from China Traffic Jam

This week provided another opportunity to review the state of progress of demand management for roadway traffic. A spectacular traffic jam outside of Beijing attracted world attention, likely only because it has lasted several days, instead of the more usual hour or two that we now frequently enjoy as a respite from our families while listening to our favorite music.

A WSJ article by Carl Bialik (2010.08.28), The Inconvenient Truth About Traffic Math: Progress Is Slow, opens with “there is absolutely no way congestion can stop increasing” then hauls out a stack of miserable statistics such as “peak-hour trips now average 25% longer than non-peak hour trips, up from 9% longer 25 years earlier”.

Several solution approaches are mentioned, then criticized as ineffective (“tools [such as ramp metering] shaved an average of about three minutes of travel time for each rush-hour commuter, each week”) or rejected outright (“adding roads … lead[s] to more travel, because of an effect … describe[d] as triple convergence. Many drivers who had shifted their trips to off-peak hours, or to different roads, or to public transit, resume their previous pattern and converge onto the new highway”).

Instead, we are “working to spread traffic out more evenly” (which we were told a paragraph before will save me a whopping 3 minutes per week).

The rest of the article completes a litany of disturbing stats and limp solutions – solutions we already know are growing in cost and diminishing in effectiveness. Ominous in its expense and limited effectiveness will be to “merge data from 60 million devices to detect patterns and build a prediction engine…to predict traffic accurately within 20 minutes, at 80% reliability.”

The Montague Street Flyover

Another will “weave together information about multiple modes of transportation, including road and rail, then attempt to shift traffic accordingly [by using] such information to tell drivers, via electronic roadway signs, how long it will take to get to a popular destination by different routes.” Such approaches are intended to “get a lot more use out of our existing transportation infrastructure.”

Well, very little, actually. We know well that these measures all have minor impacts, like the earlier 3-minute-per-week effect. Similar to attempting to cure Alzheimer’s with Ginkgo Biloba, these impacts are swamped by the growth in vehicle miles traveled as populations grow, accumulate wealth, buy cars, abandon transit, and spread out. Cumulatively, all of our increasingly complex smoothing tools and sanding tricks provide only diminishing returns in congestion abatement.

And we all know this.

There is one tool that has proven the exception: road pricing. Done correctly, as in Stockholm, Singapore or on the SR-91, it produces an initial 15-25% traffic reduction, which can then be sustained with market pricing.

So what’s new? Nothing, really. Every one of the people quoted by Bialik in his Times article knows, studies, writes about or sells road pricing as a solution to the problem. So, why no mention of the only known sustainable solution? WSJ editorial policy? Bialik doesn’t like the idea? The solution just slipped everyone’s mind when interviewed by Bialik?

Why do we persist in hoping and praying like this? “Oh Great Transportation Fairy, we pour out our hearts that you will grant us our birth-right of infinite road space. We know you do not listen, but we beseech you anyway.”

As my mother often told me: “The Transportation Fairy helps those who help themselves.”, but as Bialik documents, rather than help ourselves we seem satisfied praying to some pretty minor saints.

We need a new ready-made collection platform for road fees

One of the largest differences between collecting fuel taxes and collecting road-use taxes (and this plays very much against the business of collecting road-use taxes) is that a century ago there was a convenient measurement node and collection platform already in place (fuel distributors).  Government(s) merely had to tap into an existing infrastructure.  Relative to any of the current proposed approaches to collecting for road use from each vehicle (RFID/DSRC, GPS, Cellular, Camera, OBD, Odometer, Vignette), collecting at several hundred fuel distribution nodes is smart, easy and cheap.

Making the critically important shift from fuel-consumption tax to road-consumption tax has almost everything stacked against it except that it would (if priced correctly) solve many of our surface transportation problems (funding, congestion, emissions, oil dependence). The problem with all the proposed replacement collection methods is their business execution model: build an elaborate, dedicated, complex, confusing, and expensive infrastructure that is subject to greater user resistance and mischief, to collect a few dollars a week from each vehicle – a terribly small amount for such a complex operation.

This is why the economically inefficient fuel tax is preferred. This is why even less efficient sales taxes are preferred. This is why property taxation is preferred and heavily used. And this is why, in the United States, we are currently back-filling the fuel tax out of the General Fund. From the simple business of finding an affordable assessment and collection mechanism pretty much anything other than metering each vehicle is a more expedient business to administer.

If there was a device already in each vehicle – a reliable device that had another, highly desired, indispensable purpose, i.e., a purpose comparable in importance as having fuel in your tank – such a device could carry an embedded road-use meter and become the collection platform for the replacement of the fuel tax.

We already know several ways to make such devices.  What we are missing is a way to make it have a highly desirable and indispensable purpose. We are missing a free, pre-existing collection platform model to rival the fuel distribution business model that Governments so easily exploited over the past century. This is why building a new, dedicated tax-collection infrastructure that reaches into every vehicle is wrong-headed. And this is why promoting telematics systems for safety, convenience, traveler services, parking payment, PAYD insurance and infotainment – systems that can carry road-use metering functionality for little or no marginal cost – should be the first order.

Such systems can be made desirable, useful, reliable and nearly self-enforceable.  They can make our roads safer, our drives more pleasant, our trip more efficient, our roads less congested and save almost all of us money.  Much more importantly – for matters of funding, demand management, emissions management and oil dependence – such systems can provide the basis for private enterprise to offer profitable and competitive services, just as fuel distributors already offered profitable and competitive services a century ago.

If markets for telematics-based parking and insurance metering, for safety systems, for traveler services and for infotainment were nurtured, standardized, encouraged and in some cases (insurance, parking) regulated or legislated in newer and smarter ways, private enterprise would build the telematics platform governments need to replace the cheap, convenient collection platform afforded by the fuel distributors over a hundred years ago.

This idea should hardly be surprising.  We have been in the Information Age for some decades. Automotive telematics is an information technology. We have ignored the obvious for too long. A private, for-profit telematics platform with numerous desired driver-service applications can be exploited to avoid system operational costs of road tolling, using the same business thinking that governments used to exploit the fuel distribution system a century ago.