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Comment by jefftk | Hacker News Reader

The general idea of charging road users partly in proportion to miles traveled makes a lot of sense. But why, every time this is proposed, do people talk about fancy tracking mechanisms? Why can't we just use odometers?

I mean, yes, the odometer cannot measure how much of your mileage is in Virginia versus other states, or how much is on what kinds of roads, but it is so much cheaper to implement that I would expect it to still work out much better?

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I'm purely guessing here. But roads are owned by different government agencies: federal, state, county, municipal, HOAs, and private. And those different agencies might have different ideas on how they want funding. If you drive primarily on town streets, which you pay for through property taxes, your odometer won't know to charge you less.

This is based purely on my experience on trying to add bike lanes in my city. It was fairly easy to get it done on our sidestreets, the city owns those, but major streets are federal or state owned and will take years due to bureaucracy.

Big trucks use odometers to enforce driver regulations and there is a whole semi-hidden market for tools and fixes that disable the odometers, even electronic ones. Menaing, they are easy to interfere with.

I still agree with the other's posters that tracking is conveniently useful for other things.

This is like people who argue that tax fraud and money laundering justify banning cash to leave only trackable means of transaction. Tampering with an odometer is illegal and though some people will defraud that doesn't justify another step towards a surveillance state.

And I totally agree with you. I was just pointing out that odometers are easy to fool.

Because in such schemes, tracking peoples' movements is the actual intent, collecting fees is just a nice side-effect.

Tracking as a prelude to restricting and controlling movement.

You need location info in addition to distance since roads and infrastructure are owned and maintained by various agencies. The solution could be to build upon EZPASS. Have the EZPass readers in every signboard or lamppost along the highways. They can read and record distance travelled along a particular highway so that revenue can be attributed to appropriate agency.

This is a proposal to replace the gas tax, which doesn't give you that information today. So I don't see how it's required?

We could divide the money how we do today, or could sample road usage to estimate an appropriate division. We don't need per-car level data.

A lot of people in the NOVA area are commuting to DC/MD and vice versa. It seems like you’d need to be able to fairly exclude resident out of state driving for the proposal to be viable?

Why? We don't do that with the gas tax.

That is already done on a large scale, through gas tax. However, it doesn't differentiate much between locations or vehicle types.

I have an old car and I can just unplug the speed sensor and the odometer stops turning.

Ok, but that's already illegal (since we need accurate mileage for used car sales)

Yes, but people break the law all the time.

Having your odometer connected costs ~$1k/y in depreciation, and people don't generally disconnect it. Do you think they'll start for the opportunity to save an additional $100/y?

Older cars don't depreciate as much. Mine are pretty much done depreciating. I also understand that it is possible to flash the ECU on some newer cars to change the mileage.

I just checked and according to the NHTSA cars over ten years old aren't even required to have a functional odometer (you just have to disclose it when you sell it). I'm not sure how common odometer fraud is, or would be under your proposed law, but the bigger the incentive the more likely I think it would be to occur.

You are right though most people would comply with the law.

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