IBM Patents Pricing Motorists Off Highways

theodp writes "Self-professed patent reformer IBM snagged a patent Tuesday for the Variable Rate Toll System, which covers the rather anti-egalitarian scheme of pricing motorists off of the roads by raising tolls as congestion increases. 'Congestion pricing of traffic is emerging as a completely new services market for IBM,' boasted Jamie Houghton, IBM's Global Leader for Road Charging."

Prior art in LA

[simpsone]

I didn't exactly RTFA, but they already do this in LA. It's not the entire road, just the commuter/carpool lanes. As traffic increases the toll does too. There's no tollbooths either, it's all run via FasTrack.

Re:Great, another way to screw the tax payers...

[keithjr]

So people with money get to work faster, and people with out will get taxed more. Sounds like a great idea.

Incorrect. The people without money, and also the sensible people, will start taking public transportation. The elitists in the equation are actually the people who continue to drive regardless of the negative reinforcement. And they can pay all they want.

Anti-egalitarian

[Arthur B.]

*sigh* When you have a limited resource, you have to discriminate. Either you'll have the people you can pay or the people who don't mind waiting in line. The great thing with price discrimination is that it introduces an incentive to produce more of the scarce resource. This is what the entire economy if not the entire civilization is based on. Yes, discrimination is anti-egalitarian, but guess what, everything cannot possibly be available to everyone, that's a physical impossibility, discrimination is natural.

Re:Bad Ideas all around

[R2.0]

"The other huge reason toll roads are a BAD IDEA is that there is no competition, no other option. There's almost never a parallel highway going the same place, and who would really want that anyway. So you have to pay the toll or not go at all, or spend hours and gas $$ going around. It's taking a critical public resource and using it for legal extortion. Imagine if you had to pay a sidewalk toll to walk to lunch every day."

In this particular case, you picked the wrong example. There is a road that goes all the way across southern PA, pretty much paralleling the Turnpike - It's called Rt. 30, the Lincoln Highway.

What's that I hear? US 30 is a mess? With stoplights everywhere, massive congestion, and horse drawn Amish buggies slowing down traffic? It would take an entire day to get somewhere? Absolutely correct - but it IS an alternate to the Turnpike. If you are so incensed at the Turnpike Commision, take Rt. 30 - put your time and nerves where your mouth is.

As for the bullshit about the tolls paying for the toll workers, I offer the following:http://www.paturnpike.com/geninfo/fastfacts/financial.aspx
Now, it might be a fraud, but some sharp eyed internet whistleblower would have spotted it by now. It looks like "toll collection costs" are about 10% of total costs. as for construction projects taking forever, have you ever seen ANY highway project north of the Mason Dixon go quickly? That's a union and piss poor government procurement procedures issue. Fer Chrissake, have you ever driven I78 between Harrisburg and Allentown?

Hell, I partially agree with you that toll roads may not be the best way to go - you just picked a particularyly poor example about which to bloviate.

Re:motorists being forced off the road and into bu

[vertinox]

You bought your house in the wrong place. Next time look for bus stops when you buy.

I live in a city where decent housing near public transportation are nearly 3 times in price what they should be. I mean... Its great if you have money to blow on a $600,000 house, but othere wise not so great if you don't make they much.

Re:Screw carpools

[jjn1056]

With all respect, I don't think rushing to the office at 3am to restart a server will be affected much by congestion time pricing, since every plan I know of (and I live in NYC with a plan like this on the table) doesn't increase prices at 3am. Anyway, perhaps you should look into improving your remote access in order to reduce that need in the first place.

As to the point about people working 'fuzzy' hours, well this is exactly the kind of situation congestion pricing is trying to encourage, that is to get employers to realize not everyone needs to be at the office at exactly 9am. By encouraging employers to look hard at who really needs to be in the office at that time we can hopefully spread out the road usage over greater time, thus reducing congestion, which will save fuel and reduce pollution.

All this will do for your friend with a fleet of plumping trucks is to encourage them to consider making non emergency appointments during non congestion time. Remember, this is not just about carpooling, cars sitting in traffic and not moving also waste a lot of fuel and cause pollution. If you can reduce your commute time by 20 minutes because your boss allows you to come in at 10:30am instead of at 9am that is going to 1) let you sleep 20 more minutes, 2) reduce the amount of fuel you waste idling in congestion, which incidentally saves you some money and 3) reduces the pollution spilling out your exhaust pipe. So even if you don't carpool this can end up being a win-win solution.

Also, for those people not living and/or working in a major city I very much doubt they have congestion trouble that needs fixing.

Maybe it's easy for me to not understand your objections since I live in NYC which has had the foresight to develop layers of useful and reasonably prices public transportation. All I can say for those of you living in big cities without it, well, the gov't you elected failed to have that foresight and guess who is to blame for putting those officials in place?

Re:Screw carpools

[Kadin2048]

The Northeast and Mid-Atlantic is full of them; it's not purely a East Coast phenomenon, but it's definitely more prevalent here. There are a few of them in Texas and the Midwest, I think. Definitely not as many, though.

It's going to increase though, because there's a lot of infrastructure out there in dire need of maintenance, and people really hate taxes. Nobody wants to pay for crap they don't use. As the technology makes it more and more feasible, I think we're going to move towards a 'use-tax' system pretty quickly.

I was listening to CSPAN Radio the other day and they had a speech by somebody (head of the Federal Highway Dept, I think), talking about the future of transportation funding. He was pretty set on the idea of a miles-driven based tax rather than a gas tax. The idea is you either have an RFID transponder in your car, or maybe they just go low-tech and check your odometer reading, but that's what you're taxed off of. Obviously this is a privacy nightmare but I don't see it disappearing. It's an easy sell to the public because you can say you're "cutting" all sorts of taxes. (Particularly because the plan calls for doubling or tripling the gasoline tax before moving to a mileage-based tax. Carrot, meet stick.)

In Virginia, transportation money is one of the biggest issues. Here you have a state where one rather small part (the northern suburbs, around DC) are in desperate need of money for infrastructure, but the rest of the state doesn't really give a flying fuck about it. And why should they? If you don't come to Northern Virginia, it's pretty hard to see how you benefit from a few billion dollars in improvements on I-66. The state government has fooled around with alternative funding sources (the recently repealed extra-special tax on speeding tickets), but in the medium- and long-term I don't see any alternative to tolls and congestion pricing.

There's no point in expanding the roads without implementing congestion pricing -- if you just widen the highways, it just encourages more people to use the roads at the same time. Very quickly, the volume just increases until you hit the failure point again. You can't just keep building roads and hope to keep ahead of the demand. You need to encourage people to use the roads at different times, carpool, work from home, etc. Maintaining the infrastructure we have while charging the people who actually use it for the construction/upkeep (and all the negative externalities associated with their use, which congestion pricing tries to do) seems eminently fair.