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IBM Patents Pricing Motorists Off Highways
Posted by
kdawson
on Tuesday January 22, @02:03PM
from the prior-art-stuck-at-the-tollbooth dept.
from the prior-art-stuck-at-the-tollbooth dept.
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."
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Genius! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:There's an essential flaw in this plan. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Screw carpools (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Screw carpools (Score:5, Insightful)
want to go, EXACTLY when I want to go there and then also come
back at EXACTLY the same time, then more likely than not there
would be a mass transit option available for the same route.
Self-centered thought will lead nowhere.
1) You won't carpool because you want an absolute minimum commute time.
2) Property developers spread out industry and residence because they want the absolute maximum profit.
#1 leads to no demand for more cooperative arrangements (high density development with good mass transit) which encourages #2.
We will perpetuate this cycle until we start thinking about the overall best way to do things, instead of the individual best way to do things.
Re:Screw carpools (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
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.
False Dichotomy (Score:5, Insightful)
I have to admit, I find it fascinating that in the discussion of an article on a technology that applies a variable solution to a variable problem, the naysayers all waffle between two points; all or nothing.
You're absolutely right, sometimes carpooling is inefficient. Sometimes it will only work if you go it alone. But you fail to ask the question, "How often can I get away with it?" Are you and your buddies so inflexible that you can't communicate about what would be a good compromise time for leaving? Surely they have end-of-the-day tasks, too? And maybe, just maybe you can put in the extra effort to not have to stay late?
My point is that generally speaking you could, if you put an ounce of effort into it, find a workable carpool solution. Lots of people do, who recognize that resources aren't infinite - their's or the world's. And if everyone carpooled even 20% of the time that they commute, that's a big difference - a 10% decrease in cars on the road. So why is it that it's such an impossible thing? Is it really that un-doable, or does it just necessitate a change and the acceptance that to-date you haven't been doing it the optimal way?
Re:There's an essential flaw in this plan. (Score:5, Insightful)
First of all that is not really true. People dont like it becuase they wouldn;t want to be caught dead as an adult riding the bus. In many areas there is good public transportation that only takes slightly longer to get where you are going. People still wont do it and its a cultural thing. In plenty of other countries public transportation doesn;t ahve the same stigma. In America if you ride the bus people assume you got a DUI, or are a loser, or are a hippie.
It is precisly becuase of the perception that public transportation is no good that it is held back from being truly good. I know someone is going to chime in here about how they live in an area with no bus service but please don't. Im not talking abnout where there really are no other options. I am talking about where there is perfectly good service and very few people use it.
The things you own begin to own you. Try riding a bike sometime. The more you rely on the car the more of your life is dedicated to maintaining that car. Its a vicious cycle that leads to lots and lots of time wasted in traffic.
anti-egalitarian? (Score:4, Insightful)
And this seems to be as much the rage amongst liberal urban planners as evil corporatists.
Great, another way to screw the tax payers... (Score:4, Interesting)
So the toll makes out even, or slightly ahead at best. While the tax payers have to pick up the tab to repair the surface streets that are now getting heavier traffic because of increased pricing on toll roads.
So people with money get to work faster, and people with out will get taxed more. Sounds like a great idea.
-Rick
Re:Great, another way to screw the tax payers... (Score:5, Insightful)
Depends on where you live. There are large cities in the USA that have very poor public transportation. At a former job one of my co-workers was a "flower child" from the 60s and although she had a car, she usually took public transportation to our office. I'd say she could have driven to work in 30-40 minutes most days and driven home in roughly the same time frame. Riding the bus took between 90 minutes and 2 hours each way. While it's certainly cheaper to ride the bus, most rational people would conclude that saving 50-90 minutes each way by driving instead of riding the bus made a lot more sense.
Re:Great, another way to screw the tax payers... (Score:5, Insightful)
Even more reason (Score:4, Funny)
anti-egalitarian? (Score:5, Insightful)
Charging people more for things in higher demand is called "capitalism". Perhaps that is anti-egalitarian, but this particular instance is no more anti-egalitarian then, say, charging people more for higher quality health care, or charging people more for better quality food.
Re:anti-egalitarian? (Score:4, Insightful)
Isn't that the point? (Score:4, Insightful)
Tone of the summary (Score:5, Insightful)
When demand outstrips supply, you have 3 choices:
- Endure lines (traffic jams). This sucks for the environment and our dependence on oil, makes the roads less useful for everyone, and costs society a bundle in lost productivity.
- Create more supply. Build more roads. We've been trying that for a long, long time. I don't think the Jersey Turnpike can get much bigger.
- Curtail demand. Many ways to do this, including building more public transit and taxing fuel.
- Raise prices. This affects the poor more than the rich - big surprise there! So does everything else, why are roads special?
Now, I understand the appeal of helping out the poor. But this isn't health insurance or food stamps or housing. The "right to drive a car to work" is not exactly a basic human right. I think that a nice balance of 2-3 is the way to go.Anti-egalitarian (Score:5, Informative)
Bad Ideas all around (Score:5, Insightful)
Using the PA turnpike as an example, almost all of the tolls go to pay for the state employees and their benefits, heated booths, etc, and very little if any goes back into the road. The toll system is in place to pay for itself and not the road. It's a sham. If they got rid of all the zombies in the toll booths and put up those buckets that you toss change into they could charge a fraction and have more money to put toward the road, but still... that's what taxes are for.
As a result the PA turnpike is the worst highway in PA to drive on, full of potholes, poorly maintained, half finished construction sitting empty and idle most of the time.
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.
This idea of congestion tolls seems to have yet another bad idea behind it... Most people aren't on the roads for fun. They're on the roads because they need to get somewhere.
If skyrocketing gas prices aren't thinning out the traffic why would congestion tolls thin it out?
Re:*Lanes* (Score:4, Insightful)
Then you have a deal.
Of course you realize that
But go ahead and place toll booths at every major road. Traffic would come to a dead standstill.
-nB
Re:motorists being forced off the road and into bu (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:motorists being forced off the road and into bu (Score:5, Insightful)
You know, I would love to take public transportation to work. I mean really love it. The hour I spend in my car driving to and from work every day would suddenly be converted from "chore time" to "me time". I could read a book. I could watch a movie on my iPod. I could even do some work on my laptop, if I was feeling generous to my employer.
But the it seems to me that the truth is that "they" (the public transportation authority) really don't want me to ride the bus. Why do I say this? Let me tell you.
The nearest bus stop to my house is 2 miles away. The nearest bus stop to my work is 1 mile away. That's 3 miles in the morning and 3 miles in the afternoon. I just happen to walk at about 3 miles per hour, so now my 60 minutes of daily commuting time has now turned into 2 hours of commuting time just to walk to the bus stops and back.
But it gets better. According to the online "plan your trip" schedule, they pick me up at the bus stop, then there is a layover (oops, transfer) as I wait for another bus to take me to work. Total rode-and-wait one-way time to work: 3 hours! Coming home at night is a bit better, at only 1.5 hours.
So my 60 minutes of daily commute is now a whopping total of 5.5 hours! As if that wasn't enough, due to the times the buses run I can only work a 6 hour day. On top of all this, I have to pay!
So, yes, I'd love to take public transoprtation. Too bad there's no such thing, practically speaking, where I live.
Re:motorists being forced off the road and into bu (Score:5, Insightful)
I could take public transit to work. I wouldn't even have to walk that far (a few hundred feet at each point). But I'd need to make two transfers, for a total of 57 minutes of my time, and pay $3.10 in fares. (I checked their trip-planner site to get that accurate.) Which isn't that bad.
But if I drive? 8 minutes and 55 cents in gas.
Seven times more costly; there's no comparison.
Public transit is a joke in this country.
Re:How to beat IBM here... (Score:5, Funny)
Jesus! Eisenhower's gonna rise up out of his grave and slap the stupid out of you.
Re:How to beat IBM here... (Score:5, Insightful)
But the vast majority of trips on interstates are trips within a metro region, from suburb to city or suburb to suburb. Their primary effect has been to make the modern car-centered suburb and exurb possible. This may or may not be a good thing, but it certainly wasn't Zombie Eisenhower's intention when the plans for the system were first drawn up.
I do actually think that roads are a perfectly legitimate thing for governments to spend money on; I just question whether they're the most legitimate thing. Why is it that, for instance, so many people think that whether someone gets the health care that determines whether they live or die (or live comfortable or live with constant, chronic illness) is something best left to the free market, but that getting from one outer-ring suburb to another in twenty minutes instead of forty is a pressing reason to spend billions of dollars on asphalt? I'd argue that most people see daily annoyances as things that must be fixed and are willing to ignore real necessities that are needed by other people, or that they don't need right now.