tax you by the mile? double the gas tax?

tax by the mile its just stupid--

London Charges to drive downtown

Congestion charging: special report

Why is a congestion charge thought necessary?

Transport for London (TfL) cites increasing journey times as the reason. Currently, 250,000 vehicles travel into the charging zone between 7am and 6.30pm each day; during rush hour that peaks at 40,000 vehicles an hour. Of course many of these are parked during the day. In fact, there are fewer cars actually driving around inside the zone than there were in the 1960s, but between 1998 and 2000 average traffic speeds dipped below 10mph for the first time since records began. Derek Turner, managing director of TfL Street Management, who has developed the charging scheme at Ken Livingstone's behest, claims that the cost of congestion in the capital, in terms of wasted time, now exceeds £2 million a week.

How does it work?

Drivers must pay £5 to drive in London's central zone between 7am and 6.30pm Monday to Friday, excluding bank holidays. This zone is the area bordered by (but not including) the capital's inner ring road: Marylebone Road and Euston Road to the north, Park Lane and Vauxhall Bridge Road to the west, Commercial Street and Tower Bridge to the east and Kennington Lane and New Kent Road to the south. The zone is eight square miles in size (1.3 per cent of the 617 square miles of Greater London). As long as you pay £5, you can enter and leave the zone as often as you like during that day.
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15 Feb 2003

Cameras, 816 of them at 203 sites, have been erected at the 165 entry points to the zone as well as randomly within it. These supply high-quality video images to computers using Automatic Number Plate Recognition software. At the end of each day the plates spied by the cameras will be cross-referenced with the database of drivers who have paid the £5 for that day.

How do you pay?

There are no toll booths or ticket barriers. Instead you pay by registering your car. Payment can be made online at www.cclondon.com or by phone on 0845 900 1234. If you register first you can also pay by text message from a mobile phone. Selected newsagents and petrol stations can also take payment and there will be machines in many car parks that accept certain credit and debit cards. Payment may also be made by post; obtain a form from: Congestion Charging, PO Box 2985, Coventry CV7 8ZR or telephone the number above. A deal with the Post Office fell through because Livingstone felt it was asking for too much money.

When can you pay?

The £5 fee can be paid on the day of travel, but only before 10pm. After that, you will have to pay a £5 surcharge. This is because TfL is concerned about late payers swamping its system.

What happens if you don't pay?

If you haven't paid by midnight of the day of travel your name and address will be collected from the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) and a penalty charge notice (PCN) for £80 will be sent out. This will be cut to £40 if payment is received within a fortnight. If you don't pay within 28 days, the fine will rise to £120. As with parking tickets, non-payment will be a civil offence. Unpaid penalties will be pursued through civil courts.

Three or more outstanding PCNs could lead to your car being clamped or removed from anywhere in Greater London. TfL snatch squads will patrol the city and the suburbs, looking for cars that have repeatedly entered the zone without paying. These will be clamped or even removed and impounded until all outstanding charges - including removal and storage - have been paid. The clamp release fee is £45; to retrieve a vehicle from the pound will cost £125 and storage is £15 a day. If you can't or don't pay in full within 56 days of your car being taken, it will be auctioned or scrapped.

5 Pounds that over $ 10 !! Government is for one thing, to take the people's hard earned money and give it to a bunch of snooty lazy POS politicians and Government fatcats that lay around all day enforcing idiotic regulations...

Several municipalities are already discussing taxing you by the mile.  Each car would be required to have a GPS and you would get a bill each month for the miles you have driven.

Tax revenues have dropped because people are driving less and cars are getting better mileage.  The Federal Gas Tax hasn't risen in 20 years although the cost of maintaining roads has risen.

IF, and that is a huge IF the government could prove with a transparent audit that the current gas tax revenues are being well spent and have not been wasted, I'd pay a higher tax.

I live in Tallahassee.  As part of the stimulus boondoggle the Feds. built a freakin' TURTLE TUNNEL under one of our Federal highways for...get this $3.2 MILLION!  A single student at FSU had done a "STUDY" about how many turtles were being killed crossing US27.  He had been lobbying for years to get this thing built.  Until then volunteer groups had been maintaining those temporary erosion fences you see around construction sites for many years at a cost of nothing.  (I have driven the road for 30+ years and never saw a smushed turtle on this stretch of highway)

The law of unintended consequences has also come into play.  The turtles are guided to a single wide concrete culvert going under all 4 lanes of highway joining a small arm of the lake with the main portion.  It didn't take long for the ALLIGATORS to discover they were serving up TURTLE SUSHIE at either end of this tunnel.  Other animals and critters us the tunnel and yep, the alligators enjoy them as well.

Nonsense that I find humorous...

Someday the tax on water will make the taxes for fuel, tobacco and and liquor look like chickenfeed,. After the aquifers have been destroyed by Fracturing and the mountain snow packs have disappeared all water will come from lakes and will be required to be purified. Unless a inexpensive way to desalinmate seawater is found.

http://frenchtribune.com/teneur/1321029-researchers-found-freshwater-reservoirs-beneath-ocean-surface

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/learn/topics/increase_in_earthquakes.php

Yella wrote:Someday the tax on water will make the taxes for fuel, tobacco and and liquor look like chickenfeed,. After the aquifers have been destroyed by Fracturing and the mountain snow packs have disappeared all water will come from lakes and will be required to be purified. Unless a inexpensive way to desalinmate seawater is found.

"Someday" there may be a tax on air too....

Yes, some areas, not surprisingly, are short of water.

Fracking has been used in Oklahoma for well over 50 years with no ill effects.  They have clean air and water.

Mountain snow packs have grown and the Arctic ice has grown by more than 60 percent in just the past year.

Other than people with their own wells, all our water is purified today.

IM against a GPS being attached to my car to monitor my activities.

Mr Ichi wrote:Accident investigators will soon have black-box data from all crashes, because of a new rule set to be finalized by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
WASHINGTON – Many motorists don't know it, but it's likely that every time they get behind the wheel, there's a snitch along for the ride.

This week ended the public comment period on a proposed law that would put so-called black boxes in every new car sold by September 1, 2014. The thing is, most cars already have them unbeknownst to many drivers.

Automakers have been quietly tucking the devices, which automatically record the actions of drivers and the responses of their vehicles in a continuous information loop, into most new cars for years.

When a car is involved in a crash or when its airbags deploy, inputs from the vehicle's sensors during the 5 to 10 seconds before impact are automatically preserved. That's usually enough to record things like how fast the car was traveling and whether the driver applied the brake, was steering erratically or had a seat belt on. This data has been used recently, for example, to determine what was happening in cars before accidents when some Toyota owners were claiming their cars were accelerating out of control as they were driving.

The idea behind mandating black box data recorders is to gather information that can help investigators determine the causes of accidents and lead to safer vehicles. But privacy advocates say government regulators and automakers are spreading an intrusive technology without first putting in place policies to prevent misuse of the information collected.

Data collected by the recorders is increasingly showing up in lawsuits, criminal cases and high-profile accidents. Massachusetts Lt. Gov. Timothy Murray initially said that he wasn't speeding and that he was wearing his seat belt when he crashed a government-owned car last year. But the Ford Crown Victoria's data recorder told a different story: It showed the car was traveling more than 100 mph and Murray wasn't belted in.

In 2007, then-New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine was seriously injured in the crash of an SUV driven by a state trooper. Corzine was a passenger. The SUV's recorder showed the vehicle was traveling 91 mph on a parkway where the speed limit was 65 mph, and Corzine didn't have his seat belt on.

In this way, the black boxes can nail liars trying to blame their cars for bad driving.

There's no opt-out. It's extremely difficult for car owners to disable the recorders. Although some vehicle models have had recorders since the early 1990s, a federal requirement that automakers disclose their existence in owner's manuals didn't go into effect until three months ago. Automakers that voluntarily put recorders in vehicles are also now required to gather a minimum of 15 types of data.

Besides the upcoming proposal to put recorders in all new vehicles, the traffic safety administration is also considering expanding the data requirement to include as many as 30 additional types of data such as whether the vehicle's electronic stability control was engaged, the driver's seat position or whether the front-seat passenger was belted in. Some manufacturers already are collecting the information. Engineers have identified more than 80 data points that might be useful.

Privacy complaints have gone unheeded so far. The traffic safety administration says it doesn't have the authority to impose limits on how the information can be used and other privacy protections. About a dozen states have some law regarding data recorders, but the rest do not.

"Right now we're in an environment where there are no rules, there are no limits, there are no consequences and there is no transparency," said Lillie Coney, associate director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a privacy advocacy group. "Most people who are operating a motor vehicle have no idea this technology is integrated into their vehicle."

Part of the concern is that the increasing computerization of cars and the growing communications to and from vehicles like GPS navigation and General Motors' OnStar system could lead to unintended uses of recorder data.

"Basically your car is a computer now, so it can record all kinds of information," said Gloria Bergquist, vice president of the Alliance of Automotive Manufacturers. "It's a lot of the same issues you have about your computer or your smartphone and whether Google or someone else has access to the data."

The alliance opposes the government requiring recorders in all vehicles.

Data recorders "help our engineers understand how cars perform in the real world, and we already have put them on over 90 percent of (new) vehicles without any mandate being necessary," Bergquist said.

The National Transportation Safety Board has been pushing for recorders in all passenger vehicles since the board's investigation of a 2003 accident in which an elderly driver plowed through an open-air market in Santa Monica, Calif. Ten people were killed and 63 were injured. The driver refused to be interviewed and his 1992 Buick LeSabre didn't have a recorder. After ruling out other possibilities, investigators ultimately guessed that he had either mistakenly stepped on the gas pedal or had stepped on the gas and the brake pedals at the same time.

Some automakers began installing the recorders at a time when there were complaints that air bags might be causing deaths and injuries, partly to protect themselves against liability and partly to improve air bag technology. Most recorders are black boxes about the size of a deck of cards with circuit boards inside. After an accident, information is downloaded to a laptop computer using a tool unique to the vehicle's manufacturer. As electronics in cars have increased, the kinds of data that can be recorded have grown as well. Some more recent recorders are part of the vehicle's computers rather than a separate device.

Yeah, I heard something about this. when was this communistic law passed?