Big brother wants to monitor your driving habits and tax you.
Taxing drivers for how many miles they travel rather than how much gasoline they buy. Minnesota and Oregon already are testing technology to keep track of mileage. Other states, including Washington and Nevada, are preparing similar projects.
The efforts are being prompted by the fact that gasoline taxes no longer provide enough money to pay for roads and bridges — especially when Congress and many state legislatures are reluctant to increase taxes imposed on each gallon. The federal tax of 18.4 cents a gallon hasn't been raised in nearly two decades. More than half the states have not raised their gas tax this millennium. Fuel-efficiency also is behind the efforts. Electric-powered vehicles are growing in numbers. In 2009, President Obama set the nation's most aggressive fuel-efficiency standards for new vehicles, ordering a 40% increase by 2016.
"As the (national vehicle) fleet becomes more fuel efficient … we're going to lose a lot of revenue from the gas tax. If it's not replaced, we're going to see our transportation infrastructure deteriorate," says Joshua Schank, president of the non-partisan Eno Center for Transportation in Washington, D.C. He expects to see a state vehicle miles-traveled (VMT) tax within the next five to ten years.
"We're seeing a lot of interest in VMT as one of the potential solutions to transportation funding gaps that states are dealing with," says Jaime Rall, senior policy specialist at the National Conference of State Legislatures.
The greatest obstacle to a miles-traveled tax has been privacy concerns. When Oregon ran a pilot program six years ago, motorists' major objection was to in-vehicle boxes used to track miles driven, says James Whitty of the Oregon Department of Transportation. "They didn't like the government boxes. They didn't like the GPS mandate," he says.
In Minnesota, 500 volunteers in largely urban Hennepin and mostly rural Wright counties have been testing a system using software installed on smartphones, says Chris Krueger, spokeswoman for the Minnesota Department of Transportation. "We can collect trip info and be able to simulate what it would be like to have a mileage-based user fee," she says.
MinnDOT will provide a report on their research when the pilot is complete in December. "We know that eventually there will be an isue of not having enough revenue from the gas tax," Krueger says.
A federal miles-traveled tax is unlikely, Schank says. "So far, the federal government has been terrified of even talking about this," he says. "The federal government needs to take a leadership role in helping states do this. You want to have sharing of information, compatibility across state lines."(Schank is an appropriate name since the American driving public will get "Shanked" if this happens)http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/story/2012-06-03/states-motorist-taxes/55367022/1?loc=interstitialskip
DOT's new communication system helps cars avoid crashes by talking (spying) to each other.
Washington, D.C. - As a safety demonstration, it was a heart-stopper: A Ford Taurus was seconds away from cruising through an intersection when suddenly a row of red lights pulsed on the lower windshield and a warning blared that another car was approaching fast on the cross street.
Braking quickly, the driver stopped just as the second car, previously unseen behind a large parked truck, barreled through a red light and across the Ford's path.
The display at a recent transportation conference was a peek into the future of automotive safety: cars that to talk to each other and warn drivers of impending collisions. Later this summer, the government is launching a yearlong, real-world test involving nearly 3,000 cars, trucks and buses using volunteer drivers in Ann Arbor, MI.
The vehicles will be equipped to continuously communicate over wireless networks, exchanging information on location, direction and speed 10 times a second with other similarly equipped cars within about 1,000 feet. A computer analyzes the information and issues danger warnings to drivers, often before they can see the other vehicle.
On roadways today, the Taurus in the demonstration likely would have been "T-boned" — slammed in the side by the other car. There were more than 7,800 fatal intersection accidents on U.S. roadways in 2010.
Called vehicle-to-vehicle communication, or V2V, more advanced versions of the systems can take control of a car to prevent an accident by applying brakes when the driver reacts too slowly to a warning.
V2V "is our next evolutionary step ... to make sure the crash never happens in the first place, which is, frankly, the best safety scenario we can all hope for," said David Strickland, administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
It's also possible for connected cars to exchange information with traffic lights, signs and roadways if states and communities decide to equip their transportation infrastructure with similar technology. The information would be relayed to traffic management centers, tipping them off to congestion, accidents or obstructions. If cars are reported to be swerving in one spot on a roadway, for example, that could indicate a large pothole or obstruction. The constant stream of vehicle-to-infrastructure, or V2I, information could give traffic managers a better picture of traffic flows than they have today, enabling better timing of traffic signals to keep cars moving, for example. Correspondingly, cars could receive warnings on traffic tie-ups ahead and rerouting directions. "Why not say connected cars will be monitored by Big Brother, is privacy dead?" (italics mine)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/08/v2v-department-of-transportation-cars_n_1579913.html
Surveillance City
Find out where you're being watched all across the United States.
Next time you're in D.C., head over to the Lincoln Memorial: There's Abe with his unblinking eyes, a monument to a city that's watching your every move. Sound paranoid? At this moment, an extensive network of closed-circuit cameras is monitoring the D.C. metro area, looking for terrorists and criminals at tourism sites and on street corners. We could tell you which corners, but then we'd have to kill you.
To figure out where it's always 1984, we gathered intelligence on the presence of all kinds of cameras: traffic, red light, and police surveillance (TrafficLand.com, Photo Enforced.com, and local police and state transportation departments). We then checked in with the Administrative Office of the United States Courts to calculate rates of authorized government wiretaps.
Police across the country are using automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) to catch car thieves and other criminals. And that sounds good, except that ALPRs capture data from innocent citizens too. "Where you go can reveal a lot about you—if you're seeing a medical specialist, if you have a lover, even your political activities," says Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the ACLU. Ask your city council whether ALPRs are being used and, if they are, how often records are purged.
Your fingerprints are being lifted off the Internet: Websites you visit (and their advertisers) secretly log your IP address, which can reveal who you are, where you live, and what you've been up to online. Worried? The Electronic Frontier Foundation recommends protecting your IP address with Tor (torproject.org), a free service that keeps your surfing anonymous.
"Metrogrades Most Watched List" covers 100 US cities.
The Top 10:
1. Washington, D.C.
2. Houston, TX
3. Denver, CO
4. Cheyenne, WY
5. Rochester, NY
6. Dallas, TX
7. Austin, TX
8. New Orleans, LA
9. Virginia Beach, VA
10. Atlanta, GA http://www.menshealth.com/best-life/surveillance-city#ixzz1wHTswuZ1