In 2008, the Washington legislature passed a law mandating a 50 percent reduction in per capita driving by 2050. California and Oregon have similar but somewhat less draconian laws or regulations.
The Obama administration wants to mandate that all new cars come equipped with vehicle-to-infrastructure communications, so the car can send signals to and receive messages from street lights and other infrastructure.
Now the California Air Resources Board is considering regulations requiring that all new cars monitor their owners’ driving habits, including, among other things, how many miles they drive, how much fuel they use, and how much pollution or greenhouse gases they emit.
Put these all together and you have a system in which the government will not only know where your vehicle is at all times, but can turn off your vehicle if it decides you are driving too much or driving in a way that emits too many grams of carbon dioxide or is otherwise offensive to some bureaucratic imperative.
The Antiplanner sometimes thinks privacy advocates are a paranoid bunch, seeing men in black around every corner and surveillance helicopters or drones in the air at all times. On the other hand, if a technology is available–such as the ability to record cell phone calls–the government has proven it will use it.
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Of course, the elected officials and bureaucrats who run this system will exempt themselves from the rules. After all, nothing is more important than their work of running the country and making sure people don’t abuse their freedom by engaging in too much mobility.
As California writer Steven Greenhut points out, we already have red-light cameras, and some “eastern states have suspended drivers from using toll lanes after their transponders showed them to be speeders.” They’re not invading our privacy, the greens will argue, they are just making sure that our actions aren’t harming Mother Earth.
Of course, for many it really isn’t about greenhouse gas emissions. Mobility allows (or, as anti-auto groups would say, forces) people to living in low-density “sprawl” where they can escape taxation by cities eager to subsidize stadiums, convention centers, and light-rail lines. All they have to do is ramp down people’s monthly driving rations–something like a cap-and-trade system that steadily reduces the caps–and suburbanites will eventually find that they have to move back to the cities.
No doubt some will argue that even those who drive the most fuel-efficient cars should be subject to the same driving limits because suburban homes waste energy too. Or that people will be safer from terrorists if they are all jammed together in cities close to emergency facilities than if they are spread across the countryside. Or that suburbanites are parasites on the cities and should be reassimilated back into the cities’ benign embrace and taxing districts.
Whatever the argument, the point is that if the technology is there, the government will use it. If people really want to buy cars that monitor their every move and are capable of communicating those moves to some central infrastructure, they should be allowed to do so. But allowing the government to mandate these things is simply asking to have well-meaning, and sometimes not-so-well-meaning, government bureaucrats control how we travel and where we live.
Antiplanner: ” should be reassimilated back into the cities’ benign embrace and taxing districts.”
Interesting insight. The planners are actually turning our cities into concentration camps. Surrounded by little Berlin walls.
As one planner admitted: planners are basically fascists. http://www.portlandfacts.com/planners_are_fascists.html
Still formatting my thoughts on this one. What might be an interesting comparison is how new things like “Uber” “catch on” in society and how they come into being, compare that to how government programs like Obamacare come into being. I imagine one is painfully slow and considers “everyone” while the other is very fast and considers only “potential customers”.
Just because you think they are watching you, doesn’t mean they aren’t.
The way to cut greenhouse gas emissions is to cut actual emissions in the most cost effective manner, not pretend that passing laws that try reduce driving make any difference. When anyone claims they have some sort of plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions I ask “at what price per tonne of carbon dioxide equivalent?” Not one person has so far had an answer.
Let us get this debate to focus on costs rather than on ineffective planning solutions.
The technology exists: a piece of technology called the “starter interrupt device,” which allows lenders to remotely disable the engines of borrowers who don’t pay on time as well as to track those cars’ movements with GPS.
But if you borrow money (usually bad-risk borrowers) to buy a car and contract to allow them to use technology to disable the car and find the car for the repo guys, it is your own choice. And if they abuse it, you can go to the government or sue the company.
But If this technology is mandated by and in the control of the government, the potential for abuse is unimaginable. A not very crazy example: on election day, all privately-owned cars in red states get disabled, and the guys on CBS, CNN and NPR will all have reasons why that is legal and acceptable.
It’s worse than you imagine. They are trying to discourage driving and get people to walk and ride bikes in order to turn us into toned, trimmed human meat. The slaughterhouses will be set up in walkable, dense urban centers where the most lean and tasty specimens congregate. This is planned to start happening after Obama declares himself President for Life in 2016. I’d recommend staying out of dense cities starting next year.
The Antiplanner wrote:
As California writer Steven Greenhut points out, we already have red-light cameras, and some “eastern states have suspended drivers from using toll lanes after their transponders showed them to be speeders.”
As I understand it, these are former cash toll collection lanes that have been converted to all-electronic toll collection lanes, but not (yet) upgraded to high-speed all-electronic toll collection (open-road tolling). Many of the older toll roads in the East will have to spend many millions of toll dollars to do those upgrades, though encouraging drivers to use cashless toll payment technologies (E-ZPass and FasTrax are two examples) is (in my opinion) sound public policy.
It is unsafe to speed through those lanes that were built for cash toll collection, and I do not think the sanctions that Steve discussed are about environmental impact of speeding as much as they are about safety.
Gilfoil warned:
It’s worse than you imagine. They are trying to discourage driving and get people to walk and ride bikes in order to turn us into toned, trimmed human meat. The slaughterhouses will be set up in walkable, dense urban centers where the most lean and tasty specimens congregate.
And as a retired Marine related to a Tea Party member on a flight somewhere above “Flyover Country,” Obama is planning to disband the Marines and reassign them as guards at the FEMA camps that will process the Soylent Green as well as all Tea Party and similar “Red State” types who are “nails who stick up and will get hammered” as the Japanese say.
msetty and gilfoil,
better get upstairs from the basement, your mommy made you peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, with the crusts cut off, the way you like them. After that, a jolly game of Dungeons and Dragons, looking at online pornography, then whining about people who want responsible government, before retreating to your insulated little blogs to count your food stamps, where you were supposed to stay in the first place.
Metrof—cks, please crawl back under your rock. You have a severe case of projection when you go off your meds.
I’m sorry you suffer from projection yourself. I am not on, nor need to be on, any meds. Now hurry back to the basement.
They said government health care was supposed to free us from worries about healthcare costs, but now because government pays for so much health care government demands the right to control anything that affects health — smoking, eating, exercising, sports, etc.
Government will inevitably seek more and more control. Every problem is a nail and regulation is the hammer.
I am all for this of it means assholes will stop tailgating, will actually stop at stop signs rather than nearly plowing down me and my dog, will use turn signals, will not text and drive, etc., etc.
If it will end these practices in Seattle, yes! http://goo.gl/rWuIIA
Anyway, driverless cars will make this all obsolete. Amiright?
Anyway, driverless cars will make this all obsolete. Amiright?
It’s interesting that the AP is so enthusiastic about driverless cars, when those will be the easiest type of car for the government to monitor, regulate, spy upon, tax, and co-opt. True lovers of freedom will let go of their steering wheel when it’s pried out of their cold, dead hands.
“It’s interesting that the AP is so enthusiastic about driverless cars, when those will be the easiest type of car for the government to monitor, regulate, spy upon, tax, and co-opt. ”
I guess you didn’t read this post. Maybe it was published before you began trolling this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
“I strongly support new technologies that will enhance personal mobility as well as new ways of financing roads and other infrastructure that insure that users pay for the cost of what they use without invading anyone’s privacy. V2V and V2I systems offer too many ways to invade privacy and allow government control without providing any greater safety benefits than will come from increasingly autonomous cars.”
“I support the driverless cars that I am imagining in my head, not the ones that will actually be mandated by government regulations.” – the AP