Cav's Place

When I first saw the proposal for the new Dutch road tax, I thought something was finally moving in the right direction. The basic concept is correct: You don’t pollute or damage roads simply by owning a car; you do that by driving it. Plus that purchase taxes discourage people from replacing their old cars with newer ones, which likely use less fuel and emit less carbon dioxide, so eliminating them can have a positive environmental effect under certain circumstances. However, installing a GPS on every car in order to report its location to the authorities for the purposes of calculating the distance covered and whether it’s being driven in high-traffic areas during rush hour is a frightening prospect, not to mention ineffective in calculating how much the car actually pollutes.

I don’t think I need to explain why having a GPS installed in order to track where you are and where you’ve been at all times and report that information to the authorities is a bad thing. Whatever the officials say about how that information will be used and even if this could help recover stolen vehicles, the price is much too high!
One has to wonder why has this method been selected when it’s not even necessary, since sealing the distance covered indicator to prevent it from being tampered with would be enough to know how much the car has been driven and installing some sort of device in the exhaust system to record the emissions would indicate the exact amount each car produces, which is a very important piece of information that the GPS could never gather. And since rush hour traffic implies frequent starts and stops and engines running without the vehicles actually moving, the resulting emissions are also higher, which would result in the desired higher tax for the people who insist on driving through high-traffic areas during rush hour.
I can’t stress this enough: Tracking people like that is unacceptable! Knowing how much they drive and the emissions they’re responsible for is completely reasonable, even necessary, but the authorities shouldn’t be able to know where a person is or has been at all times unless they have reasonable reason to believe that said person is carrying out criminal activities!

At least, as I said before, getting rid of the purchase taxes could help, but only if it’s done right. Eliminating them entirely actually encourages people to buy their first car or additional ones if they already have at least one that they intend to keep, which is certainly not desirable. But if these taxes would be waived for people who turn in their old car when purchasing the new one, and even then only if the new car has a lower fuel consumption and lower emissions than the old one, the advantages of both systems would present themselves: People would still be discouraged from buying their first car or additional cars, but they’d be encouraged to replace old cars with newer ones that are better for the environment.