Does car-sharing reduce emissions?
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Potential Reduction in emissions from car sharing under three scenarios (Source: Rand)
The Washington Post and DC.Streetsblog both report on a new study which estimates the potential savings in carbon emissions from car-sharing are relatively modest (see exhibit). The study was prepared by Rand Corporation for the US Department of Energy.
Car-sharing differs from car rental in a number of respects. With sharing, rentals are short term, fees are usually charged hourly, and cars are parked close to members’ dwellings or workplaces. It’s also much more reliant on automated systems for booking and accessing vehicles. And it’s up to members to keep cars clean.
Compared to owning, sharing reduces drivers’ emissions in three ways. First, drivers cover fewer kilometres, largely because standing costs like depreciation are incorporated in the hourly tariff. The perceived cost of driving is considerably higher and acts as a disincentive to low value trips.
Second, car-share vehicles are more fuel efficient. That’s partly because they tend to be newer, since they rack up kilometres fast and hence are turned over relatively quickly. It’s also partly because members can match the size of vehicle to the task. Owners on the other hand usually purchase a vehicle large enough for the most demanding task, notwithstanding that most of the time a smaller vehicle would be adequate.
The third reason is fewer vehicles need to be manufactured in the first place. One estimate cited by Rand is each car-share vehicle replaces between nine and thirteen privately owned vehicles.
Rand say car-share use is very low in the US at present – only 0.27% of drivers are members of a scheme. However they estimate there’s potential to expand to around 4.5% of the nation’s drivers. To put that in perspective, it’s roughly equivalent to half of all inner city drivers in a city like Melbourne using car share.
Surprisingly though, 4.5% penetration would only reduce total light vehicle emissions in the US by a measly 0.6%. Even if 12.5% of US drivers shifted to car share – a hugely ambitious target at present given the many obstacles to this form of tenure – Rand estimate the reduction would only be 1.7%.
That scant pay-off is primarily because the sort of people who currently use car share weren’t big drivers to begin with. They didn’t own many cars and they didn’t cover a lot of kilometres before becoming car-share members, so the reduction is from a small base.
There’re a couple of points to make about this. One is that some of the benefits – such as incorporating at least some standing costs into operating costs – can be achieved without resort to car-share. For example, vehicle registration could be loaded into the price of petrol or picked up using transponder technology. However the biggest component by far – depreciation – couldn’t.
Another point is car-share has other important benefits. For example, it reduces the amount of space devoted to on-street parking and the level of traffic in city streets. It also gives residents who want to drive a cheaper option than owning a car.
The most important point though is that Rand appear to have under-estimated the potential reduction in car use associated with sharing. Existing car-share customers were previously low car users, but if the market can be broadened to 4.5% of drivers and perhaps ultimately to 12.5%, then it will necessarily be attracting drivers at the margin who were previously much bigger car users. The reduction in emissions and fuel use would accordingly be larger.
I don’t think the low emission reduction is in any event a deal breaker. It’s neither necessary nor feasible to reduce the emissions associated with all activities by the same amount i.e. equiproportionately.
Better to prioritise effort on emissions-reducing activities where the ratio of pain to gain is more favourable and where the overall contribution is large e.g. shifting electricity generation from coal to renewable sources. Of course it’s pertinent that sharing doesn’t actually increase emissions.
Car-sharing still faces many problems, like insurance for younger drivers and access to parking spaces. The characteristic low density of most US suburbs makes it hard to provide viable parking within walking distance of dwellings and work places. Rand sound a cautionary note:
A 1994 study predicted that the market potential in Germany was 2.45 million members; however, ten years later, the market stood at 70,000….More than a decade ago, observers noted that actual membership rates were only 3 to 8 percent of projections of membership levels from a decade earlier….
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Interesting piece, I wonder if there good be a push from local government that would help drive the rates up. One possible option to do so would allow apartment blocks to construct one ‘car share’ spot instead of a set amount of parks. Developers could potentially benefit by being required to build less spots, whilst selling properties in the sites as green, using the linked car sharing program as part of its credentials. I believe there are already a few apartment blocks that have car sharing included in their developments, this seems like an option for more to be pushed in that direction.
IkaInk: The other possibility is peer-to-peer sharing where private owners essentially rent their cars under a unified management system. Rand say it was pioneered in Australia in 2008 by DriveMyCar Rentals. AD
In estimating the car sharing potential by a community, there needs to be a quantified allowance for people who need a car to express themselves. There are people wedded to their cars: who use and display cars as an expression of self esteem and validation.
The actual transportation by private car is of secondary importance for some people.
I’m not sure that this model of car sharing is all that useful. Outside of commuting cars tend to be for ad hoc transport.
A better model would have the following elements
* all fixed road usage charges (and levies, excises and sales taxes) abolished. That would include both CTP and road registration and even the cost of a licence.
* all travel on any major connecting road (defined by average vehicles per hour crossing a given threshold) would be chraged on a per unit of distance basis. Vehicle locations would be via transponders
* the rate vehicles were charged would reflect TARE; vehicle type; driver competence and compliance; road contention at the time of use; emissions (both CO2 and other)
* those willing to obtain police clearances, submit their vehicles for inspection every 90 days and pay a slightly higher usage rate (to allow for CTP) could charge for “car fares” for ad hoc travel. (They might advertise on face book pages and there might be an app on mobile phones to facilitate). They would have to publish their rates in the vehicle and on the web.
There are some messaging apps that would make very late requests for lifts possible.
The beauty of a system like this is that it would greatly facilitate the roll out of electric vehicles, since with zero emissions, their road usage costs would be far lower. Much of the travel would be within urban areas and with fast switching of batteries, these could be in continuous operation. Of course, many would use their home PV systems to charge their batteries. A person who was a commuter could obviously car pool with other commuters along the same route, reducing road contention.
hk – you seem to be alluding to the car enthusiast community which describes me and many of my friends. There are a couple of points for you to consider:
1. Not everyone who enjoys cars “use and display cars as an expression of self esteem and validation.” It’s possible to just enjoy something without tying it to ego or self-esteem.
2. Many car enthusiasts don’t particuarly want to drive their cars every day to and from work. That sort of driving is no fun at all. For example, I absolutely love cars and driving but I cycle to the train station and train in. You may be surprised how many car enthusiasts are also public transport enthusiasts. Owning a car doesn’t mean to say you’d always use it as your transportation choice.
@observa
But owning a car would make you considerably less likely to use car share programs, where pretty much the point is to get the benefits of a car without needing to own one; which is what this post is about.
The downside is the establishment of yet more privacy-invading bureacracy when there are already two excellent and simple proxies for calculating distance driven and vehicle efficiency: odometer readings and fuel levies. Rush-hour congestion charges take care of adding a premium during high-volume timeframes.
These things will achieve like 95%+ of the result of your overcomplicated plan at probably something like 5% of the cost and next to zero backlash about how “the Government” wants to watch you wherever you drive.
InkIna – yes that’s true existing car owners would not in general be particuarly inclined to use car-shares. However, a percentage would, because as the OP mentioned people buy the car suited for the biggest job which often means an over-specified vehicle for routine use. For example, let’s say you’re a fisho with a big boat so you’ve got something like a 4WD capable of towing 3000kg. But you also drive into a CBD every day…you may well be inclined to use a smaller car if one was available, but you wouldn’t want to run both. And if you were to buy a car knowing carshare was available then that would influence your choice of vehicle.
Nonsense. We’ve had this stoush before. We still disagree. My system is far more elegant and equitable. We need to move decision making into realtime rather than perpetually presenting people with sink costs to recover.
Under my proposed system the roads would be safer and much less contended. The costs of running a vehicle would almost certainly decline — since a change in driving culture, radically reduced theft and radically improved whole vehicle recovery would force down premiums. We could slash the size of the Highway Patrol and pretty much eliminate police chases. No more “Sky’s Law” victims.
Yes it’s true that a paranoid fringe would squeal about Big Brother and try for vehicles with foil hats on them and it’s likely that the Daily Tele would urge the government to give them more than the time of day, but as regrettable as that is, it doesn’t make me mistaken.
Yes, and then as now you had nothing except pie in the sky ideas that had clearly never been remotely through through, with no evidence to support the fanciful outcomes you insisted were inevitable.
The cost of installing the transponders you want, alone, will be well into the billions of dollars.
It’s not at all elegant. It’s complicated and complex and will undoubtedly be riddled with loopholes where it crashes out of theory and into harsh reality. Hence, it’s almost certainly not going to be equitable, either.
Pricing vehicle by distance travelled, class and fuel economy with nearly zero cost increases or negative impacts on the owners, is “elegant”.
What “decisions” are you planning to move into “realtime” ?
You have provided no evidence – not even a rationale – to support these assertions.
No. You being wrong is what makes you mistaken.
Historically, Governments actively tracking the every move of citizens has not ended well. That alone should be enough to give any reasonable person reason to re-evaluate their position.
Until now, that hasn’t been remotely possible in anything like realtime, so your use of “Historically” is eccentric.
The problem with government is not it’s obsessive interest in the doings of the populace. It’s nearly the opposite — it has little time and less interest in what its citizens are doing. By and large it could scarcely care less what any individual thinks and the banalities of most citizens’ lives would be even even less interesting if that were possible.
In the 40 years or so I’ve been paying attention to the government with more than passing interest I’ve seen virtually no indication at all that the government is interested in anyone who isn’t about 50 times as wealthy as the average person, or in parliament. How the car usage habits of individuals would tell them anything of interest is hard to fathom. Having a log of where you’ve been might actually be useful to a person, now and again.
While I’ve no doubt that there are many people with a morbid fear that government spooks are seeking new opportunities to learn how often uncelbrated members of the public launder their underwear or visit the cinema, I strongly suspect the principal beneficiaries of fear of state surveillance are … the government. Really, the more they know (or ought in theory to know) the more pressure there is on them to do something about what they know. Not knowing is a great alibi, and if they can use the privacy defence as an excuse for not knowing, then better yet.
Your reference to authoritarian and intrusive states is acontextual. In none of these states was there ever a significant history of a separation between the state and civil society. People never had, in any real sense, any freedom from the intrusion of the state and had no expectation of getting it. State intrusion was merely a symptom of the manifest power of a ruling elite that had never been answerable to anyone outside it.
You wave your hands dismissively at what I propose, saying it would cost billions and be full of loopholes and will crash, but you simply have no basis for any of this prognosis. The fact of the matter is that as things stand, policing driver behaviour costs billions and is sharply less than completely effective. Not a day goes by when there aren’t multiple deaths and injuries in circumstances where less reckless behaviour would have foreclosed that outcome. The cost of that to the community is also significant. Those are your real “loopholes” or more precisely, cracks in the system. Change driver culture, reduce the number of vehicle miles, retire hundreds of highway patrol duties police and you save tens of billions across the country. You also save billions in repair bills to vehicles.
I can see why you want to stay with the current system. You are fearful, and sadly, I can’t allay your fears, because they are not based in anything rational. At same level you realise that so you reach for objections in utility — it will cost too much, be flawed in some way etc … It’s a tried and true approach beloved on both the major sides of politics. It’s still bogus though.
Fuel excise is an efficient way of collecting revenue as it (in most cases) has a very centralised distribution network that can be used for collecting the excise. Transponders would be in individual cars and thus would be subject to much higher rates of tampering and thus evasion.
Higher registration costs for inner-city car owners could be used to discourage private car use and thus encourage car-sharing.
Rrright. So you think by making it easier and more efficient to identify and track people, the negative outcomes from doing so will be *lessened* ?
Your last point is a completely furphy, since there is a vast gulf of difference between you personally having a log of your movements and someone else having a log of your movements. Further, this is easily achieved without the need for yet another expensive, intrusive, Government boondoggle, or indeed any Government involvement whatsoever.
Tracking movements is all very benign right up until the point people get segregated off into some group whose attributes or actions have been arbitrarily defined as bad by the power holders of the day.
Being defined “bad” could involve anything from religious beliefs, through skin colour, to union membership.
You’re a typical authoritarian. You believe “nothing to hide, nothing to fear” is a perfectly reasonable argument, and that the law is, implicitly, always right.
Coming from someone flailing about like a bird trying to fly, that’s pretty funny.
There are upwards of 15 million cars in Australia. Assuming (quite conservatively) an installation cost of $500 each, that’s at least $7.5 billion before you’ve even started to implement any of the other aspects of your plan.
You argue the roads will be made safer yet describe no mechanism by which this will happen. You focus on high-speed chases as if eliminating them will make a dramatic difference to road safety, yet completely ignore that most accidents (fatal or otherwise) happen at or under the speed limit in urban areas.
You argue cars will become cheaper to own, then argue that their usage will be reduced.
You argue vehicle theft will be “radically reduced”, yet offer no mechanism by how this will happen nor evidence of what the most common types of vehicle theft are. You argue insurance costs will drop, yet offer no evidence of the primary drivers of insurance costs and how your plan will reduce them.
You completely ignore any possibility that breaking the road rules (in as much as your system could enforce them) can have a positive outcome (and, conversely, assume that any breaking of the road rules always has a negative outcome).
No, I don’t want to stay (completely) with the current system. I just want to replace it with someone that achieves the best outcomes in the most cost-effective and unobtrusive fashion.
Further, my fears are perfectly rational. People like you who think the best solution to minority behaviour which has some negative impacts is to get a big stick out and beat the crap out of everyone scare the hell out of me. In no small part because they have a tendency to seek out positions of power that allow them to do so.
From The Age on 21 May 2005, Green with flair car share, about four new developments in inner city Melbourne that offer car share.
I said:
to which DrSmithy responded:
So that’s your way of admitting that you started with a false claim? Amusing. I see no “negative outcomes” from tracking drivers in real time. Not that “people” are being tracked only while driving. There is an easy way to avoid being tracked whiole driving under my proposed system — don’t drive.
Contrary to your implication, driving is not one of the fundamental human rights. It’s a privilege.
The likely life of such a device would be about 20 years, so that’s about $25 per year. Hmmm. Of course, you only see the one side of the ledger.
I wouldn’t call it vast. That’s your cultural angst showing. The difference is convenience. It saves me the time involved in compiling it. Since I’m the only one likely to be interested in it (outside of the fees) this is a great service.
{cure scary music, background level amplitude, rising to crescendo at last clause; voiceover with pauses and gravitas}
yes … we have a government that is so craven it wets itself at what a handful of people in the outer suburbs think of a few thousand asylum seekers, who dares not introduce gay marriage, or an ambitious carbon pricing or super mining profits scheme is going to start rounding people up based on … oh for pity’s sake. Do ybou really think they need your car data to do that if they had the resources and the will to do it? It’s too silly for words — and yet, I’ve wasted some words on it.
There are a couple of ways. Since the prcing calculus would take account both of demonstrated driver credentials (such as defensive driving competence for example) and actual driver compliance, the system underpins positive driver culture. There would be a reward not merely in lower relative running costs but in status. I’d favour a system of rewards for those drivers who drove 20,000km without a caution or outstanding traffic matter. In addition one could give highly competent and compliant drivers higher speed limits (traffic conditions permitting). More generally, one could adjust general speed limits to actual real time road conditions. Over time, the culture attached to driving would change for the better. People who take pride in keeping a clean sheet are much less likely to infringe other good driving practices that would be harder to police.
Moreover, if vehicles can be remotely shut down and likewise are made harder to use unauthorised, then vehicle thefts should radically decline, and if they occur, could be quickly abated. The knowledge that one can’t get away with it discourages the act in the first place.
Yes because in this case there is an express marginal cost to using the vehicle. People tend to keep their mobile phone calls short because they are charged in 30 second units. If you are charged for every kilometre, you are going to think twice about wasteful driving. OTOH if the only cost is petrol, you might not be very discouraged.
Doubtless there will be exceptions here and there, and our system allows people to challenge the recording of a conviction in such circumstances. I’m concerned with the typical case. It’s hardly ever the case that “breaking the rules” creates a public good (though it obviously creates some private ones, typically at the expense of others’ safety and one’s own) .
You’re obviously easily frightened and inclined to exaggerate. There’s no big stick. In my system, the fines would be much lower, but inevitable. I suspect the total value of infringement revenue would decline sharply over time. The stick is little more than the old-fashioned teacher’s ruler being waved about more in disappointment than in an attempt to intimidate. There are also carrots — rewards for good driving, greater privileges, more flexibility …
I’m no authoritarian — far from it. I want reasonable rules. If I have reasonable rules, I want people to comply with them. I want people doing both the right thing and the wrong thing to be recognised in a meaningful timeframe. What’s so scary about that?
No, because I, er, didn’t.
Yes. No negative outcomes at all. I’m sure if this had been possible a few decades back it would never have been used by corrupt police to track people they wanted to threaten or extort, or by politicians to smear their opponents, or by criminals to attack their enemies.
Ah. Is this like there’s an easy way to avoid paying tax – don’t work ?
At no point have I ever stated, suggested, implied or even hinted that driving is a fundamental human right. Stop lying.
I will, however, explicitly and deliberately state that for a hell of a lot of people driving is a practical necessity and that for most people it’s a significant positive influence on their quality of life.
Thus far there’s only one side of the ledger to see.
I would. Let me draw an analogy for you.
There is a vast gulf of difference between you having a copy of a sex tape you’re in and someone else having a copy of a sex tape you’re in.
A basic sense of privacy is “cultural angst” ?
Tell me, does your house have any curtains ? Does your bathroom have a door or do you just tell guests they’re suffering from “cultural angst” when they want to take a shower without anyone else looking ?
No, it’s not. The difference is you having access to your personal data vs other people having access to your personal data in a honkin’ great big database they can cross-reference with a lot of other data.
The “convenience” argument is – as usual – a complete non-sequitur since the same result (“conveniently” tracking your own movements) could be achieved without needing any of the infrastructure you demand. Heck, it’s a near certainty there’s an app for it already given just about every smartphone on the market has a GPS receiver in it.
It’s service you can have without requiring everyone else around you to have it as well.
Ask all those people who have suffered systematic police discrimination about how they’re the only people who care about where they are. Ask the people whose phones were hacked how unimportant their privacy is. Ask the politician being smeared by claims of an affair because a reporter bribed someone at the DoT to show them how much time he’s spending at someone else’s house how no-one cares where he is.
Your complete and utter blindness to the myriad ways such a system could be abused is mind-boggling.
So you mean it does nothing that couldn’t be achieved equally as well, less intrusively and much cheaper with minor (and I might add, still inadequate) modifications to the existing licensing system ?
Congratulations. You’ve successfully eliminated the fundamental argument behind having speed limits in the first place.
This can already be done today with no need for your expensive, complicated, intrusive system. Heck, it could have been done decades ago.
There is no reason to believe people would take any more pride in their driving record than they do now. Nor is there any reason to believe the driving culture (which is atrociously bad in this country) would improve. If anything, such a huge emphasis on eliminating personal responsibility would probably make it worse.
To support this claim, you would need to show that a) your system will be any better than the immobilisers currently fitted to all modern vehicles preventing theft (pretty much guaranteed that it won’t be) and b) that the majority of drive-away vehicle thefts fit a profile where owner knows about it soon enough for a remote shutdown to be meaningful (i.e.: before the car can be loaded up onto a trailer to be chopped up for spare parts).
You have described no mechanism meaningfully better than existing systems.
An annual registration fee based around odometer readings effectively charges per kilometre travelled. So do fuel taxes, for that matter. Again, without needing to spend billions of dollars invading people’s privacy.
No, you’re not. At all. The typical case is easily covered by the system I described. Heck, the typical case is covered without any changes (from the drivers perspective) at all just by assuming 18,000km/yr travelled, an average fuel consumption of ~10L/100km per vehicle, a surcharge for every vehicle registered within 25km of a city’s CBD and a massive overhaul of the driver training and licensing system (ok, that last point would need to impact on drivers).
Your entire focus in supporting your ideas is concentrating on corner cases and highly specific areas where they _might_ deliver a marginally better result some of the time.
You want the Government to micro-manage an entire country’s driving habits, track everywhere they drive, remotely disable cars, etc, just to deliver highly questionable, if any, benefits, but you’re “no authoritarian” !?
Holy crap. Just what the hell qualifies as “authoritarian” in your book ?
I’m not tin-foil hat conspiracy theorist, but I certainly don’t think it’s a good idea to have databases showing the real time location of every car in the country. That sort of a system is just too open to abuse from bad government, bad employees that have access to the information, bad people that hack into the system and bad cops that don’t want to go through procedures that have been set for good reasons.
You didn’t say: Historically, Governments actively tracking the every move of citizens has not ended well or it wasn’t a mistake to imply that governments have done this?
OK … it seems to be the case that you are implying that you didn’t say this. Amusing. On the substantive point, you are hypothesising contrary to fact. Governments didn’t do this decades ago so we can’t say what they would have done. Even here though the problem is not that some government somewhere might have used such technology for nefarious purposes, but that some government in Australia would have felt as if they could act this way. In a sense, you are doing what you accuse those who mindlessly say “speed kills” of. You are ignoring context and cultural practice. In a state that has had a patchy relationship or worse with the concept of the separation of the state and civil society, there would be a pretty reasonable fear of such a thing occurring. In Australia though, we have done pretty well with this.
I’m also not sure in what way being able to track drivers of vehicles in real time would add to the capacity of a corrupt regime wanting to frame someone. A regime that corrupt can probably rig a court case, and perhaps wouldn’t even need to bother with one. If they are unaccountable, then why do they care if some hatchet job is credible to those who can think for themselves. As to criminals getting access, that is a riosk with any of the systems we now have. In theory, a criminal can track you in real time using an ATM or EFTPOS or your mobile phone. That looks a lot more interesting than tracking driving.
As a sidebar, I rather think that one Craig Robert Thomson wouldn’t have minded being able to prove where he was and was not all those years ago, or maybe his accusers might have benefited because they’d have had a store of irrefutable proof.
Not at all. Driving is a lot more optional than working. Perfectly respectable folk choose not to drive. Some people are specificaly excluded from driving, yet they can still undertake paid employment and live rich and fulfilling lives.
Yes, you have. You claim that tracking people’s road usage violates a right to privacy, when all it’s really doing is regulating one’s exercise of a privilege — driving 0.8+ tonnes or more of metal at speed in public space. If driving is not a fundamental right, you’ve no business making how it’s regulated an issue of principle. One can argue that this or that matter fails a good utility test, but that’s another matter.
Oh dear … analogies rarely end well, in my experience. They illustrate but don’t prove anything because to do so, one has to argue that the analogy maps exactly an asserted causal relationship in something else. yet if one could do that, one woul;dn’t need the analogy.
{sigh} Yes, there is. The problem is that the right to privacy during legal activities with a consenting other is a fundamental right. Driving contrary to the road rules and getting away with it is not.
Most certainly. My home is my space. The people I welcome into it get a degree of privacy too. I’ve no reason to suppose that their unmonitored activities are conducted at the expense of any other person’s compelling or contested claims, and I wouldn’t agree that mine would either.
I don’t know that there are all that many people in Australia who have suffered from systematic police discrimination. I’m also not sure that the RTA (not the police) tracking their vehicles would make much difference. Indeed, perhaps it might help. In London during demonstrations, surveillance technology entrapped police doing the wrong thing, and removed their deniability. Good thing too.
Again, this was an artefact of having phone technology, as well as the corrupt relationship between the police and the Murdochracy. Nobody suggests we shouldn’t have phones, only a few oppose police (and although I’m against having a Murdochracy, most people at this stage aren’t). The broader point though is that the problems lie not with the technology but with the unreasonable power of the press. The right to privacy over the phone is different from the right to drive on public roads without being monitored.
That’s your claim. You’ve restated it, but it adds nothing.
It has never been my claim that there is a linear correlation between the speed at which vehicles move and adverse driving events. Speed is simply one factor, along with driver competence and state of mind, the condition of the vehicle, road conditions, the behaviour of other traffic and so forth. Current speed limits are a tradeoff — a kind of lowest common denominator best guess about the capacity of those with adequate competence in the worst conditions to negotiate the roads with acceptable risk and taking into account public belief in the integrity of the system and the capacity of the system to effect widespread compliance at acceptable cost. Having variable speed limits would be confusing as things stand — because now people get confused when transitioning between different speed zones. Having technologically assisted compliance and a better match between speed and context would be a step forward.
Fitted to a handful of prestige cars …
Again. This is not the major way in which vehicles are stolen. Nevertheless, you could configure the system to send an alert when the vehicle was being moved without an authorised driver, or for an alert to be raised when a unit went off-line and couldn’t be pinged.
No, they don’t. Most obviously, they discriminate against those who travel long distance on lightly contested roads — such as rural folk. Also, they take no account of driver competence and compliance and they leave it open to the driver to violate the laws anywhere unmonitored — i.e most places. You’d need something like a police state to stop them — which is why fines are so large, because one assumes you only catch people doing the wrong thing very occasionally.
Well not in your view anyway. But then, you would say that.
Someone who tries to tell people what to do with coercive force in circumstances where there is no bona fide and sufficient public interest in controlling the behaviour?
No, that’s exactly what I said because it’s true.
What I did not say – but you inferred – was that the only possible definition of “actively tracking” is using GPS transponders.
They did, and we can. In some countries they did it with road checkpoints. In some countries they did it by recruiting neighbours. In some countries they did it by getting peopel to wear a little star. In some countries they just employed a whole bunch of other people to do it.
Wow. Just… Wow.
The good old US of A was founded on the principles of individual liberty, fundamental rights, yadda yadda yadda. Yet numerous violations of those rights – from slavery, through rounding up Japanese citizens into detainment camps to “free speech zones” – have occurred throughout history.
Closer to home, we had Joh in Queensland and the influences of organised crime in Victoria and every other state. Or, if you’re that way inclined, the stolen generation.
Yet you try and argue these sorts of things are a cultural anathema to Australia.
I honestly can’t tell if you’re naive, unbelievably ignorant, incapable of critical thinking, or just simply trolling.
Oh, please. Stop trying to weave in grandiose language like “regime” as if corruption, discrimination and petty politics don’t happen across the entire spectrum of society from the PM to a small town court clerk.
Not if the systems don’t exist (which is one of the biggest reasons these sort of data collecting activities – and particularly attemps to combined them – should be fought at every turn).
I can guarantee you there are a hell of a lot of people who couldn’t reasonably work (or otherwise live their lives) without access to a car. Well into double-digit percentages of the population, I have no doubt.
No, I have not. Stop lying. I’ve happily spent half my adult life without owning a car, it would be pretty stupid of me to try and argue they’re essential.
So you wouldn’t see any problem with everyone entering the country being forced to wear a GPS tracking bracelet and video/audio recording device for the duration of their stay since that’s simply “regulating one’s exercise of a privilege” – visiting Australia ?
How about if we required every single computer in Australia to report every website visited, email read and file downloaded, since using the internet is just a privilege ?
How about if TV were required to record audio and video of the inside of your house and feed it back to be monitored ? After all, owning a TV is just a privilege.
What !? Your benchmark is whether or not the activity on the tape is legal ? So a decade or so ago when homosexual intercourse was still illegal in some jurisdictions your opinion would have been different if the tape depicted that ?
But you’re not trying to monitor people who are only driving contrary to the road rules. You’re trying to monitor everyone regardless of how or where they’re driving.
But your car is not ?
Surely you wouldn’t have a problem with the Government installing video cameras in everyone’s houses to make sure they’re not running a meth lab in the spare room ?
Yes. I’m sure it wouldn’t make the slightest difference if a corrupt cop was able to trivially pinpoint the location of someone he was being paid to intimidate.
This is an argument for monitoring the police, not society.
Ah. Artefacts and corruption that would somehow be magically averted with a database of every car in the country’s movements ?
It boggles the mind you complain about the power of the press, who can do little more than write words, yet are completely sanguine about the power of the Government.
That’s because there’s nothing to add.
I never said there was. However, the fundamental principle behind speed enforcement is that the speed limit really is a limit – only in perfect conditions no less – and that anything faster is implicitly and inherently dangerous.
Obviously, allowing some people to drive faster than the posted limit renders this justification completely moot.
Once again, you have layered yet another coat of complication and complexity into your system. This time to allow supposedly “better” drivers to exceed posted limits (how is this indicated ? by how much ? when ? who decides ? how do they decide ?). All so – in complete and utter confliect with your stated desire to focus on the common case – you can capture the few percent of drivers who couldn’t be just as easily identified with a driver training certificate and a different license class.
Er, no. Fitted by law to every vehicle sold in Australia for the last decade.
Then what is “the major way in which vehicles are stolen” ? How will your system substantially reduce this in a way a cheaper and less intrusive solution can not ?
Awesome. Now you can’t lend your car to anyone.
Yes they do. Lower relative charges for drivers in more remote areas arise from better fuel economy on longer trips (thus lower fuel costs) and the CBD surcharge for people living near cities.
Again, all without have to spend tens of billions of dollars trying to micromanage every car in the country.
That’s because we’re shooting for the common case where most people are somewhat competent and safe drivers, not trying to spend far more than will ever be returned catching the last 5% by imposing a police state (simply one enforced with tracking devices and automation rather than a cop on every corner).
Indeed I would, because my views are grounded in reality rather than fantasy. The best way to improve driver attitudes in this country is with better driver training, not by automatically fining them or disabling their vehicle every time their harmlessly break a road rule.
Right, so pretty much everything you’re proposing then. You’ve yet to demonstrate even a modicum of “public interest” to justify what you want to do, nor how the tens of billions it costs to implement and run will be paid back.
Fran, you’re a _textbook_ authoritarian. You want to micromanage everyone’s lives. You believe the law is infallible. You cannot conceive of corruption. You prefer vast, complex, intrusive, centralised schemes over simple, elegant distributed ones.
So your remark was a complete red herring. Nobody has done what I’ve proposed but you want to condemn what I propose on the basis of practices that were fundamentally different and conducted in circumstances that were fundamentally different.
So not the same. You’re comparing passive monitoring by a piece of software of the movement of a driver of a vehicle with one neighbour spying on another. Astonishing.
I wondered how long it would be before Godwin raised its head. That wasn’t “tracking” anyone for public purposes. It was an attempt to exclude and marginalise people, like tar and feathers. Your allusion is pathetic.
OH FPS … slavery had nothing to do with tracking people. When there was slavery, the dominant European settler population regarded Africans not as humans but as property. In their minds, the black man had no rights which the white man was bound to defend. I’m not sure why you started this excursion though because it doesn’t buttress your case for de facto unmonitored use of the roads at all.
Yes … that was indeed dreadful, though the government has now recognised that that was wrong and even paid some very belated compensation. Still, if the government wants to round up people of Japanese descent, they are not going to need to track their vehicles to do it.
Yes, we did, but again, those activities are now recognised as wrong and as violations of civil liberties. In the case of the Stolen Generation, they were all rounded up without tracking people’s cars. Joh banned street marches without knowing where people were driving. Organised criminals know a surprising amount about the lives and movements of people who are annoying them. It would be nice to know who they were spying on. If they had to do all their spying by public transport, that would be a nuisance to them I grant you.
So you fought EFTPOS, the ATM, the credit card, and mobile phones at every turn? You opposed barcoding groceries and readers at checkouts. You fought to ban loyalty schemes in shops, doubtless?
Obviously not. The right to consent to sexual activity with another consenting adult is a fundamental right that trumps the statute law, IMO. That makes it de facto legal.
In principle, no. In practice it would be seven shades the wrong side of nuts. There’s no possible public interest that such a measure could serve that would not be outweighed by massive negative consequences. We refuse visas to people we think are more trouble than they are worth. (Here and here I might disagree, but the principle is fair) If we felt that bothered about people as a whole entering, we could simply say that we didn’t accept guests. Of course, we don’t feel that way so we don’t.
Again, the public interest. The harm (if there is one) from not having that data is greatly exceeded by the good that comes from allowing people more or less unrestricted access to the internet. One should presume in favour of individual discretion unless there is good evidence that the discretion if allowed would harm legitimate public interests.
Not really as there are no significant impositions on others arising as a result. Video taping inside the house also has nothing to do with owning TV sets. You are being silly.
I would. Again, the public interest … FTR, there are better ways of controlling the spread of unregulated meth labs … but let’s not digress any further.
Yes, because there are two unrelated reasons for the monitoring — charging of road usage and restriction of misuse of motor vehicles.
You can’t monitor the police interacting with society save by monitoring society. The camera was neutral. It both protects police unfairly accused of acting outside the law, and strikes down lies intended to allow police to act with impunity. There are several cases where a camera was the only witness to a serious crime, and in once case it helped nab a gang of violent thugs who had hitherto got away with a string of serious assaults. I’d say that was a good thing.
The speed limit for them would be “posted” in their vehicles.
It would depend, but there would be a formula. They might get a 10% allowance. If they abuse the privilege, it gets revoked.
I want it to be the common case. Drivers who are both demonstrably competent and have shown good discipline and compliance over a substantial period of time earn the privilege. It’s something for the mass of driver to aspire to. Carrots and sticks …
You misunderstand. I mean a remotely operated immobiliser. i.e. so as to remain comparable with what I propose.
People stealing keys, hotwiring cars and so forth. Being able to remotely immobilise them (and having biometric start) would make this much harder.
You could authorise others perhaps by entering a PIN and your own biometric data and then allowing them to enter theirs. You could even time limit it — say 24 hours.
Don’t be silly. These things are simply irrelevant. You can set up systems to resist unauthorised access and to log authorised access.
The pen really is mightier than the sword. The government is largely a creature of the privileged classes and the press is that class’s ambassador and plenipotentiary. The government is a weak and inconstant thing as we see today in Australia. The lion’s share of the say in this country is with Murdoch and the rich more generally.
The huge distances involve and the rural price of fuel more than negate that –
It’s not going to cost “tens of billions” to implement and run unless you are talking of 20-30 years. Then you have to consider the offsets — radical cuts in police numbers; radical cuts in road trauma and damage to vehicles and property, declining insurance costs, reduced pollution from motor vehicles, higher quality air in major cities, cuts in damage to property from vehicle pollution, increases in quality public transport and housing from the funds raised and so forth.
I want to make sure everyone on the road pays their dues and plays nicely. I want that to be a cultural norm.
Ridiculous. I support a system of independent courts, of separation between police, courts and the executive.
Laughable
I prefer efficient and effective ones over those that are ad hoc, ineffective, inefficient and not maintainable. I don’t like systems that predictably produce anomalous outcomes.
No, it’s a simple fact.
Your inability to think outside of a literal box does not change history. Tracking and monitoring people’s day to day activities (often under the guise of “the public good” – or, more recently, “national security”) has been a key aspect of authoritarian Governments since time immemorial.
That they can now do it more subtly and efficiently than any other time in the past is not a cause for celebration, nor does it change that they’ve tried to do it in the past.
Neither the practices nor the circumstances were fundamentally different. They were all about tracking people with the objective of controlling their actions by punishing them for breaking the law. That some may have started with good intentions or “in the public interest”, or that the laws were unjust or unreasonable (explicitly or otherwise), does not change any of this.
Your complete and utter refusal to even consider the possibility that a system for monitoring and tracking citizens not only will not – but can not – be abused is incomprehensible. What’s even scarier is that you want to handwave away historical failings with pithy comments like “those activities are now recognised as wrong and as violations of civil liberties” as if they somehow weren’t recognised as wrong and violations of rights when they were actually happening.
Even more incomprehensible is your insistence that – again, despite ample evidence to the contrary, much of it within the last decade – these sorts of authoritarian systems are an anathema to cultures like Australia (which by extension, includes the rest of the Anglosphere). Have you been living under a rock since 2001 and missed the extensive privacy-invading and rights-infringing practices instituted throughout the Western world under the guise of “the War on Terror”, or a couple of decades earlier in “the War on [some] Drugs” ?
Once again, your inability to think outside of a literal box and deal with concepts rather than focus on semantics does not change the facts of history. Government attempts to micromanage and monitor people’s lives almost invariably end badly.
Which large cross-referenceable Government databases do you think this information is going into ? Which of them is almost impossible to obfuscate or opt-out of ?
These are (or can be) completely anonymous. Loyalty schemes are completely voluntary (don’t even try to compare “choosing to drive” with “choosing to have a Myer One card”, it would just be insulting).
But being able to anonymously transport yourself from one place to another without being tracked and monitored every inch of the way is, apparently, a bridge too far ?
The public interest is at least as significant of being able to capture that last few percentage points of bad drivers, stolen cars and road tolls.
I find it amazing you think a harmless and unobtrusive tag on tourists (would need to be no bigger than a watch) would have “massive negative consequences”, but a series of hugely expensive and intrusive imposts on drivers would have none at all.
So finding paedophiles, identify thieves, frauds, tax-evaders, et al, is not in the public interest ? Or is it just less in the public interest than identifying the costs and crimes of a few percent of drivers ?
What good comes from letting people look at websites that depict, encourage, or educate about illegal acts ?
Indeed. You have yet to demonstrate any “good evidence” your big brother scheme will deliver significant – or even any – benefits in the public interest (especially compared to simpler, easier, cheaper methods). It is therefore logical to presume in favour of individual discretion and not try to micromanage everyone’s driving.
There are (vastly) better ways of properly charging for vehicle use and creating safer roads than your crazy plans, as well.
Rubbish. There’s no need for everyone in location A to be monitored 24/7 so that police in location B at a specific time can be monitored.
You’ve missed the point, which is that the fundamental argument behind speed limit policing is that the limit dictates what is and is not objectively safe under all conditions. Remove that argument by saying it’s actually ok for some people to speed and you have removed the argument for policing speed limits (and instead replaced it with an argument for policing safe driving, which requires someone to actually evaluate what “safe” is at the time).
You have yet to demonstrate how a remotely operated immobiliser will make a significant difference. Plain old immobilisers have already slashed theft rates of outfitted vehicles by something like 80%.
In which case we come back to my original point: you need to demonstrate that the majority of drive-away vehicle thefts fit a profile where owner knows about it soon enough for them requesting a remote shutdown to be meaningful (i.e.: before the car can be loaded up onto a trailer to be chopped up for spare parts).
Ah, yet another layer of complexity to go wrong. Of course, these things could never be disclosed under duress, or not be disclosed when needed because the relevant party was incapacitated.
Securing data and computer systems is one of the biggest and most difficult problems in the IT world and you want to handwave it away as “irrelevant” !? That’s almost as crazy as trying to handwave away abuses of power and corruption.
I’m pretty sure the guy who gets beaten up by the corrupt cop would prefer he’d been written a nasty letter instead. As would the people who ASIO spirit away.
Take it from someone who has actually lived outside of a city and driven “huge distances”, and also has some inkling of what would be involved in the unprecedented technological leviathan you want to create: adjusting the combination of mileage, fuel taxes and high-density surcharges to account for larger distances and lower fuel average consumption by rural dwellers would be trivially simple (and practically free) in comparison.
Just installing the infrastructure, creating software and establishing the bureaucracy is going to cost tens of billions. Given the extra functionality you keep tacking on top of your original tracking device every time I point out a flaw, like awareness of local road rules, remote engine immobilisation (what happens when the system loses contact with home base ?), biometrics and, if I recall from last time, a breathalyser (how hard is it for someone to get a mate to blow into the tube ?), that $500 per vehicle is probably underestimating by a factor of 5-10.
You have yet to describe any realistic mechanisms as to how any of these things would actually be achieved. Lots and lots of handwaving, zero evidence (or even practical theories).
In the context of your massively expensive, complicated, intrusive, government-expanding, privacy-invading plan vs much simpler, cheaper and less intrusive alternatives:
You have not demonstrated any evidence or argument to support “radical cuts in police numbers and road trauma” (and that’s ignoring the simple political impossibility of “radical cuts in police numbers”). People are still going to drive dangerously – too fast, speeding, tailgating, weaving through traffic, on bald tyres, without lights, talking on the phone, blasting through pedestrian crossings because they weren’t paying attention, etc. All of these things need an actual police presence.
You have not demonstrated any evidence or argument to support the assertion that insurance costs would be “radically reduced”. Cars are still going to get crashed, stolen, chopped up for parts, caught in hailstorms and vandalised. The only thing your plan could potentially assist with is theft, and you have not given any reason to believe that a significant proportion of vehicle thefts could be averted if cars could be remotely disabled.
You have not demonstrated any evidence or argument to support the assertion that car usage would significantly decline, leading to lower pollution and air quality.
You have not even come close to demonstrating how your system – which *starts* tens of billions in deficit – will manage to so much as break even, let alone generate more net funds “for housing and public transport”. Particularly in light of your insistence that car ownership would become cheaper (which, by definition, means less revenue generated from car owners).
In summary, it’s a bad idea across the board and you should feel ashamed for using it as a beard for your authoritarian ambitions – and given you want anyone, anywhere in the country, who drives a car to appear as a little dot on a map, along with every piece of personal information available from the first speeding fine they ever had to whether or not they’ve got asthma at the touch of a button, please stop trying to pretend your motivations are anything else.
Your scheme is everything but efficient and is absolutely guaranteed to predictably produce anomalous outcomes due to its massive complexity and complete lack of flexibility or discretion. It might well be effective, but then so is North Korea.
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