Ah yeah, groene golf (green wave [1]). I grew up remembering my parents also using that. Except it never bloody worked.
> In the UK, in 2009, it was revealed that the Department for Transport had previously discouraged green waves as they reduced fuel usage, and thus less revenue was raised from fuel taxes.
Ugh...
The degree by which governments routinely violate the accounting principle of matching revenues to expenses is awful.
A carbon tax on consumers (incl. businesses) is effective at producing good market behavior regardless of how the tax revenue is spent.
In the example I reacted to, a government agency actively worked to inhibit that behavior in order to preserve its revenue. Your point would hold if governments didn't have the power to do things like this.
> Earmarked funds are stuck.
If the revenue is being raised to pay for damage caused by society, those funds should be stuck to that purpose and should rise and fall based on the level of damage being done.
A governmental bad actor is basically orthogonal to the idea of a carbon tax. The government could equally try to increase sales of liquor and cigarettes for sin taxes, or go around murdering people for the estate taxes. The UK example is shameful but reflects on that government body rather than the specific tax on petrol.
The problem is earmarking or allocating a variable set of revenue as funding for something unrelated, and in particular something unrelated that's otherwise valuable or important.
And NOT earmarking or allocating 'sin taxes' to pay for the supposed costs of those sins, borne by the public in the form of the government, seems pretty stupid (to me) if it's actually necessary or desirable for the government to 'manage' those sins or those sin's consequences.
There is this thing called the "waiting time paradox" [0] (or more generally the "inspection paradox") that suggests a surprising thing, the average time between discrete events observed by many other randomly interspersed observation is the same as the average time between events. This should be surprising, because it suggests that many more people experience times LONGER than the average wait to balance out people who experience a shorter wait because they were randomly closer to the event.
This happens because longer intervals, when they do exist, get a larger proportion of the random observations than the shorter intervals between events. More precisely and generically, when the quantity being observed affects the observer, the observations will be distorted by the quantity in question and have to be normalized.
In the case of a green wave, those rare times when someone waits too long on a green because they were looking at their phone or a naked person in a nearby window and create slowdowns and stalls in the pipeline? Those moments are longer, so there is a longer window where you could experience them.
This actually comes up a lot in observations of things in nature. Imagine if instead of light flips or bus arrivals we were observing clicks on a geiger counter and you'll realize how fundamental this is to experiencing the world.
tl;dr: The Green Wave only works in averages and it can be correct even as your experience of it never working is also correct. :)
[0]: https://jakevdp.github.io/blog/2018/09/13/waiting-time-parad...
Timed lights work, I've seen it in action. Top of my head, Indianapolis 20 some years ago, Capitol Avenue going north I'd bet you could go from (what is effectively) Zero Street to 38th and not hit a red light.
Of course traffic was heavy enough that you'd be stuck behind someone doing the speed limit most days, but sometimes you got to ride the wave.
If two cars both say they drive at 50 km/h, and one is actually 45 km/h and the other 55 km/h, that is quite a bit relative margin of error. And we only need two cars like that in the whole group to start causing problems.
If you can't design a green wave to be tolerant of varying speeds, then it isn't useful.