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Comment by Arainach | Hacker News Reader

In principle, having road charge be a combination of mileage and axle weight makes an incredible amount of sense - it taxes the factors which contribute to road wear.

Unfortunately, these proposals all seem to end up at "let the government location track your vehicle at all times", which is a privacy disaster - a disaster even worse than the current widespread use of automatic license plate readers. Unless such conditions are removed these programs are gross curtailments of freedom which should be opposed.

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It should be simple enough to use the odometer. If the vehicle drives significantly outside the country or on private roads, then a GPS-based odometer seems simple enough. I'm sure a 1GB SD-card can geofence the public road network of most countries so that the taxed odometer rolls only when on taxed roads.

Doesn't seem like a privacy nightmare, and this kind of system is more practical than an online server-based one, given that mobile signals are especially uncommon when off-roading or roaming internationally.

> It should be simple enough to use the odometer.

The odometer lets the owner know whether the car needs maintenance.

Also, it determines the resale value of the car, and in this context modifying a car's odometer is a crime.

If you start fining people for having certain odometer readings, you're doing a lot of damage to the idea that modifying the reading should be a crime.

In general, the more purposes you want something to serve, the less effective it's going to be at each of those purposes.

I'm sure the ANPR network in the UK will make short work of people rolling back odometers, especially now that it is tax evasion.

The sort of people that roll back odometers are also the sort that steal post-pay gas by driving off and fail to carry insurance, and fill their diesel vehicles with tax-free dyed agricultural fuel, etc. They will have a scheme no matter the system, and the system will have a scheme for them.

When you change the meaning of the odometer, you also change what "the sort of people that roll back odometers" means.

I don't agree. Lying to other people buying your car to get more money and lying to the government to pay less tax are both unethical for the same reason and are the same sort of person.

The odometer says how far the car has gone. Nothing is being changed about it.

I’m not certain I agree with the premise that mileage is a good indicator of road wear.

I do about 30k km in a typical year. My families live far, so a return trip is around 4000 km.

If we visit our family 3x/year, we’ve effectively exhausted this “10k mile” thing (I don’t live in the UK, but the point still stands), however very little of our actual mileage would be in our home country. To be precise, only 300km out of 2000.

If I go in other directions, the math gets even worse. I can leave the country in 30km and add 800-3000km of mileage for a scuba trip.

The amount of damage you do to the roads is exactly proportional to how many miles you drive on the roads. Where the roads are doesn't matter.

What you're describing is a billing detail - how do ensure the right chunk of those fees goes to the owners of those roads? And that leads to the conundrum I posed - without tracking your location at all times there's no way to prove what number of miles were in one municipality versus another.

It depends more on vehicle weight than miles driven

It depends on axle weight, not vehicle weight, and regardless of weight is directly linearly tied to mileage.

Road fees aren't just for the damage you're causing - they're for construction, signage, and many other pieces of infrastructure whose usage depends more on mileage than weight.

Yes, that was exactly my point. A local government handing me a bill that is not proportional to which roads I was driving on.

There are many systems, many of them imperfect. The vignette system, per week/month seems maybe the most responsible, as it guarantees I’m paying my due in the place of and proportional to the amount of time I will be using the roads.

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