[clearsight]

Past time to organize and determine which State borders to defend.

[RockinRight]

My response to this idea is "f--- off..." to any politician proposing it.

Sorry. That's the only proper response IMHO.

[RFEngineer]

"Add to that the fact that the license plates on every American vehicle since 1992 can be tracked by global positioning satellites [GPS]"


This article should be taken with a grain of salt while wearing one's tin-foil hat.

[upchuck]

Thanks for posting this. Got a link?

[KrisKrinkle]

"...the ability of the US government to covertly track any vehicle wearing a license plate stamped after 1992."

Say what? How does that work?

[gooleyman]

If they're so worried about cars using more gas and spewing pollutants into the atmosphere, they should stop screwing up the light timing whenever they do a construction project. Forget these big-brother gizmos.

Every time a stretch of highway or a street corner is worked on around here (Cleveland, Ohio) they always lengthen the timings of the traffic lights causing us to have to sit at lights twice as long. The traffic always builds up behind these longer lights and we wind up with more and more gridlock. There is one intersection near here that if you get caught as it turns yellow, you have a 3 (THREE) minute wait if you're going straight. That's three minutes there at idle, spewing pollutants. And that only started after they did construction at the intersection. I called and called 'til I was blue in the face and could not get a sympathetic ear who would changed it, so there it stands. I moved away from the area so I don't have to deal with it, but it hasn't changed in all these years.

Does this happen where you live?

[Alberta's Child]

It was called the Intelligent Vehicle-Highway System or IV/HS. Ostensibly, it was designed to "lighten" traffic on heavily-used, smog-polluted roadways by assessing congestion taxes on the vehicles on the stressed roadways in order to "spread the traffic out" so that it moved faster with less pollutants spewing into the atmosphere during peak driving hours.

The author of this article really lost his credibility by demonstrating an utter lack of understanding of that the "IV/HS" concept was all about.

"Intelligent Vehicle-Highway System" (IVHS) was the term used to describe the theoretical extension of modern technology to the world of highway operations. It became very popular during and after the Gulf War in 1991 because defense contractors began to think of creative ways to apply many of their defense technologies to civilian uses (global positioning and vehicle tracking systems, for example). The assessment of "congestion taxes" wasn't really part of these early discussions -- the real "futuristic" goal at the time was that eventually transportation in the United States would involve high-tech automobiles that would operate free of human control by interacting with the roadway itself as well as the other cars on the road (imagine how much more efficient a highway system would be if cars were able to drive on their own -- no more than two feet apart at highway speeds).

The term "Intelligent Vehicle/Highway System" was replaced by "Intelligent Transportation System" in the mid-1990s when it became clear that: 1) the original "high-tech highway" concept was too ambitious, and 2) the application of technology to transportation would cover multiple areas of transportation (highways, mass transit, etc.) and shouldn't focus on just highways.

Nowadays, motorists in metropolitan areas deal with various ITS elements without even thinking about it. Those overhead variable-message signs that warn you of an accident or other delays on the road ahead of you are part of an ITS strategy for your city, as are those loop detectors at an intersection that monitor the number of vehicles on the road and automatically adjust the signal timing to optimize the operation of the intersection. As more an more high-tech applications become cost-effective to implement, these things will become more common.

In some cities you can even subscribe to a traffic monitoring service that will extend the "Warning: Accident Ahead" concept one step further. You can arrange to have them serve as your alarm clock by automatically calling your home phone number every morning, and if there is an accident on your usual route to work they will compute the estimated delay for you and activate the wake-up call earlier to inform you of the problem.

[RFEngineer]

"What happened between Jan. 20, 1993 when Bill Clinton took office and March 29, 1996 when Clinton granted civilian access to 24 GPS satellites to the world? "

GPS has always been available for Civilian Use, what happened is that "Selective Availability" - an algorithm to degrade the accuracy of GPS to prevent an adversary from using our own satellites to navigate accurately was turned off.

I submit that this was a good thing.

Because even for civilian uses, it was possible to "back out" the selective availability algorithm through the use of Differential GPS techniques (measure the GPS reading of a known point over time and correct for differences)- which were becoming pretty sophisticated and indeed, real-time with many services.

The "tax-by-the-mile" proposals are real, but totally disconnected from this author's alternate reality.