VMT Post-script

Posted by on . 2 comments.

Dave Roberts has a nice piece up at the Prospect reviewing two books on driving, which includes this passage:

Moreover, all USVs [urban small vehicles] will be GPS and Internet-connected. Think of the location–specific services an iPhone offers, from maps and directions to restaurant suggestions to hyper-local news. Now imagine a similar range of apps for a vehicle that’s receiving real-time information about road congestion, parking availability, and the latest box scores. Imagine the benefit to traffic planners of having information about the location and trajectory of every vehicle (encrypted, say the authors, but their discussion of privacy issues is cursory at best).

This “Mobility Internet” could lead to the same kind of innovation unleashed by the Internet itself. Among other things, it could enable a revolution in civic management of road, parking, and power services. Currently the large majority of roads and a great deal of parking is free, and as any economist will tell you, an unpriced resource will be overused. Sure enough, road and parking demand frequently exceed supply, leading to congestion, a good chunk of which, Traffic reminds us, is created by people driving around looking for parking (“parking foreplay” also causes one in five urban collisions). Although power isn’t free, it’s generally sold at a flat rate, leaving consumers no way of knowing when it’s most valuable.

Toll roads and congestion charges are crude attempts to change the situation. Once the devices that consume road, parking, and power services are connected to the Internet, however, cities can institute variable, real-time, citywide pricing for those resources, based on the balance of supply and demand moment to moment. This could radically increase the productivity of resource use, compensating at least in part for the expense of building these systems. Cities would become more like organisms, their subsystems controlled and coordinated by a unified nervous system. (Water and sewage systems could be integrated to the digital grid as well and even used as backup energy storage — but that’s another story.)

VMT Tax: there’s an app for that.

Comments

  1. Turbulence says:
    February 13, 2010 at 12:45 pm

    (encrypted, say the authors, but their discussion of privacy issues is cursory at best).

    Encryption is not magic pixie dust that makes all systems secure. It is merely one tool that protects against a limited set of attacks. Note that many transit smartcard systems also employ encryption, and they too have been broken.

    Encryption doesn’t make systems secure; at best it raises the costs needed to break them. But if we build an infrastructure where every vehicle is constantly chirping its location to a central government facility, we’ve now increased the total payout of breaking that system. When the benefit of breaking a system exceeds its costs, you should expect successful attacks. The more centralized we make our vehicle location database, the bigger the benefit to attackers who break into it, which means more resources will be directed into attacks. Smaller decentralized systems (say, run by individual cities) represent smaller targets, but will likely have far far worse security and system design than a nationwide system run by the federal government. Municipal governments have many skills, but those skills do not include designing and operating, or even just supervising the design and operation of complex distributed systems.

    Before we run off and build social policy on the backs of a complex network of distributed systems, we should recall that over time, attackers only get better and attacks only get stronger. Defenders, constrained as they are by the law and the economic costs of replacing lots of infrastructure, have difficulty matching them.

  2. jim says:
    February 13, 2010 at 4:22 pm

    “VMT Tax: there’s an app for that.”

    No. There may, in the future, be a platform on which an app (if written) could be run. Do not confuse potentiality with actuality.