How exactly will mobility pricing be different from a gas tax and insurance?
- Those who drive more in Metro Van pay more and use more gas
- Those who drive more efficient cars pay less because they consume less gas
- Insurance charges you less if you drive your vehicle only recreationally than for work and less depending on your region.
For mobility pricing to be implemented, it would need to do all of these three things:
(1) increase/decrease the cost of driving on an hour by hour basis.
(2) increase/decrease the cost from micro location to micro location basis.
(3) charge visiting vehicles and old vehicles.
It would be a waste otherwise because you can just use other methods, such as a gas tax, insurance charges or bridge tolls.
A list of proposed systems:
- Odometer: No(1) No(2) Yes(3). Can't tell when and where you are. Could charge a flat rate per km driven for those crossing the border by road.
- GPS Tracking: Yes(1) Yes(2) No(3). Unless it is hardwired into the car someone could just turn it off. You can't hardwire it to every car because of existing vehicles and out of town vehicles. Also a privacy issue. Very expensive to implement continually.
- RFID micro zones: Yes(1) Yes(2) No(3). High initial capital cost with RFID sensors on all borders to micro zones. Low operational cost. Entry points into Metro Vancouver would need toll booth's to ensure all visitors have an RFID registered or a Metro Van Pass (similar to a National Park Pass?). Very disruptive to inter-regional traffic (Hwy 1, Sea to Sky Hwy, Ferry Highways).
- All Bridge Tolling: Yes(1) No(2) Yes(3). Zones aren't evenly distributed in size.
- Specify your work place on your Insurance: No(1) NotReally(2) No(3). People use their cars for much much more than just going to work.
- Gas Tax: No(1) Kinda(2) Yes(3). People don't fill up frequent enough that the price of gas can be changed to discourage travel during certain hours.
The only solution I think remotely worth considering would by RFID Microzones, but would be a very expensive endeavour. They should scrap this idea of Mobility Pricing and just increase the Gas Tax as a more fair and simple way of collecting revenue. People will avoid peak hours from congestion by their own accord, which increases the likelihood they will consider transit and if they do need to drive, influence what time they do drive at.
People had enough trouble with Compass and that wasn't really revolutionary technology.