Are You Ready for the Congestion Tax ?

News With Views ^ | 06-14-05 | John Christian Ryter

[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?

[Calpernia]

It looks like the link was posted with the article vs. the link source field: NewsWithViews.com

[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?

[clearsight]

http://www.newswithviews.com/Ryter/jon91.htm

[upchuck]

Thanks for the link.

I, too, would like to know how this, "track any car with a license plate stamped after 1992" works. If this is the case, and I find it very hard to believe it is, why do LEOs still "tail" people?

FWIW, I took the license plate off my vehicle and inspected it very closely. I could find nothing to lend credence to this idea.

[Wooly]

The way they are able to track your license plate is by using a receiver on the black helicopters that fly over the USA all the time. A select group of technicians dressed in black on-board the black helicopters, record all sorts of information about where you are going, where you have been, how many people are riding in your car, and if you have discovered secret information about Roswell New Mexico or area 51.

[clearsight]

I am not sure it is done directly by satellite, but through a scanning system built into the bed of the highway itself and then transmitted to the satellite?. Next time you are driving down the interstate around or through a large city notice the dual square pattern on the highway about 2' x 4' in size ( a thin tar line rectangular pattern) occurring about every 1/10th of a mile. That is the magnetic pick-up field which is interrupted each time a vehicle with a chip on the underside passes over. I was under the impression that every vehicle in the u.s. manufactured since 1985 was trackeable, but the article indicates a later date.

[Millee]

Shame on you!!!!!!!!! You forgot to capitalize the 'F'!

[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.

[clearsight]

Wow.........x files ya think.........?????

[Alberta's Child]

The rectangular pattern you describe is nothing more than a loop detector embedded in the roadway. Large metro areas use these to measure traffic volumes and estimate average highway speeds for various roadway segments, and they are often tied in to other high-tech devices (like variable-message signs) on the system.

These loop detectors don't monitor individual vehicles in any way -- they just detect a heavy object passing over them, estimate the size of the vehicle, and compute the speed. They are basically high-tech versions of those rubber hoses you sometimes see on roads that are used to count traffic.

[eyespysomething]

[RockinRight]

Like this?

[RFEngineer]

That, my friend, is a Cranial Groundplane, NOT a tin-foil hat.