Big Brother Driving

Wired reveals the machinations of the state of Oregon to reach into your wallet in ever more insidious ways.

The Oregon Department of Transportation is evaluating a scheme that uses the global positioning system to keep track of the distance every car travels in order to impose a road-use tax.

How do you pay?

When a driver needs to fill up the tank, a built-in radio transmitter will zap the data to a reader alongside the pump, and the mileage charge will be added to the gasoline bill.

Why do they need GPS?

...pure odometer readings can't guarantee that all the miles traveled are within Oregon...

Big Brother will be your backseat taxer.

"We're also looking at variable pricing and congestion pricing," he said, "and we could even do different time-of-day rates." For example, the state could make it more expensive to drive downtown during rush hour than it would be to cover the same ground during a midnight munchie run when the streets are deserted.

Even the Greens see problems with this.

Chris Hagerbaumer, a program director at the Oregon Environmental Council, a conservation advocacy group in Portland, points out that moving away from a tax based on gas consumption eliminates an incentive to purchase fuel-efficient vehicles.

Bureaucrats can manage to alienate conservatives, libertarians, and greens in one fell swoop with a massive expansion of spying on the public while trying to shake them down for more money.