Well, I have seen that several states have talked about doing something like this, including Oregon and California. And in the cases where I have read about this they were looking at this as an addition the existing gasoline tax, not a replacement. And if you don't collect a lot of data and make assumptions about what the vehicles do to the roads, you end up treating all vehicles the same. Suddenly a Hummer is paying the same to use the road as a Toyota Tercel.

I attempted to sign up for a test program that the University of Iowa was launching last year, but did not get picked. I was not a fan of this sort of thing but I was curious and wanted to know what data they would be collecting and how it might be used. I know that the stories I had seen talked about how they wanted to have billing based not only on the number of miles driven but the time of day and where they were driven. So, you might pay less on a rural highway than a congested city street. You would pay more for travel in the city at rush hours than after hours. (I think of this when I see the IBM commercial where they talk about a system of fees or something that helped a city reduce congestion.)

Nonetheless, it is intrusive, but then so might be the smart grid and other technologies. I guess we should just get used to not having our privacy.

It is one of the things that they have talked about in the studies of this technology. They will be able to charge differently for driving in different locations. Charges could vary by the demands of some types of roads. That could be bad for people that live in rural areas without much traffic since they could decide that they will charge them more for that road use. I do think that lawnmowers and chainsaws probably don't impact the overall numbers too much though in most places.

I agree. And it disables the incentive that the gas tax gives and it treats all mileage the same. In other words, if I'm driving a big heavy vehicle that wears the roads more than a smaller lighter vehicle, I pay the same. A tractor-trailer rig pays the same per mile as a Prius? I do understand it from the perspective of alternative fuel vehicles that are/will not pay the gas tax. We need to find alternative funding, but I don't like this solution.

This reminds me of a story from Network World a few years ago (maybe 9 or 10) which talked about how Stanford University had a Class A and several class B networks and re-addressed themselves into the B's and gave the A back. In the same article the network administrator for MIT (I believe it was) said that they didn't see there was being an IP shortage and was not considering giving any of the class A network that they have back to ARIN. I worked for a place at one point that had three Class B networks and some class C networks and we could have very easily existed in on class B since we were using under 20,000 IPs, but nobody was interested in trying to rework things to give any back. At the end of the day, I think more emphasis should have been given to migration planning for IPV6 and we wouldn't even be having this discussion.