Perspective: E-tracking, coming to a DMV near you — Another Take On PAYD
Declan McCullagh at C|Net had a pretty good look at this issue last month in his column. I’m a little bit less pessimistic and privacy paranoid than Mr. McCullagh, but his general ideas are very much on target.
Actually the privacy issues, while important, are overshadowed in my view by the use of the wrong tool for the job approach. It’s like the old saying about the fellow with on one tool, a hammer .. and because of that, everything looks like a nail.
Now I sell these GPS tracking units for a living, so I probably wouldn’t kick the chance to sell them to an entire state’s automobile population out of bed very quickly.
But GPS tracking as it exists today is not really the way to approach most of the PAYD issue. Our company sells relatively sophisticated units that enable fleet managers and corporate operations officers to tailor the performance of both their vehicles and drivers for profit. If they couldn’t see a profit .. and I certainly am often tasked to provide that proof, they won’t buy. And, they darn well shouldn’t. But none of the savings is automatic. Someone has to run the reports and compare them to standards. Someone, interested in profit, has to look at the maps and determine if the drivers have been where the company told them to be.
In the case of a private user the same economies through efficiency can accrue, but is the average motorist going to take advantage? heck you can’t get most of them to take their cell phones out of their ear .. or to not tailgate three feet off the car in from going 85 in a 75.
States already have the technology to collect data from very simple RFID tags to a large degree. Passive RF tags for vehicles would cost only pennies in quantity. Every automated freeway road sign, every centralized traffic light controlled and many other points already owned by government organizations could collect the ID of passing cars and forward it to a central collection database. In point of fact this method is not only cheaper it’s world’s more practical for the idea of collecting tolls or monitoring the use of special lanes. If you have the HPS tracking information from one of my sophisticated commercial units you can find out a lot, but to tell if I drove on I-25, you have to look at the map and determine that fact visually. If I drive past an RF reader or a camera on I-25, there’s nothing else needed to show I was there.
Anyway, it going to be an interesting next few years with this PAYD bandwagon picking up speed. It won’t all be boring.