I have to admit, I was quite against it before it started, but am now all for it!

The only stupid thing is that currently if your car gets stolen and the thief drives it with the autogiro transponder in it, the police aren’t allowed to use the data from the charging stations to track your car (the data privacy laws are going a little too far there I think…). Worse, if this should happen you have to pay the charge and then appeal the charge as in the regular way for any other contested tax. But that is the only blip, and I’m sure it can be one that is easily remedied.

Consumption tax increases prices, of course, but that is more than offset if there is a reduction in income taxes. Decisions can be made by the individual on the spot, on a daily basis, as to whether to pay for the price of the service plus tax, while one can only affect income taxes through the ponderous process of electoral politics.

I’d love to see higher tolls on the bridges and tunnels of New York (they’re about $4-$6 now; I’d like to see $10 or $20), and less income taxation from the City of New York. It would also be interesting to see San Francisco have the same kinds of rates: that city has worse weekend traffic jams than New York.

I once made the mistake of borrowing a friend’s car at 3pm on Friday in San Francisco, and attempt to get it returned to Berkeley by the usual 15-30 minutes it takes while driving at nighttime.

It took me four hours.

Did he even get lucky?

Can’t the bored suburban kids do this in beautiful ‘downtown’ Espoo or something?

Apparently the booty is better in Helsinki than “lovely” Espoo.

Toby:
My big moan is about the cycle paths. Don’t get me started on this, or on how Finnish drivers treat cyclist (you seem to become invisible when on a bike). I could moan about that all day!

Oh, you should have seen what it was like to try to cycle in the centre in the 80s when there were no cycle paths. Thankfully, the Greens in the Helsinki city council have since remedied the situation somewhat and we have at least cycle paths on Mannerheimintie and Bulevardi as well as across the railway station. But Helsinki is still a long way from Amsterdam when it comes to bike-friendliness.

My big moan is about the cycle paths. Don’t get me started on this, or on how Finnish drivers treat cyclist (you seem to become invisible when on a bike). I could moan about that all day!

And Frankin, I’m familiar…hell, even in Ivalo where there might have been 100 cars in total, I watched a guy drive the three blocks that was Ivalo round and round for several hours in the snow which I supposed was a function of there being nothing else to do in late November in the deep north of nowhere. Can’t the bored suburban kids do this in beautiful ‘downtown’ Espoo or something?

This is the age-old libertarian custom of cherry-picking (just not on anyone else’s property!) the premises that best suit the argument at hand. Though, Phil has been disturbingly disloyal to libertarian ideals lately.

And by the way, cars don’t “kill ozone”, apart from perhaps leaks from old air conditioning systems that use CFCs. They’re a source of ozone, which is a Bad Thing in the lower atmosphere.

In “Buying a car should be fun”, Phil points out the folly of high taxes on cars by asserting that they prevent people from trading up to less polluting vehicles:

“Yeah but the high taxes don’t really prevent people from buying cars, it just prevents them from buying cleaner, safer cars instead of holding on to their Ozone killing gas guzzlers.”

And yet here he seems to be doubling-back on this one, in spectacular fashion:

“But when 15% of the traffic stays off the road, what kind of people are those 15%? Yeah, it’s the poor. The poor will take their little polluting rust buckets off the Helsinki streets to make room for Finland’s wealthy, zooming around in their bigger, more polluting SUVs. At the very least, these bigger more polluting cars should be taxed more, but this isn’t done in Stockholm.”

But I thought the rich were in the CLEANER, safer cars, not the ozone killing gas guzzlers? And really, SUVs, here? I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto.

Are you familiar with the concept of pilluralli? It’s essential for Finnish procreation (and, I suppose, should be tax-exempt because of that).

I cycle (3200 kms commuting last year – so I have PLENTY of time to pay attention to Helsinki driving styles and traffic issues!) and its very rare in Helsinki that you get lengthy amounts of standing traffic where cyclists can nip down between lanes as is SOP for British cyclists. On the rare occasions I need to drive in, about the only place you seem to get queues in the morning is at the end of the motorways (i.e. coming off Tusalantie). The UK is obviously a crappy comparison as it does have such major conjestion problems, but its what I know and thats why I think that Helsinki in comparison to most British cities just doesn’t have real traffic problems, particularly considering its unhelpful geography. Of course good public transport is central to this.

Yeah, so then you need to take the bus… oh, but the bus pass has all that data, so they know even where you change buses… eeekkkk

Isn’t that the case now?

I think some people would appreciate the amount of traffic in Helsinki more if they spent some time stuck in traffic on the West Loop in Houston, Texas at 5pm. Now that will put some hair on your ass.

But I only read the blog for the comments!

In Stockholm, it is 20kr (2€), in London it is £8 (12€)!