Easier to watch and control people when they can't move fast and far. Sometimes after work I'll end up 20+ miles out of my way for no other reason than "I felt like going for a drive" and I don't always bother to tell anyone where I'm going either (dangerous, I know). Sometimes I'll just decide on the spur of the moment to go into Anchorage (45 miles from work, 55 from home) for whatever excuse I can come up with (there's a pretty good used video game store in there). With cars capable of moving at what are, in practical terms, very high speeds (especially if you feel like being dangerous and using all your horsepower; even my 90 horsepower Escort wagon could probably get into the triple digits faster than you'd think), powered by a plentiful fuel source that can be replenished in minutes, people can be quite slippery to say the least.
We stop and say good enough, when it is in fact, good enough. However it currently isn't, not by a long shot. As for everything else I said, based upon the predictions I made you would be totally fine. As I said, whether you use mass transit and rent a vehicle if you need one, vs whether you buy a vehicle will depend on what is more economical for you. So if you only need to do 500 miles a year you would likely use mass transit and rent a car when you need it. If you live in a rural area and need to use a car every day, you would buy one, because that is more economical. So for you, that would likely mean business as usual. Mass transit would probably be run by private companies in the US anyway. So the end result would be less money spent by the government on inner city road infrastructure for dealing with high volumes of cars. Knowing the US, the local governments would likely ask for money in exchange for allowing a monopoly to operate in their city anyway I can't think of a good reason why "the powers that be" would have any interest in curtailing the freedom of movement.
That's true of certain places, but there are others where air quality is very, very far down the list of concerns. That's what I was getting at - identify the places where it still isn't good enough ,and enact local-level solutions that will improve the situation for those places while leaving the rest of us alone. If you still think we really need national-level solutions anywhere outside of China, I'd love to hear why. See above, and below. Look at any failed or failing people's republic of despair, and find its real (not necessarily stated) reasons for doing so. The reasons will be the same here. There are some people who are by nature elitists and cannot trust common people to live their own lives, and who really believe that they can create a utopia on earth if only they can put themselves in a position to run the show There are some people (not necessarily different ones) who would just love to make themselves rich beyond belief at the expense of everyone below them.
You are aware just how easy it is to track people who are on the move. Number plate scanning tech can track cars with ease, facial recognition camera's are starting to enter the fray, if you carry a mobile phone your location can be tracked very easily. I don't buy that curtailing movement would in any way hinder anyone's ability to track you if they really wanted to.
And how would monitoring everyone help them? Also, if you looked at history, you'd see that pretty much every people's republic, save for Cuba, Mongolia, North Korea and Albania, had a motorization program at some point. I know, I live in a country that was once one.
Generally people in power believe that if they can track everyone then they can prevent any crimes from occurring. However innocent until proven guilty is pretty well established and doesn't seem to want to budge. So generally monitoring systems are only used on high profile targets, then they watch until they have solid evidence that proves guilt, then step in before a target can do anything major. This is mostly used for anti-terrorsim. You can see the evidence of this with all the news stories that go along the lines of "terror suspect arrested outside [place x] with [weapon y]". They were only able to make those arrests because they had evidence that amounts to probable cause that a suspect was going to do something.
Not everywhere uses it, and if it relies on cameras a simple infrared-light license plate frame (inexpensive, completely legal, and probably not difficult to knock one together yourself if you're a nerd) will laugh at it, at least in theory. If the cameras are badly designed or placed, even that might not be necessary; I've heard that some Japanese street racers have defeated speed cameras just by putting their front license plates in a goofy place or even just at a goofy angle. If it can't get enough of your face to recognize, it's not gonna do jack. Also not likely to be common out in the countryside. Off pocket or leave it at home. Even if everything I said above turns out to be a moot point, you gotta admit it's a lot harder to run from some hypothetical secret police when it takes half an hour just to recharge your car enough to get to the next cluster of stations.
To be fair, if "they" had the power you imply they do, why can't they place their men at charging stations, and stop the wanted person there?
I think he is relating to built up areas, in the UK at least there is a very large amount of monitoring, with CCTV everywhere in London and on every bus including rural ones. If I'm honest I'm surprised there isn't a CCTV camera attached to every lamp post really (government could do this, there is electricity live inside them anyway). In rural UK things are much less monitored, but you can't go un-noticed, like the local corner shops all have CCTV, the petrol stations have CCTV and the police are allowed access to it. If needed the police can track you down almost anywhere in the UK, that's just the way it is here, not too sure how it is anywhere else though tbh. Anyway car discussion, the demise of the Internal Combustion Engine has happened a lot quicker than I thought, but I think it's helped by the Diesel gate from VW, I'm not sure why everyone wants to overly punish them, like yeah they messed up but now the vehicles are being tuned back (but why not just post the true values, if the cars are capable of that value then why not have that tune, and sacrifice the performance, besides if this was a performance fiddle no one would care)
Most CCTV in England is not active. It's mostly turned off or dummy units. Shops are the exception though are property of the shop, police do not have access to it without a warrant(or cooperation)
The issue is that a lot of consumers purchased the vehicles based upon the specifications. Since the specs turned out to be false they had to issue a buy back, since it was argued that people wouldn't have purchased one had its real specifications been known. VW did offer to retune vehicles, but that was at the owners discretion. Most owners didn't want to reduce their cars performance, however there is uncertainty as to whether they will be allowed to continue to drive them going into the future. However the buy back meant that VW was paying above market price for the cars, so that is what many people chose to do. Since you get a full refund, you can then buy a new vehicle. So owners have essentially had a free car for a few years.
Oh, come on. If the government really wanted to track all your vehicular moves, it would pass a law that requires every car to have a GPS transmitter "because it will be easier to find you when you will be lying inside a crashed car somewhere in the wild". Russia already did so, but it's Russia.
hehehe, you'd be surprised by how many cars already have both a GPS receiver and a GSM radio already. Current "ethical hacking" shows, no, nobody is monitoring those signals maliciously. But boom if government wanted to track you, theres their back door
The russian GPS system I was talking about constantly transmits information about your car's whereabouts to emergency services.
yup. Most manufacturers do the same the world over, BMW also issue firmware updates for the ECU over it. Reporting is only in event of airbag deployment
who on earth buys a car based on its emissions rating, yeah maybe the tax group which is based on the emissions rating, i suppose it is taken into account but i doubt people buy it based on the emissions figures, unless they really dont care about anything else (or a company car, which is very important for the typical workhorses by Audi..) So to keep the emissions down to specifications (well the lied one...) they have to decrease the performance of the car, so is it a crime for tax evasion if you don't do this ECU modification by VW? Oh thats quite a good idea, especially the firmware updating as with the 1st generation Jaguar's and some rangerovers you can connect a laptop running Windows XP (even in a VM) and update the ECU and transmission firmware and do tests on different things such as the Air conditioning and servos (like power locks) As for the GSM radio how is the data transmitted, doesn't it require a SIM and therefore a contract (so BMW would be out of pocket?) or does the owner have to pay this? Im sure quite a few people would be disgruntled when they get a bill from a telephone company asking them to pay for data used by their BMW without them even knowing that it was connected up to the internet!
From memory the patched cars have worse fuel economy and lower power figures. So people were understandably annoyed with that.
