That's one of the near-future threats to government funding that is going to cause some very interesting public arguments that don't match the private fears.
- Autonomous cars will massively reduce income from speeding fines
- Electric cars will reduce the incoming tax revenue from buying fuel (in Australia this is a large component that also goes into funding the maintenance of the roads)
- Solar power reducing overall household spend on power, which is potentially another large source of tax revenue
The last two things keeps more money in the pockets of consumers, which will therefore probably get spent on other things, so could be closer to a zero-sum game than it looks.
Until some kind of rule change comes in to create new government revenue streams, it's the early adopters getting the benefits so far (for example, Australia is considering additional taxes on electric cars to make up for the 'road maintenance' component the government won't be getting due to their not buying fuel. No word on incentives for "clean air" or "reduced emissions" benefits though...).
Not to worry. I'm sure there will be a new autonomous vehicle registration fee to implemented to help offset any losses. This registration will of course be on top of any existing registration fees.
They could also use some sort of algorithm that looks at each driver's record. If you have a history of speeding, they can just go ahead and asses extra fees for you since the algorithm extrapolated you would have had more tickets anyways. If you have a clean record, then the algo will go ahead and decide you're "due" for a ticket, and charge you accordingly. Why not, insurance companies do it.
Well I imagine step one will be to keep raising the penalties for speeding on the remaining manual drivers. After all it will be like 20 years before autonomous cars are a significant minority.
Some people will refuse to buy them for years. People will be buying cheap used cards for years, and those will be normal cars for quite a long time. Dollars to doughnuts the sensors and cameras and whatnot on a lot of autonomous cars will fail before the car itself does, rendering them back to manual. And again the used car market isn't going away.
There might be plenty of manual drivers in fifty years.
I don't think self driving cars will even have a steering wheel. It would probably be cheaper to buy a new car than to convert a self driving car back to manual operation.
i really dislike speed traps. i'd even support a proposition to convert all speed limits to suggested speeds (thereby abolishing fines for speeding). you could and should still punish dangerous driving, but speed by itself wouldn't serve as the threshold for unsafe driving.
>> "...convert all speed limits to suggested speeds (thereby abolishing fines for speeding)"
The State of Montana had this until the late 1990's, when the Fed's finally forced Montana into having a speed limit again by threatening to pull all Federal highway funding.
Other fun facts are that you could get a driving license at 14 years old (or a "ranch driving license" at 12 in some semi-rare cases), there was no seatbelt law, no motorcycle helmet law, and no law against drinking and driving[0].
[0] There was a law against being drunk while driving, but not a law against drinking while driving. This lead to the classic canard: "How far is it from Butte to Helena?" "Oh about four beers."
Problem with that is that for the most part speed is a pretty objective measure —whereas “dangerous driving” isn’t, so will result in uneven interpretation/application.
As someone who was ticketed for going the speed limit on a bright sunny day on a rural highway with no other cars around, where the cop wrote down two different speeds and it just happened to be the last day of the month... I assure you it is not always objective. Cost me 5x to fight it what the ticket would have been, but it's the principle of the matter.
I'm not discounting this issue. I'm sure it happens but: 1. having a speed limit allows you to know the cop was objectively wrong (barring broken speedometer). 2. Imagine the leeway cops would have if they had the discretion in determining "dangerous driving". The abuse would be even worse.
Choosing to enforce a speeding law is still subjective though, so this wouldn't change much. We speed all over California, police choose to go after the most dangerous (or least conforming to community standards, or... some other even less good measure, like race).
I understand that but at least you know what to expect: “I’m going 42mph in a 35 zone, I might get pulled over and issued a ticket”, vs. “hmmm I wonder if going 35mph is dangerous driving, does passing a bike mean it’s dangerous? Does it being dusk mean it’s dangerous? Huh, I don’t really know”.
After the US national speed limit was repealed in the 90s, Montana had no posted daytime limit. The law stated you had to drive "reasonable and prudent for conditions". The law got tossed by the state supreme court because there is no objective standard for reasonable and prudent.