Would lower insurance fees ease privacy qualms?
Paul Hanley, who directs transportation policy research at the University of Iowa’s Public Policy Center and helped run the study, said it’s possible to erase all record of one’s driving patterns, but then it becomes impossible to challenge the government if one thinks the tax was calculated incorrectly. “So you trade off a little bit of privacy on that, but you gain auditability,” he said. During the study, two participants’ cars were stolen. When they — and the police — asked Hanley if the cars could be tracked, he said they couldn’t. The study concluded in August. When looking at the results, Hanley found participants “trusted the system, they trusted us that they were not being tracked, they had faith in the system itself … the participants said, ‘We trust you, but how would we trust anybody else?'” Those butterflies have convinced advocates of the VMT tax that if they’re going to persuade the public, they have to do it right the first time. Paul Sorensen, an operations researc
