License Your Car For Free
** New update at the end of this post. **
On Saturday, I took my car in for its mandatory emissions inspection. Seven minutes and $15 later I was on my way. All I've got to do now is mail in $76 and my car's good for another year on the road. My brief visit to the testing facilitiy was hardly enough time to ponder the eternal verities, but I did have a couple of thoughts.
It's well known that people don't like paying so much to license their cars. So I devised a way to make licensing your car free. Are you ready for this?
It works as a feebate. Basically, we'd identify the median level of tailpipe pollution (the level at which half of all cars are cleaner and half are dirtier). Easy enough. Then we'd devise a sliding fee schedule: the dirtier your vehice is than the median, the more you pay. But the extra revenue wouldn't go to the government, it would go to reduce the licensing fees of cleaner-than-average cars.
In this way, the dirtiest cars would pay enough to make it free or very cheap to license the cleanest cars. As the vehicle fleet became cleaner, the median would move, and the fee schedule would continute to provide an incentive for driving clean cars.
Feebates are grand. In different ways, they're being considered in California, Canada, France, and the UK. But there may be a problem with my scheme.
