"On the freeway, rewarding drivers 1 cent for every minute that they kept their speed at 50 mph resulted in a traffic planner’s dream: a smooth flow of vehicles all traveling at the optimal speed for maximum road utilization."<p>I'd happily lose that "reward" to drive faster.
If you want to keep everyone driving at a certain speed for extended periods of time, there is only one way that really works - average speed cameras as implemented in the UK. There are long stretches of the motorway(50 miles long for example) where you have a camera at the entry point and at every exit point - the camera reads your licence plate when entering and when leaving, calculating your average speed based on time.<p>For the entire length of the limited zone people do drive at the limit, because everyone knows that there is absolutely no escape from the fine. At a regular speed camera or police checkpoint you can slow down momentarily only to accelerate again. There's no escaping average speed cameras.
In general, most roads shouldn’t have a price for most drivers, and rewards for maintaining a particular speed sounds stupid.<p>However, we’d get big improvements to our urban/suburban city planning if we had (a) much less street parking, most of it metered; (b) looser or no parking requirements for houses and businesses written into the zoning laws, with mixed-use zoning allowing both smaller parking-free residential units and for-profit parking structures to pick up the slack from the reduction in free and required parking; (c) lower speed limits on urban streets encouraged by better street designs and enforced more strictly by traffic cops; (d) tolls on most highways; (e) much higher gas taxes to offset health and environmental costs of driving, and a removal of various automobile subsidies; (f) tolls for large vehicles like trucks which cause most road damage and cost the most in road maintenance, proportional to the amount of road wear they cause, which increases something like mass per wheel to the fourth power (a semi-trailer truck causes something like 1000x the road wear of a passenger car).
FYI Daedalus was a column by David E. H. Jones in New Scientist by a fictional inventor, containing all sorts of fun, odd, and satirical ideas: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_E._H._Jones" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_E._H._Jones</a>
Sounds interesting. Alas, the last sentence has triggered a Cobra Effect alert. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect</a>
I think Daedalus (writing in the 1970s/80s) didn't anticipate that we'd spend our time working for free to gain HN karma, Facebook likes and so on. No need to pay out cents at all, just ring the little bell!
Where does the money come from? Not just for the payouts, but to setup and maintain the program?<p>Seems like there would be some major privacy concerns also.<p>Pretty sure it's satire, though.