I think a tire tax would work much better, as tire wear should be closer to being proportional to road wear caused by the vehicle. The proportion may change over time, necessitating tax updates, but clearly fuel consumption isn't proportional to road wear.
Victoria follows South Australia and imposes electric car road tax
321–330 of 388 posts
Re: Victoria follows South Australia and imposes electric car road tax
#322I think that road users should pay to use the road. Fuel excise, or electricity surcharge tax or whatever, is a tiny fraction of the subsidy that road users get from regular tax payers. I'm a blind Aussie taxpayer. Consider my tax situation. If I take an Uber to my local pub, that's about A$10. Of that $10: $0.90 in Goods and Services Tax $1 to the taxi compensation scheme That's 19% tax - or $1.90/$10. In Australia,…
>I think that road users should pay to use the road. I think we should have pay to use parks. And schools. What's the point of having government funded infrastructure if not to make it equally available to all regardless of means?
Roads are a bit different than parks and schools, in that the vast majority of the maintenance costs of roads are caused by commercial (generally for-profit) activity. You do often have to pay to use public parks and school facilities for commercial events.
Also, there’s a difference between the government funding infrastructure or protecting monopolies that develop and maintain infrastructure, and government providing total end-to-end funding of something. We generally pay for usage of electricity, water, and postage, for example.
Re: Victoria follows South Australia and imposes electric car road tax
#323Earlier quoted context omitted.
You know what else will lead to unrest? Unmitigated climate change. We need to drastically reduce driving. Making it more expensive is just one of the measures to take here. We also need to alternatives easier to use. Better city planning and better infrastructure need to go hand in hand with price signals.
>You know what else will lead to unrest? Unmitigated climate change. Yeah in 10-50 years. Not now. People that aren't part of the intelligentsia don't see it a threat yet.
This piece of pie every day won’t cause obesity now. Maybe in a few months.
Re: Victoria follows South Australia and imposes electric car road tax
#324I'm not really sure there's a good answer here. Fuel tax is 43 cents a litre. Australian cars right now avg about 13.1 litres per 100km. So you're looking at ~$5.6 per 100km for fuel tax. This tax is adding $2.5 tax per 100km for electric. Right now, EVs are absolutely creating an regressive tax situation with regards to fuel. Those who can afford to buy newer, efficient cars can usually save money on tax over those…
I read somewhere that road damage caused by vehicles is not linear with weight. Heavy vehicles do much more damage. I can't cite a source, but I recall an exponent between 3 and 4 on the leading term. With that in mind, everything but heavy freight is basically negligible. And then it's generally for businesses where privacy isn't so much of an issue.
Is it known if this is purely a weight issue, or does weight distribution make a difference? If a large truck were equipped with twice as many tires at half the PSI, what difference would that make?
I’ve seen weight limit signs on certain roads, I wonder if instead they should be PSI limits?
Re: Victoria follows South Australia and imposes electric car road tax
#325I don't understand the opposition to this. These vehicles continue to use roads but don't pay any taxes that would help maintain roads if they were gas or diesel cars. How is that fair?
Why is it incumbent on the EV owners to somehow solve the blatantly and deliberately incorrect means of charging people to use roads?
This is like saying “the movie theater makes money by charging to park a car in the parking lot, but you walked to the theater, so how is it fair that you get to watch the movie for free?” Well, perhaps the movie theater should come up with some slightly less ridiculous way of charging for entrance.
Or if governments had decided to fund road maintenance using a tax on car paint, would it be unfair to buy a car that isn’t painted?
And what about people who use gasoline and diesel for things other than automobiles on public roads? That’s also unfair.
Re: Victoria follows South Australia and imposes electric car road tax
#326Earlier quoted context omitted.
Singapore isn’t comparable to this situation at all. To simply purchase a car in Singapore you need to purchase something called a certificate of entitlement, which entitles you to own a car for 10 years. They’re sold by tender, with different tenders for different types of cars. But you’re looking at about $30k USD just to buy the right to then buy a car. Singapore is also a country where essentially the entire coun…
That.. and a person can walk across it in a day. You cant walk across brisbane or many of the capitals in Australia in a day.
Yes, but it's the mass car usage that have caused Australian, American and many European cities to spread out to such an extent that walking or cycling or even transit is no longer an option for most people.
Re: Victoria follows South Australia and imposes electric car road tax
#327I'm not really sure there's a good answer here. Fuel tax is 43 cents a litre. Australian cars right now avg about 13.1 litres per 100km. So you're looking at ~$5.6 per 100km for fuel tax. This tax is adding $2.5 tax per 100km for electric. Right now, EVs are absolutely creating an regressive tax situation with regards to fuel. Those who can afford to buy newer, efficient cars can usually save money on tax over those…
> For electric, it was worse - because they do tend to be more expensive to purchase up front, and they paid no fuel tax at all California was cutting $10,000 checks to rich people buying $80,000 sports cars called Teslas. You could be a solo driver in an HOV lane for a long period of time, in a part of the world where rich people's negative experience with the outside world is disproportionately traffic. For every t…
I just want to chime in to say that it's true everyone benefits from roads, but not everyone benefits from ever wider roads and huge traffic machines. Delivery trucks and ambulances and what have you do not need 8 lanes and clover junctions. Those things are built to accommodate suburban commuters.
Re: Victoria follows South Australia and imposes electric car road tax
#328Earlier quoted context omitted.
I read somewhere that road damage caused by vehicles is not linear with weight. Heavy vehicles do much more damage. I can't cite a source, but I recall an exponent between 3 and 4 on the leading term. With that in mind, everything but heavy freight is basically negligible. And then it's generally for businesses where privacy isn't so much of an issue.
Is it known if this is purely a weight issue, or does weight distribution make a difference? If a large truck were equipped with twice as many tires at half the PSI, what difference would that make? I’ve seen weight limit signs on certain roads, I wonder if instead they should be PSI limits?
I'd imagine a 20 tire truck of 1tonne roughly equals 5 4-tire cars of 200kg.
So that would mean the first still has to pay 5x the tax of the latter.
Re: Victoria follows South Australia and imposes electric car road tax
#329I'm not really sure there's a good answer here. Fuel tax is 43 cents a litre. Australian cars right now avg about 13.1 litres per 100km. So you're looking at ~$5.6 per 100km for fuel tax. This tax is adding $2.5 tax per 100km for electric. Right now, EVs are absolutely creating an regressive tax situation with regards to fuel. Those who can afford to buy newer, efficient cars can usually save money on tax over those…
How do you track the number of Kms driven? Is it possible to do so while maintaining the privacy of individuals?
It's more difficult than that: How do you track the number of Kms driven on public roads. As claimed purpose of tax was to cover the wear on these.
Re: Victoria follows South Australia and imposes electric car road tax
#330Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because you want to discourage use.
But now you're making a statement which is too general. There is no benefit to discouraging use of highways at night, or uncongested suburban/rural roads. The thing you really want to prevent is congestion. And even that is not inherently best solved through punitive fees. If you can reduce congestion by e.g. building more housing near where people work so they don't have to commute as far, that's preferable to levyi…
The amount of NOx and CO2 emission is a direct product of use, and not (or hardly) congestion.
The world doesn't heat up slower if we manage to use roads 100% during nighttime too.
Same for wear and tear.