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Victoria follows South Australia and imposes electric car road tax

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Re: Victoria follows South Australia and imposes electric car road tax

#351

Post by jb775 »

cs02rm0 wrote: post #320
recursive wrote: post #24

Earlier 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.

Road damage isn't the only issue with weight though. There's safety, exhaust emissions, tyre and brake particles, noise, etc. I'm sure some of them don't have a linear relationship either. One of the biggest upsides to taxing vehicle weight could be to counter purchasing decisions that have shifted to larger vehicles that no longer comfortably fit in parking spaces but ride better over ridiculous speed bumps and give…

This entire thread is flawed in two fundamental ways:

1) The primary concern here is per capita road damage. If that's agreed, why is the conversation not about improving the resiliency of roads?

2) Why would the adoption of new technology automatically subject you to draconian taxes that have nothing to do with that new technology? I understand infrastructure needs to be paid for, but this is simply a cash-grab by politicians. If people started jogging to destinations rather than use cars, would it be acceptable for the government to charge a "jogging transportation tax"?

Re: Victoria follows South Australia and imposes electric car road tax

#352

Post by vl »

URSpider94 wrote: post #180
perlgeek wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you pay for maintenance from the general budget, you are allowing shipping companies (for example) to externalize cost that they incur on society. This is generally a bad thing, but very concretely it led to road traffic growing much faster than rail traffic (or canal ship traffic) even in countries with a very dense rail network.

This, and it also subsidizes people’s decisions to live far away from where they work and commute by car every day. There was a time when I think that would have been seen as a public good, and thus people were ok with that. Now is not that time. Comparing this with free public education, by not charging user fees to attend school, we are subsidizing (a) having children, and (b) educating them at the expense of the c…

Public education is not “free”, we pay for it with out taxes. And right now we are paying, and our children are not getting an education...

Re: Victoria follows South Australia and imposes electric car road tax

#353

Post by BlueTemplar »

moralsupply wrote: post #220
dragonwriter wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My point is that taxation is unjustifiable ethically. That's entirely dependent on your ethical axioms, on which there is no universal consensus. There are certainly frameworks within which some taxation is justifiable. > You can only justify taxation under an authoritarian standpoint (eg. "we must tax people so that...") (1) that's not true, and (2) that's an instrumentalist/utilitarian argument, not an authoritar…

> That's entirely dependent on your ethical axioms, on which there is no universal consensus. There are certainly frameworks within which some taxation is justifiable. You're right in that there are multiple ethical systems that could justify the arbitrary nature of taxation. That doesn't mean those ethical systems can survive the scrutiny of philosophical razors. Being specific, from the perspective of the ethics of…

Individuals are an abstraction too, we're just a bunch of cells.

Human beings evolved to live in a society. Exile from society being tantamount to a death sentence. And no society exist where there is no taxation, even if it's only in the very mild form of losing social credit if you didn't share food with others.

Re: Victoria follows South Australia and imposes electric car road tax

#354

Post by AmericanChopper »

Thlom wrote: post #326
ungamedplayer wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Car usage certainly hasn't caused that at all. Many people want that because they don't want to live in the type of environment, or in the type of accommodation you will find, in high density central city living. This has been the case since long before the car was even invented.

Re: Victoria follows South Australia and imposes electric car road tax

#356

Post by GreenWatermelon »

URSpider94 wrote: post #182
rconti wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah, once we get to 25% adoption (or something) we can talk about how badly EVs are hurting fuel tax revenue. in the meantime, jack up the fuel tax in a planned, regular way, and let the market decide :)

That might be rational, but it’s highly unpopular with the 99% of people who don’t drive electric cars. This is virtue signaling,

The 99% of people who drive ICEs and can afford an EV should get one.

Many good things are unpopular. Shutting down coal mining operations is unpopular with miners. Staying at home to avoid spreading a disease is unpopular, but we have to do it anyway because it's important.

Switching to EVs is important for slowing down climate change, and should be incentived (incentivised?).

What those 2 Australian states did translates directly into accelerated Climate change and Coastal cities sinking.

Re: Victoria follows South Australia and imposes electric car road tax

#357

Post by Dagger2 »

hallway_monitor wrote: post #304
TulliusCicero wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nowhere did they suggest that they want to get rid of all cars ever. The principle that shifting traffic from cars to bikes saves money for the government is a sound one. There'll always be a need for cars for some things -- probably not gonna have ambulance bikes, and of course deliveries for anything big needs a car/truck -- but you can certainly reduce the need. Especially with ebikes making biking more convenient…

I'll keep my car thanks

Most cyclists are also drivers, so yeah, I'd expect you to. Noone was telling you to get rid of your car.

But not every journey needs to be done by car.

Re: Victoria follows South Australia and imposes electric car road tax

#358

Post by labawi »

myself248 wrote: post #209
0xB31B1B wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the vast majority of road degredation isn't due to weather, its due to weight wear. As heavy vehicles travel down the road, they create a "ripple" on the road surface in front of the axle. You can create a similar effect if you run your hand across a loose sheet on top of your bed (you will see the wrinkle in the sheet in front if your hand). This bending is the method of road wear that causes like 99% of the mainten…

If that were the case, then roads would be almost equally bad everywhere regardless of the weather. As a Michigander, the dictionary does not contain words to express how strongly I disagree with that implication.

While I may disagree with GP about the exact method of wear, regional differences are mostly due to construction not weather or wear. Roads ~50km west of us look almost new, while ours usually develop potholes or at minimum cracks, within a year. It's a different country, so different standards.

Re: Victoria follows South Australia and imposes electric car road tax

#359

Post by names_are_hard »

Baeocystin wrote: post #252
jholman wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmn. Brief research seems to show that you're more correct than I would have expected, but also that it's less true than I think you imply. For example, https://afdc.energy.gov/data/10310 gives motorcycles as almost 2x as efficient as cars, almost 3x as efficient as "light truck / van". Given that enormous amount of metal that's not being hauled around, I would have expected a bigger difference. Nonetheless, for sing…

>Before any new car hits the showroom, the EPA runs an emissions evaluation and calculates a “CO2 equivalent” – a single number that represents GHGs CO2, NO X , HC, and CO. The CO2 equivalent units are in grams/mile, so a higher number means more GHGs and more climate damage. For a 2WD 2020 Ram 1500 HFE on the highway, that number is 340 g/mile. Unfortunately, motorcycle emissions data isn’t documented by the EPA. Th…

This is very surprising. But on reflection I suppose it makes sense, because the typical motorcycle is designed to be a performance machine not a commuter vehicle. So the engineering trade-offs are probably more similar to those made for sports cars.

Re: Victoria follows South Australia and imposes electric car road tax

#360

Post by names_are_hard »

jondumbau wrote: post #269
Baeocystin wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Before any new car hits the showroom, the EPA runs an emissions evaluation and calculates a “CO2 equivalent” – a single number that represents GHGs CO2, NO X , HC, and CO. The CO2 equivalent units are in grams/mile, so a higher number means more GHGs and more climate damage. For a 2WD 2020 Ram 1500 HFE on the highway, that number is 340 g/mile. Unfortunately, motorcycle emissions data isn’t documented by the EPA. Th…

Many motorcycles didn't come with cats in the 2000s, combined with lots of high strung 600s running massive valve overlap. But the modern class of commuter bike has got to be pretty good. Drag coefficient is poor but they're also a much smaller area, and city driving is more forgiving for aero.

This is a key point. Fuel consumption on my bike goes from about 22km/l all the way up to 15km/l if I increase my speed from 70km/h to 130km/h. Essentially the killer is wind drag. I'm riding a bike with notably poor aerodynamics, I suppose sport bikes do better in this regard.
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