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Electric Cars – fuel duty and road tax: how to replace £35B annual revenue

carwow.co.uk

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Re: Electric Cars – fuel duty and road tax: how to replace £35B annual revenue

#151

Post by mbg721 »

unglaublich wrote: post #74
redeeman wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so perhaps its also time for the government to admit that the prior taxes didnt have ANYTHING to do with environment, but just a way to justify money grabbing to spend on their own worthy causes?

Cars are a huge burden on health, safety, environment and quality of life. It has never been a secret that governments tax cars to subsidize causes that should partially compensate the indirect damage that cars do to their countries.

We saw this play out with the money from tobacco settlements a few decades ago; states see sin taxes as a windfall that can substitute for sustainable budgeting.

Re: Electric Cars – fuel duty and road tax: how to replace £35B annual revenue

#152

Post by chrisco255 »

techterrier wrote: post #8
chrisco255 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of road taxes is to pay for maintenance and expansion. Roads break down over time if you do not maintain them.

this is paid out of local taxation. Which is why pedestrians, cylists, equestrians, tractors, cows and ducks are allowed to used the road. There is no such thing as road tax.

Dunno how it works in UK, but in US, there are local roads, state roads, and federal roads. There are also local, state, and federal gas taxes that vary by jurisdiction. The funds from these gas taxes are used to finance new highway and roadway construction and maintenance of existing roads. Sometimes, a special tax is levied at the local level for specific local roadway projects. But the big infrastructure projects are almost entirely paid for by gas taxes.

Either way, the point of the tax has never been to "punish pollution".

Re: Electric Cars – fuel duty and road tax: how to replace £35B annual revenue

#153

Post by prmoustache »

nemo44x wrote: post #143
matsemann wrote: post #2

There is no "road tax" in the UK, is it? It's a fee for polluting, not using the road. I hate that it's being used as an argument against cyclists: "get off the road, you don't pay road tax". This of course also ignores that most adult cyclists also own a car.. Norway have the same issues now. Almost all new cars are electric. You don't pay purchase tax / vat when buying it. Pay less on toll roads. Cheaper to use. Et…

> I hate that it's being used as an argument against cyclists: "get off the road, you don't pay road tax". It's really more that many cyclists are in the way and aren't going the speed limit. You end up holding up a lot of traffic that is forced to go slower and that's annoying to everyone. to be frank, when you're driving a car a person on a bike taking up the entire road is annoying. This is why people really disli…

But then you look at the average speed of cars and you realize that in most urban area it is roughly the same as the cyclists.

How many stupid motorists kept screaming their engine when I was commuting just to pass me then come to a screetching halt behind other cars at the next traffic light while I just pass them back to the front of the line.

Re: Electric Cars – fuel duty and road tax: how to replace £35B annual revenue

#154

Post by AnthonyMouse »

7952 wrote: post #33
belorn wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

bicycle and pedestrians could be exempted from a road tax based on fairly simple assumption: the wear and tear is minimal compared to a car. It wouldn't even surprise me if the wear and tear is so small that it can't even be measured. But I could be wrong. It would be interesting to hear if heavy bike/pedestrian roads have higher road maintenance than those that are used lightly. My guess would be that the major wear…

I think road wear is axle weight to the fourth power. So lorries are massively more damaging than cars. And cars are massively more damaging than bikes. Anecdotally the issue with bike and pedestrian paths is intruding vegetation which slowly narrows the width.

It's not just a matter of "massively more" -- with those numbers the damage from anything other than large commercial vehicles is a rounding error which, if accounted for proportionally, would cost more money to collect than the amount collected.

Re: Electric Cars – fuel duty and road tax: how to replace £35B annual revenue

#155

Post by _vertigo »

nemo44x wrote: post #143
matsemann wrote: post #2

There is no "road tax" in the UK, is it? It's a fee for polluting, not using the road. I hate that it's being used as an argument against cyclists: "get off the road, you don't pay road tax". This of course also ignores that most adult cyclists also own a car.. Norway have the same issues now. Almost all new cars are electric. You don't pay purchase tax / vat when buying it. Pay less on toll roads. Cheaper to use. Et…

> I hate that it's being used as an argument against cyclists: "get off the road, you don't pay road tax". It's really more that many cyclists are in the way and aren't going the speed limit. You end up holding up a lot of traffic that is forced to go slower and that's annoying to everyone. to be frank, when you're driving a car a person on a bike taking up the entire road is annoying. This is why people really disli…

As a cyclist, I am also trying to get somewhere, and I don't enjoy being on the road with motorists either.

Based on your comment, I have to assume we live in different areas. I live in the city, and generally it is better and faster to bike because one can bike almost as fast as a car due to not needing to wait for traffic and there's no need to find parking at the destination. From my POV, the motorists I have to share the road with are driving on low throughput streets and generally don't belong on the streets I am traveling down.

Do you live out in the country with 2 lane roads? A small town?

Re: Electric Cars – fuel duty and road tax: how to replace £35B annual revenue

#156

Post by tomgp »

nemo44x wrote: post #143
matsemann wrote: post #2

There is no "road tax" in the UK, is it? It's a fee for polluting, not using the road. I hate that it's being used as an argument against cyclists: "get off the road, you don't pay road tax". This of course also ignores that most adult cyclists also own a car.. Norway have the same issues now. Almost all new cars are electric. You don't pay purchase tax / vat when buying it. Pay less on toll roads. Cheaper to use. Et…

> I hate that it's being used as an argument against cyclists: "get off the road, you don't pay road tax". It's really more that many cyclists are in the way and aren't going the speed limit. You end up holding up a lot of traffic that is forced to go slower and that's annoying to everyone. to be frank, when you're driving a car a person on a bike taking up the entire road is annoying. This is why people really disli…

leaving aside the fact that the speed limit is an upper bound on speed not mandatory… on my bike i’m more regularly held up by cars (often a single occupant) than i am by cyclists when driving my car. but overwhelmingly its cars holding up other cars.

Re: Electric Cars – fuel duty and road tax: how to replace £35B annual revenue

#157

Post by 1123581321 »

mab122 wrote: post #48

Why not just tax the tires? Seems like they are good indicator on how much you are using roads and how many miles you drove etc. (Safety maybe an argument. Don't do it so people don't drive on shitty old ones)

An old tire buyback program would be better for road safety.

Re: Electric Cars – fuel duty and road tax: how to replace £35B annual revenue

#158

Post by enragedcacti »

dahfizz wrote: post #137
Robotbeat wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The “pollute more from the tires being heavier” is a myth, by the way. There was an article that circulated claiming this, but they never actually measured the tire pollution of electric cars, just extrapolated from ICE cars with really terrible and ultimately false arguments. Electric cars tend to use low rolling resistance tires (potentially less wear… if you’re experiencing less rolling resistance, that means less…

> Electric cars are also fairly comparable in curb weight due to massive weight reductions elsewhere, Seriously, this meme needs to die. A Tesla model 3 is the same weight as a BMW 340, and the model 3 is hundreds of pounds lighter than an SUV like the BMW X3. Batteries are heavy, but so are gas engines & transmissions.

> A Tesla model 3 is the same weight as a BMW 340

Sure, but its also 500-1200lbs heavier than a Civic depending on the trims of each which has very similar utility to an M3 and is much closer in TCO to a model 3 than a 340 or an X3 is.

We shouldn't be having our cake and eating it too by saying "electric cars are more expensive but the TCO so much lower than ICE that its worth it" and then make comparisons to ICE vehicles at the MSRP of the EV.

Re: Electric Cars – fuel duty and road tax: how to replace £35B annual revenue

#159

Post by AnthonyMouse »

balderdash wrote: post #122

I think people are starting from the wrong end of the problem. It appears we have two types of roads, access roads (think last mile roads in residential or rural areas) whose replacement cycle is driven by useful life vs usage. Then we have high throughput roads, that have enough volume to require usage driven replacement cycles. So if those access roads are y% of the miles and x% of the cost, then a vehicle “access”…

Under this model you should also account for the amount of damage done by the vehicle. Which scales with the fourth power of axle load, i.e. ~100% of the road damage is caused by large commercial vehicles, to the point that collecting it from passenger vehicles isn't even worth the collection infrastructure. It certainly isn't worth the privacy cost.

Re: Electric Cars – fuel duty and road tax: how to replace £35B annual revenue

#160

Post by tomgp »

pydry wrote: post #45
belorn wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

bicycle and pedestrians could be exempted from a road tax based on fairly simple assumption: the wear and tear is minimal compared to a car. It wouldn't even surprise me if the wear and tear is so small that it can't even be measured. But I could be wrong. It would be interesting to hear if heavy bike/pedestrian roads have higher road maintenance than those that are used lightly. My guess would be that the major wear…

There is no road tax, only vehicle excise duty which bicyclists dont pay. It goes straight into the treasury so it's not even really "used" per se it's just a way of exerting downward pressure on inflation (which is how it should be, IMHO).

thats a strangely abstract way of looking at it. i think of it as a way to capture some of the externalities of car use, the environmental, social and public health damage.
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