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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

#171

Post by ehnto »

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…

That's a nasty bias you have. Cyclists are clearly also "people trying to get somewhere". I'd argue they're trying harder than you are.

I won't defend all cyclists, some of them have bad etiquette for sure. I certainly don't have traffic piled up behind me. But I'd argue they've inconvenienced you far less than your car infrastructure has inconvenienced them. I promise if they had a separated fast bike lane to use, they'd be using that instead of getting blasted by cars and trucks and dealing with people angry they're late for their next stoplight.

If you want cyclists off your road, then you should be lobbying for better cycling infrastructure.

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

#172

Post by warmwaffles »

phpisthebest wrote: post #102
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)

Aside from the safety factor, tires do have an expiration date, like with most things tires are rated for time and mileage. ie 5 years or 50,000 miles Now most people only replace them at the milage limit like their oil because they run out their miles faster but for some people (like me) I tend to replace things on time more often because I do not drive that much

> ie 5 years or 50,000 miles

It also depends on the make and where you live. I stretched my Yokohama's out to ~80k miles with good tread still left when I replaced them. But I live in the southern part of the US, so we don't have to deal with snow and ice cycles that cause tires to wear faster.

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

#173

Post by rgbrenner »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #159
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.

Even if a road never sees a single truck, it will still need to be replaced and/or repaired eventually. Things like the freeze-thaw cycle destroy roads too.

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

#174

Post by tzs »

belorn wrote: post #21
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…

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…

> 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.

That is the case, which came as a surprise to me.

For things like the road bed, where the force from the surface is going to be spread out more, I'd expect the car to do more damage because total weight would be all that mattered.

But for damage at or near the road surface I'd have expected bikes to do more.

My reasoning was simple: although cars weigh a lot more they are spreading that weight over a larger contact area.

My car for example has four tires each at a pressure of 32 PSI. My bike, before I replaced the tires with wider tires, had two tires each at 110 PSI. Any given small patch of road I drive or ride over would only get about 29% as much force on it from the car as it would from the bike at any given time a tire is on that patch of road.

It would get that force for more time from the car than from the bike if the car is going less than ~3.4 times the speed of the bike and for less time if the car is going faster than that, and more different small patches of road would get force from the car than would get force from the bike.

This is similar to why if I were to put a flat metal plate on my chest and set a bowling ball on top it would not hurt, but if I were to set hold a dagger against my chest and set a bowling ball on top it would likely hurt a lot.

But something is wrong with my reasoning, and it turns out that road damage goes as something like the fourth power of the vehicles axel weight. Whether the tires are narrow high pressure tires or wide low pressure tires, from what I've read, is not relevant.

I'm not sure if that is because I was just wrong about top layer damage, or if it is just that lower level damage is just much more important and expensive, so any difference in top layer damage due to tire size is lost in the noise.

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

#175

Post by zip1234 »

wil421 wrote: post #76
analog31 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>>> 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. Indeed, here in the states, cyclists pay for the roads that we use. For instance most local roads in cities and counties are paid for with property taxes. Income taxes cover a fair amount of road construction. The county bike paths have a fe…

> Indeed, here in the states, cyclists pay for the roads that we use. For instance most local roads in cities and counties are paid for with property taxes. Not true for a lot of states. Property tax is not used for roads. Georgia pays for roads using gas taxes and road use fees like registration (tolls contribute a very small amount). Florida is similar but they are much more toll heavy. Alabama is similar as too. A…

Georgia is 3rd in Federal road subsidies: https://www.ajc.com/news/feds-transportation-spending/ Usage/registration fees pay for less of roads than people think.

There is also this: https://taxfoundation.org/states-road-funding-2019/

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

#176

Post by enragedcacti »

Robotbeat wrote: post #167
enragedcacti wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 veh…

It’s comparing to a similar performance ICE vehicle. Model 3 is much higher performance than the civic, more comparable to the BMW.

Sure, and the Civic Type-R has a 0.8 second faster 0-60 than an SR+ M3 while weighing 550 lbs less and beats the Model 3 Performance at Nurburgring by over a minute while weighing over 1000 lbs less. All while having a $10k-20k lower MSRP. the Type-R is only 15 seconds behind a model S plaid at nurburgring which is more than 50% heavier.

But beyond that, if the only thing you ever try to compare is 0-60 performance then EVs always have an upper hand because it is one of their primary strengths, and that's great! But cars are much, much more than their 0-60 (as evidenced by a fwd car with a 5.0s trouncing an awd car with 3.1s on the track) and for many people TCO, utility, creature comforts, reliability, etc. are more important comparisons.

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

#177

Post by adamcharnock »

faichai wrote: post #19

Everyone always seems to jump from general schemes (road tax, fuel duty) to Orwellian tracking (GPS everywhere). Seems like a simple scheme of mileage tracking and net charge tracking would do. You then have an overall energy use / mile figure that you can use to price each mile so people who buy more efficient cars are rewarded, and then charge by total number of miles, so people who do fewer miles pay less.

A good point. This sounds like the kind of thing that could be incorporated into a mileage reading at the annual vehicle inspection (which I assume the USA has??). Vehicles which are for entirely private-road use don’t get inspected, so that’s ok. Or they are specially classified somehow.

Everyone else just accepts that what the system lacks in accounting for private road use, is made up for in simplicity and cheapness of administration.

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

#178

Post by kingaillas »

tzs wrote: post #174
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…

> 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. That is the case, which came as a surprise to me. For things like the road bed, where the force from the surface is going to be spread out more, I'd expect the car to do more damage b…

>My car for example has four tires each at a pressure of 32 PSI.

The air pressure of your car/bike tires doesn't matter - all tires could be flat. Try comparing (vehicle weight + your weight) / (vehicle contact surface area) where vehicle is either your car or your bike.

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

#179

Post by imtringued »

makomk wrote: post #117
unglaublich wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some motorists seem to forget that cyclists don't need a 30m wide, 40cm thick, heavily reinforced highway with stabilized foundation that has to be revised every year to account for the damage caused by heavy vehicles. The costs of a cycling path that support the same flow of people is negligible compared to that of a corresponding highway.

The thick, heavily reinforced roads with stabilized foundations generally have much nicer surfaces to cycle on than narrow cycle paths though, at least around here. Probably because a lot of the deterioration is caused by weather rather than traffic and the cost reduction is mostly through having lower standards and accepting more deterioration.

No they don't, cyclists prefer concrete bike paths which both last longer and have a smoother surface.

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

#180

Post by DrBazza »

A long article to just say, in the UK, the government will need to figure out how far you've driven an EV and charge you for that distance to replace the tax raised through fuel bought to travel the equivalent distance.

Odometer read when the car gets and MOT? Maybe, but I'd expect more cameras, because not only can you charge people for the distance they've driven, if they're average speed check ones, they can fine you at the same time for speeding (until that pesky speed limiter starts making an appearance on European, and by extension, UK roads).

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