Amsterdam Switches to 30 Km/h on 80% of its Roads

So the other 60% is paid by people wanting goods and services, even if they themselves don't have a car?

> About 750000 personal light vehicles below 3500kg pay RUC charges - a lot of that is deisel personal vehicles

Yes, because your source says petrol vehicles pay fuel excise directly. It also points out "Unlike Europe, there are relatively few diesel passenger cars in New Zealand, which may be a reflection of effects of having to pay RUC."

Where is the excise tax going?

I see motorcycles don't pay an RUC. I assume because they are all petrol.

> The RUC revenue for heavy vehicles is supposed to be assigned to road costs caused by heavy vehicles.

Yes, your source says: "Heavy vehicles pay substantially more than light vehicles, largely because the CAM includes an exponential calculation for the road wear component but also reflecting the need they create for stronger bridges and other structures, and the additional road space they occupy."

and "The weight related damage costs are allocated according to the so called “4th power rule”. This is written as ESA = (laden weight/axle factor)^4 x load factor x number of axles. The “4th power rule” is based on historical research from the USA, South Africa and NZ, and is widely accepted as a rule of thumb for road design."

A bicycle of 120 kg (including rider) has 1/10th the laden weight of a vehicle so the ESA should be about 1/10,000 th as much. In practice the exponential doesn't work that way ("Vehicles weighing less than around 6 tonnes do almost no damage to roads") but the point stands that bicycle roads are significantly cheaper to build and maintain than ones handling cars.

A bicycle takes at most 1/5th space as a car, so the space related costs should also be much smaller.

I don't know about NZ but in the US bicycles are generally prohibited from highways, which are also more expensive to build than city streets.

> That implies council rates pay about 1/3 of costs which is a similar ratio to your earlier calcs.

My earlier calcs had the NLTF paying under 1/3 of the costs for city roads in Christchurch the rest by other ratepayers and other sources.

> Hard to calculate better because a lot of the common costs are towards national infrastructure rather than local.

Yes, that is why I don't think looking at NLTF numbers gives a good idea of who pays what for the roads in Christchurch.

It still doesn't seem that the money spent on the new 101 km of bike paths is all that outrageous, given that it seems proportionate to the number of users or predicted users.