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

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

#231

Post by Tiktaalik »

rexreed wrote: post #49

Or... maybe national taxes should pay for national roads as a form of national infrastructure, state or county taxes paying for state or county roads and local taxes for local roads. Isn't this the way roads were paid for before widespread use of personal vehicles? Roads are a shared benefit for all whether you own or drive a vehicle or not. Think of deliveries and public transport and other approaches in which you p…

The problem is that removing all the various taxes on road use makes driving dramatically cheaper, which encourages people to drive, which will induce more traffic. It's the exact opposite direction we need to be going not just from an environmentalist pov, but its also counter to our urban planning goals as well.

To meet our goals we need to be doing the opposite, which is making private automobile use of the roads more expensive while creating more and better alternative transportation opportunities (ie. public transit, cycling).

Additionally if we shifted to other taxes, then this is a transfer of costs from relatively wealthy car owners to the relatively poorer who don't even own cars.

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

#232

Post by brianwawok »

Flockster wrote: post #221
dotancohen wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My hunch is that if one were to look closely at the funding of roads, one would find that they represent a net subsidy for heavy trucking. Road wear grows at the 4th power of vehicular weight, assuming similar tire pressures. An F-150 that weighs one and a half times what your Mazda 3 weighs, does 5 times the road wear. Would you like to calculate how much those tomatoes would cost, if everybody were paying their f…

That sounds interesting, do you have some more infos about this, how the 4th power comes about? I don't have any intuition why it would be that "high". Or some keywords to lead my google searches ;)

Start here

https://www.insidescience.org/news/how-much-damage-do-heavy-...

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

#233

Post by WorldMaker »

chrisco255 wrote: post #4
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…

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

Roads break down over time primarily as a function of vehicle weight. Most road taxes (especially gas taxes) are poor proxies for vehicle weight taxes. It's probably time to reconsider vehicle weight taxes.

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

#234

Post by pornel »

IndrekR wrote: post #78

For the road wear — tax the tires proportional to the tire weight. But that most likely would mean few-fold increase in the tire cost and may impair road safety. Easier to add an annual fee proportional to the square of fully loaded vehicle mass. Would be about £1k/yr on average. Less for smaller cars, more for larger ones.

I wouldn't mess with the tires. It creates financial incentives to compromise on safety by using old tires, avoiding buying separate summer/winter tires, may create a black market for untaxed tires without quality control, etc.

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

#236

Post by jgust »

adamcharnock wrote: post #177
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 cheapne…

> annual vehicle inspection (which I assume the USA has??)

Hah. Washington state doesn't even test for emissions, let alone do a vehicle inspection.

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

#237

Post by happyopossum »

blibble wrote: post #69
happyopossum wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you trust a government imposed GPS based tracking system to properly account for those edge cases? I sure as hell wouldn’t. Also, those aren’t exempted under the current gas tax model anyway, so why bother?

I would indeed prefer the odometer based solution to the GPS but it's not perfect (and you are currently exempted from the gax tax model if you have a electric vehicle on private roads / tracks, I doubt too many are affected by this though)

> you are currently exempted from the gax tax model if you have a electric vehicle on private roads

Private roads are irrelevant - electric vehicles don't pay gas tax, that's the point of this whole conversation.

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

#238

Post by brippalcharrid »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #154
7952 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's the fourth power of axle load according to the AAHSO report (https://camdencyclists.org.uk/2020/06/the-fourth-power-rule-...)

A 30-ton 5-axle HGV would be 6 tons per axle, a BMW 7-Series would be 1 ton per axle, and a heavy cyclist on a heavy bicycle would work out to around 0.05 tons per axle, so while a car might cause ~1/1000th of the wear of a heavy truck, a bicycle would cause less than 1/100000th of the wear that is caused by a car, and that's before you consider the wear that's caused according to the speed that a vehicle is traveling (it is roughly linear). So while it might conceivably be possible to tax motorists according to the level of damage that they cause to roads (with trucks paying far more than they do now, and with revenues not exceeding the costs of collection), it certainly wouldn't be possible to tax cyclists.

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

#239

Post by pengaru »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #154
7952 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Except not all roads are built to handle heavier vehicles, such roads experience significant wear from common weight automobiles. I don't think the cost of maintenance for such roads is a rounding error.
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