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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

#241

Post by jholman »

Baeocystin wrote: post #167
dmurray wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is including heavy vehicles, but also motorcycles. The average for "passenger vehicles" is still about 10.5 l/km. Just bigger cars I think. https://www.budgetdirect.com.au/car-insurance/research/avera...

Motorcycles, perhaps surprisingly, aren't all that much more efficient than regular gas cars. The tl;dr is that their aerodynamics are terrible, and their engines not tuned for fuel efficiency.

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 single-occupant travel, halving transportation carbon footprint would be quite a great thing.

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

#242

Post by girvo »

goatinaboat wrote: post #122
zozbot234 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true, but some portion of road maintenance costs is independent from vehicle-caused wear-and-tear on the actual road surface. You would want this portion to be paid also by standard, non-commercial vehicles since these users are clearly receiving some value from the existence of a well-maintained road.

This is true, but some portion of road maintenance costs is independent from vehicle-caused wear-and-tear on the actual road surface. A lot it is caused (around here anyway) by water permeating and expanding as it freezes.

In Australia, the heat melting the bitumen is infinitely more likely than water damage.

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

#243

Post by kanox »

horsawlarway wrote: post #6

I'm not really sure there's a good answer here. Fuel tax is 43 cents a litre. Australian cars right now avg about 13.1 litres per 100km. So you're looking at ~$5.6 per 100km for fuel tax. This tax is adding $2.5 tax per 100km for electric. Right now, EVs are absolutely creating an regressive tax situation with regards to fuel. Those who can afford to buy newer, efficient cars can usually save money on tax over those…

> Right now, EVs are absolutely creating an regressive tax situation with regards to fuel. Those who can afford to buy newer, efficient cars can usually save money on tax over those who can't. For electric, it was worse - because they do tend to be more expensive to purchase up front, and they paid no fuel tax at all.

Encouraging the adoption of cleaner but more expensive technology is always going to be regressive, no way around this.

A lot of environmental regulation has strong regressive effects, it hits coal miners much harder than people sipping 10$ coffee on their macbook.

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

#244

Post by gameswithgo »

kortilla wrote: post #183
Someone wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100 kg bicycle (including rider), 0.00000625 units of damage. So, getting people out of their cars onto bicycles cuts road maintenance cost. Because of that, building bike lanes/paths can be cheaper than not building them. (And 50 tonne trucks are very rare on most city roads, I hope)

A fuel truck that refuels most gas stations in the US is something like 40 tonnes so it’s not rare at all. As long as the roads are built to sustain those trucks the cars are negligible. So until cars are the big wear item, moving people to bikes is pointless from a road wear perspective.

i love bikes and there are many reasons to get people on them, but assuming the 4th power claim is correct you are right. road damage isn’t a reason. math checks out.

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

#245

Post by rbg246 »

Guthur wrote: post #199
Zenbit_UX wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No but they are that country that was on fire this year due to climate change... How quickly they've forgotten.

Nope, you don't know what you're talking about. Australia has terrible land management. Before urban settlement the Aboringal population would carry out continual burn and migrate behaviour, keeping the bush leaf clutter far more in check and drastically reducing the amount of fuel available. Austalia has always burned long before the industrial revolution and it can't burn without fuel.

No what you are saying is not true or rather it's a deliberate obfuscation of the leading cause of the fires- climate change.

Rainforests that have not burnt before, burned last year.

The fires that exploded across Australia were unprecedented and never burn so rapidly and so hot.

Former fire fighter chiefs saying the opposite of what you are saying:

"Just a 1C temperature rise has meant the extremes are far more extreme, and it is placing lives at risk, including firefighters"

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/nov/14/forme...

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

#246

Post by CountHackulus »

chrismorgan wrote: post #139
davidivadavid wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a European, 13.1 l/100 km seems... insane. What's happening here?

It seems insane to me as well. My 2010 Mazda 3, used almost entirely on country driving with an average speed of 81km/h since I got it, sits at an average of 5.2L/100km. I recall figures from a couple of family members with similar or slightly larger cars on mostly Melbourne suburban driving, and they’re something like 8–9L/100km. My parents’ Nissan Elgrand (2007 I think?) hit something like 13–15L/100km before it go…

Just to add another data point, I had a 2005 Mazda 6 V6 Wagon and I tracked the fuel usage for an entire year. Ended up a 10.2L/100km. Something I found was horrendous compared to my friends' Corollas and Civics.

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

#247

Post by Sabinus »

xd wrote: post #56
mtgx wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trucks do...wait for it...1,400x more damage to roads than standard passenger vehicles do.

Probably because they transport 1,400x more economic goods?

Then the cost of those goods should reflect the cost they put on the road transport system. It may make rail more competitive, or increase the incentive for local manufacture.

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

#248

Post by AnthonyMouse »

austhrow743 wrote: post #161
adrianN wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everybody is receiving benefits from well maintained roads, just like everyone is receiving benefits from schools. Why special taxes for users unless you want to discourage use? Just pay for maintenance from the general budget.

Because you want to discourage use.

But now you're making a statement which is too general.

There is no benefit to discouraging use of highways at night, or uncongested suburban/rural roads. The thing you really want to prevent is congestion.

And even that is not inherently best solved through punitive fees. If you can reduce congestion by e.g. building more housing near where people work so they don't have to commute as far, that's preferable to levying fees the drivers can't avoid because a viable alternative to a long commute isn't actually available.

Sometimes turning a four lane road into a six lane road really does resolve the congestion, even accounting for the increase in use that comes from the reduction in congestion. And then you don't gain anything by discouraging use there.

The number of cases where you actually want to discourage use is very small, to the point that they may not even really exist, given that most uses are productive (and already have to overcome the inherent cost in fuel and time). The best case for it would be something like Manhattan during rush hour, but even there you might be better off to use the carrot instead of the stick and e.g. stop charging fees for use of the subway.

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

#249

Post by kortilla »

an_opabinia wrote: post #134
horsawlarway wrote: post #6

I'm not really sure there's a good answer here. Fuel tax is 43 cents a litre. Australian cars right now avg about 13.1 litres per 100km. So you're looking at ~$5.6 per 100km for fuel tax. This tax is adding $2.5 tax per 100km for electric. Right now, EVs are absolutely creating an regressive tax situation with regards to fuel. Those who can afford to buy newer, efficient cars can usually save money on tax over those…

> For electric, it was worse - because they do tend to be more expensive to purchase up front, and they paid no fuel tax at all California was cutting $10,000 checks to rich people buying $80,000 sports cars called Teslas. You could be a solo driver in an HOV lane for a long period of time, in a part of the world where rich people's negative experience with the outside world is disproportionately traffic. For every t…

Sounds like the logical thing to do is to heavily tax employers that place offices in cities and force people to commute to the same place as everyone else where there isn’t adequate housing.

Additionally, heavy taxes should be levied on the city dwellers that devastate nearby communities to externalize their water supplies, their power generation, their food growth, etc.

I think you’ll pretty quickly find that you can make whatever lame arguments you want how people should and shouldn’t live. Just tax the specific negative externality you want to reduce and move on. Don’t sit there and moralize about other lifestyles.

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

#250

Post by jejones3141 »

rconti wrote: post #123
ip26 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the simplest arguments against it to me is basically to look at the landscape. For example, in the US, ballpark 1% of cars are electric. Meanwhile, the flat federal fuel tax is not indexed to inflation & hasn't been increased in almost thirty years. Yet everyone is in this panic about how EVs are going to cause a huge revenue shortfall!? I'm not opposed to EVs paying their share, but something is rotten in Den…

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 :)

Jack up tax and let the market decide? Those seem inconsistent.
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