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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

#271

Post by asdff »

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.

Another easy way is to tax wear items accordingly and have inspections maintaining their condition for safety. E.g. EVs are heavier and wear down tires more than lighter cars. The state could implement a tax on tires and mandatory inspections for tread depth like they do with smog checks for emissions in gas cars. They could use the same testing infrastructure and just stock every location with a penny to measure tread. Heavy users of the roads will see a lot of wear on their tires and will be paying more into this tax accordingly in order to have a legally safe vehicle to drive, just like how owners of ancient cars that are more likely to be polluting need to take special care that the emissions controls are in good maintenance so that they pass smog.

It would also be beneficial to incentivize better vehicle choices at the point of sale. Ebikes should be subsidized to the point of being free or nearly so. Other evehicles should be taxed extremely high per pound of mass. A family of four should therefore naturally gravitate toward a compact hatchback over a massive SUV that weighs twice as much like they do today when there is no incentive for getting a smaller vehicle.

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

#272

Post by ars »

unglaublich wrote: post #80
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…

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 costs of a cycling path that support the same flow of people is negligible compared to that of a corresponding highway.

That's not true The ground pressure of a bicycle is higher than the ground pressure of a car.

Some bike tire pressures exceed 100 psi. Only the largest trucks have ground pressures that high. A typical passenger vehicle has a pressure of around 36 psi.

The ground pressure of someone in heels is even higher than that. There's a reason sidewalks are made of cement while roads can be made of cheaper asphalt.

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

#273

Post by asdff »

causi wrote: post #5

Tax vehicles based on actual wear to the road surface and add it to the annual tag renewal. Of course, that would stop us from conveniently ignoring the fact that the vast majority of road wear comes from semi-trucks and other heavy vehicles.

You could also tax semitruck brakes and tires accordingly, and inspect them for tread and pad depth at weigh stations and during registration.

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

#274

Post by ars »

asdff wrote: post #265
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.

No one ever says "why don't we charge pedestrians fees for sidewalks," for good reason. Bike infrastructure should be thought of as the same way. A paved bike path is going to be like a sidewalk: it will last as long as the elements permit it no matter the amount of usage it sees. Versus a road used for vehicular traffic that is heavy enough to degrade the road, that sort of usage makes a lot more sense to tax.

That isn't true. Pedestrians put more pressure on the ground than cars do. Google it if you don't believe me.

The reason sidewalks last so long is they're made of cement rather than asphalt. If you made roads out of cement they would last just as long if not longer.

And the reason they make sidewalls out of cement is they have to. If they made then out of asphalt they would decay very quickly.

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

#275

Post by cptskippy »

Robotbeat wrote: post #243
cptskippy wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not really a penalty. Road repair costs are real and you should be paying your share proportional to your usage of the road and the amount of damage your vehicle causes. When ICE are the only game in town, a fuel tax is a simple solution because larger more damaging vehicles are generally less fuel efficient. The downside is that anyone using fuel for non-ICEV usage is unfairly taxed. Perhaps putting the tax on…

Fuel taxes WERE ALWAYS supposed to be a conservation measure and Pigouvian tax on pollution AS WELL AS a use tax. So a replacement tax that doesn’t have the same effect of taxing CO2 emissions is effectively subsidizing CO2 emissions compared to the status quo. That seems like a bad idea.

I don't think anyone was suggesting what you're calling a bad idea.

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

#276

Post by TimPC »

avar wrote: post #142
TimPC wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you’re underestimating how fourth powers work. If you want to charge a 10,000 pound hummer $1000/year to provide substantial disincentive then you end up charging a five axel semi trailer (75,000 pounds) $3,164,000/year. That obviously doesn’t work.

Why doesn't it work? Those vehicles would either need to add more axles[1], or you'd spread the same shipment over more lighter vehicles. Such a tax should be as close to an approximation of the actual cost of road maintenance, full stop. If it makes certain vehicles uneconomical that's the intended effect. Of course you'd want to grandfather in such a drastic policy change, or phase it in at some % per year. 1. Taxi…

I think the actual measurement is off. If a single truck did over $3 million in road damage per year we’d have far worse infrastructure problems than we do. Chances are if you tax road damage you’re charging the hummer $10/year and the truck $31,700 or so.

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

#277

Post by asdff »

unglaublich wrote: post #82
tigerlily wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear road wear scales with the fourth power of vehicle mass.

That's why a bike lane, being a fraction of a highway's thickness, doesn't need maintenance for decades.

In California a bike lane is probably good forever once its laid. There are vehicular roads in my neighborhood that are from the 1920s. These are roads that see construction vehicles and cement trucks abusing them for the past 100 years to infill more housing into the neighborhood, along with your standard semitruck based home movers, delivery vehicles, garbage trucks, fire, etc, and still work fine for roads.

A bike lane on the other hand deals with at most probably a 300lb vehicle. Bike lanes in CA especially would probably last as long as the Appian way if not longer.

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

#278

Post by ZeroGravitas »

Last time I looked into this the subsidies were set so that the country as a whole roughly broke even.

Less pollution, lower health costs, living longer, less carbon, less imports, higher efficiency, cheaper energy, cheaper transport.

https://www.mdpi.com/2032-6653/8/4/996/pdf

e.g. the above suggests the owner saves about $6000 and society gets another $10000 dollars on top, over 10 years, 120,000 miles.

But, we'd do even better if we incentivise people to walk, cycle and use public transport because the health benefits of excercise.

So I'm happy with 'road tax' returning for EVs, but mostly because road tax for ICE should always have been much higher than it ever was. Hopefully, e-cargo bikes and similar are incentivise by whatever the new scheme is.

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

#279

Post by ars »

kingaillas wrote: post #178
tzs wrote: post #174

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. 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.

When the tire is flat it is being supported by the sidewalls and by the wheel.

And if you notice the contact patch of a flat tire is much larger.

The ground pressure of any vehicle is almost exactly equal to the psi. With the exception of force carried by the sidewalls.

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

#280

Post by asdff »

pornel wrote: post #234
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.

Then you can do what was done when these things came up for emissions and have tire checks along with your smog checking. Tread depth doesn't even need a fancy inspection site. A parking officer could easily be checking tread depth while they are also looking for double parked cars and out of registration tags.
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