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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

#291

Post by brippalcharrid »

jacquesm wrote: post #199
timellis-smith wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depending on what type of bike you have. On a mountain bike, anyday. On a road bike with paper thin tyres that easily puncture, maybe not so much.

Road bikes aren't really designed for being in traffic in the first place so that places some of the downsides of that on the user. I've used one for many years, so don't get me wrong, I love riding one but it is abundantly clear to me that when my bike tires fits into the slots of a drain that that is my problem and not the problem of whoever designs and maintains the road. In many places a road bike isn't actually…

It sounds peculiar that some places would have requirements for bells and fenders in order for a bike to be "street legal"; this strikes me as more of a quaint historical holdover than anything else. Some cyclists might be more comfortable with ringing their bell a than raising their voice if they need to urgently signal the attention of another road user, but a requirement for a bell on any bike is mystifying to me. Likewise fenders; cycling on wet roads can cause dirty water to be sprayed onto a vehicle that is driving close behind a cyclist, but people don't tend to cycle on road bikes in wet weather in the first place (unless their bike has been adapted), and people should maintain a safe stopping distance, especially in wet conditions. But the use of lights when cycling at night is a perfectly reasonable legal requirement (more or less universal in my experience), and perfectly effective temporary lights can be easily attached to road bikes if necessary.

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

#292

Post by matsemann »

josefresco wrote: post #241
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…

> Lots of budgets are now off because they estimated X amounts from cars using toll roads, but half of them don't pay the price. Citation needed.

Income from toll roads in Oslo was 1 billion NOK lower per year than budgeted, after the electric car boom and their free/subsidized passing.

https://www.nrk.no/osloogviken/vil-fjerne-bompengerabatten-f...

That alone almost collapsed the whole Oslo city government, actually. As they had to negotiate with the national government and neighbor districts on how various infrastructure projects could be finished.

Was quite a big deal this spring.

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

#293

Post by matsemann »

innocentoldguy wrote: post #128
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…

> This of course also ignores that most adult cyclists also own a car. What does owning a car have to do with it? If you own two cars, or a car and a scooter, you still have to pay taxes for both to be on the road, don’t you? EDIT: I forgot to mention, where I live taxes aren’t collected as a “fee for polluting.” They’re to keep roads maintained and improve them. This often includes special bike lanes that bicyclists…

That's my point, though. When I'm on a bike and someone shouts at me to get off the road because I don't pay for it and they do, they are wrong. I pay the same as they do, I just choose to use my bike every day to commute.

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

#294

Post by matsemann »

ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #225
ehnto wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, t…

The cyclists in the US I see in a suburban area are almost all doing it for exercise (pretty obvious from the getup), not to get somewhere. In a more downtown area it's obviously different. >dealing with people angry they're late for their next stoplight. Sounds like you have some nasty bias yourself.

And why are people driving? Is their goal so much holier than whatever reason the bicyclist is out biking?

Don't live your life thinking everything revolves around you.

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

#295

Post by enragedcacti »

cogman10 wrote: post #289
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 should be noted that weight has been dropping YoY and is expected to drop further when M3 gets a structural battery pack. Those drop the weight not only because there's now no longer a structure the battery is bolted to, it is the structure, but also because the weight drop lowers the batteries needed to get comparable range (further reducing weight). Model Y is the first tesla vehicle with a structural pack. I ex…

Unfortunately most of the benefits of structural battery packs haven't materialized yet based on the stats Tesla submitted to the EPA. The Austin Model Y is 25 lbs lighter but has 14kWh less capacity and 51 fewer miles of range. Part of this is probably the battery chemistry being used in the current 4680 cells and as the chemistry improves they may catch back up in range to the non-structural 2170 packs but they have a really really long way to go before they get to the range increase and weight decrease they promised at battery day. That or some aspect of the EPA numbers are massively wrong but I feel like we would have heard from Elon about that by now.

https://old.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/u1926z/confirm...

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

#296

Post by Ajedi32 »

est31 wrote: post #79
happyopossum wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you’re trivializing the effect that shipping costs have on every day necessities. Far more trucks haul produce and other groceries around my neighborhood than ‘fast fashion’, and as we are seeing right now significant increases in those prices have an outsized effect on the most vulnerable.

The current system might cause the entire economy to spend more on transportation overall. A 2 times as heavy truck might be able to transport 3 times as much as a "baseline" truck (these numbers are off, but it usually scales sublinearly), but it causes 16 times the wear of one trip. That means that switching to that heavier truck model causes 5.333 times of the wear on your country's roads. Now if you let everyone…

Correct, and this is something people often fail to understand about the free market. The market is making optimizations like the one you just suggested above (using smaller trucks over larger ones) constantly, innovating to reduce costs in thousands of ingenious little ways no single person could possibly come up with on their own. And those optimizations aren't just confined to first order effects, they cascade across the entire market. A small change to the cost of transportation by truck will, over time, result in the entire economy making millions of small adjustments to optimize for that cost.

But the market can't optimize for a cost it doesn't know about. If you're just funding road construction and maintenance with income taxes and people aren't paying those costs in proportion to usage, then there's zero reason for the market to do anything to try to reduce those costs.

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

#297

Post by bluecalm »

dahfizz wrote: post #229
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.

Do you think that people should only withdraw exactly what they deposited from Social Security? Do you think that a patient should pay 100% of their healthcare costs under socialized medicine? I find it so strange that roads aren't viewed as a public service, and instead should be taxed (regressively) to cover the cost of the road by those using it. I'm fine paying fully for my own road use, as long as I can stop pay…

The difference between roads and other things you mentioned is that current road infrastructure, especially in cities have huge costs for health, lifestyle, mental health. I don't want cars in cities and if I have to have them I want car owners to pay the full cost of making city life way worse hoping alternatives emerge.

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

#298

Post by belorn »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #262
brippalcharrid wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The point is that it's not worth doing even for cars. If the toll for the truck was $50, the proportional toll for the car would be one half of one cent.

Dealing with government and taxes there is one additional factor to consider. The government can give tax cuts to targeted groups if they consider it beneficial to society.

So let say the truck has a $5000 tax to pay for yearly wear and tear on roads, but they also get a $5000 tax cut to reduce costs in the transportation sector. That will leave cars to still pay their road tax, even if in comparison they would be a tiny portion of the total road tax.

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

#299

Post by bluecalm »

MafellUser wrote: post #37
dazc wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe not a long term alternative but taxing drivers behaviour via extreme penalties rather than the type of fuel or vehicle they use would not only raise revenue but may also encourage people to drive in a safer and more fuel-efficient manner? For example, overtaking a cyclist regardless of the fact that you are already approaching a stop junction should result in a fine of at least £10,000. Tailgating in a dangerou…

You will NEVER catch the perpetrator. Period. Also the cost of enforcement will quickly outpace any revenue gained, as council's parking enforcements has shown. Even when caught says on CCTV, there's no guarantee you can find and fine the driver. There are over half a million uninsured cars on the UK streets at any time. Twice that many uninsured drivers. Even getting them to pay for insurance is hard enough, how dif…

Database of all cars. All penalties are assigned to the car and are to be paid on yearly inspection. If not paid, the car isn't allowed on the road.

If the owner of the car let someone else drive it then it's their issue to resolve.

We just need political will which isn't there. It's not a technical problem to solve.

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

#300

Post by bluecalm »

prmoustache wrote: post #169
stefan_ wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conveniently ignoring the fact that roads have terrible capacity as a transport system and therefore many many many miles of terribly expensive road only exist to accommodate the space taken up by a comparatively small number of vehicles, with semi-trucks and other heavy vehicles often a minority. Count the heavy vehicles: https://twitter.com/urbanthoughts11/status/11912952051876864... Don't get me wrong, the tax sys…

Imho individual cars should be banned except maybe for people with disabilities. They simply make people hateful, angry at everyone and generally unhappy. And an awful lot of space is wasted for them to stay parked most of the time. Between 15 to 50% of the existing roads should be dedicated to non motorized use (depending on the geography, moutains can pose some challenges at times), the rest to a dense network of a…

People with disabilities would be much happier if no one can drive in cities. Running a mobility scooter, a wheelchair or an electric wheelchair would be so much easier. Cars are especially bad for people with disabilities and not only because many of them can't drive at all.
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