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

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

#321

Post by AnthonyMouse » Thu, Jul 21, 2022, 12:51 AM UTC

belorn wrote: post #298

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But if you want a general subsidy then you collect the money from a broad based tax like general income tax or sales tax, not low-efficiency road tolls.

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

#322

Post by prawn » Thu, Jul 21, 2022, 12:59 AM UTC

techterrier wrote: post #144

nemo44x wrote: post #143

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". It's really more that many cyclists are in the way and aren't going the speed limit. You end up holding up a lot of traffic that is forced to go slower and that's annoying to everyone. to be frank, when you're driving a car a person on a bike taking up the entire road is annoying. This is why people really disli…

hell hath no fury like a mildly inconvenienced motorist

You could spend eternity studying how some people feel aggressively about cyclists. Would be great to understand the crux of it. Fairness (road taxes), jealousy (skipping lights, getting ahead of traffic), shame (should I be exercising too?), otherness.

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

#323

Post by AnthonyMouse » Thu, Jul 21, 2022, 12:59 AM UTC

brippalcharrid wrote: post #283

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

On the other hand, trucks are often speed-restricted and the tax might need to be on the order of $50k for a 60-foot truck (which would still equate to around $50 for a car). The costs would be passed down to all of the things that trucks are used for, so I suppose the average person wouldn't really pay any less for combined transport+groceries+fuel+household goods, but it might incentivize the use of smaller trucks…

It most certainly would not cost $50k for any size truck to travel down one road once, which is what matters if you're paying the cost to build infrastructure to track usage.

It might cost a semi truck $50k a year, but this also points in the direction of not tracking specific usage even for trucks: Just check the odometer during the annual inspection and then distribute the highway funds to states proportionate to estimated use.

Toll collection is stupid inefficient and privacy invasive.

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

#324

Post by supertrope » Thu, Jul 21, 2022, 1:18 AM UTC

prawn wrote: post #322

techterrier wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

hell hath no fury like a mildly inconvenienced motorist

You could spend eternity studying how some people feel aggressively about cyclists. Would be great to understand the crux of it. Fairness (road taxes), jealousy (skipping lights, getting ahead of traffic), shame (should I be exercising too?), otherness.

It seems to mostly be annoyance that they have to share the road. Cyclists aren't zooming along at 44MPH on a 35MPH road. Other motorists are also in their way. Automobile commercials always depict an idyllic empty road just for you.

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

#325

Post by supertrope » Thu, Jul 21, 2022, 1:23 AM UTC

megablast wrote: post #269

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.

Every single car should be tracked at all times. They are a deadly weapon, kill a million people every year around the world, and seriously injure many more.

Google Maps almost does this.

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

#326

Post by supertrope » Thu, Jul 21, 2022, 1:27 AM UTC

causi wrote: post #256

prmoustache wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Imho individual cars should be banned except maybe for people with disabilities. Append "in any area with a population density over 5,000 per square mile" and I'd agree with you.

That seems to be the point of road diets. Removing free and easy parking on public right of ways, 25 MPH speed limit, narrow lanes, adding prominent pedestrian crossings. All that combined has the dual effect of making cities livable when dismounted and discouraging automobile through traffic.

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

#327

Post by prawn » Thu, Jul 21, 2022, 1:42 AM UTC

supertrope wrote: post #324

prawn wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could spend eternity studying how some people feel aggressively about cyclists. Would be great to understand the crux of it. Fairness (road taxes), jealousy (skipping lights, getting ahead of traffic), shame (should I be exercising too?), otherness.

It seems to mostly be annoyance that they have to share the road. Cyclists aren't zooming along at 44MPH on a 35MPH road. Other motorists are also in their way. Automobile commercials always depict an idyllic empty road just for you.

Not sure it's just an annoyance at sharing the road - like you said, there are other motorists. You don't see epic forum rage-discussions about garbage trucks holding up traffic, street-sweepers, buses, parking lanes that revert at rush hour. Those get discussed, but there always seems to be a special rage reserved by some people for cyclists - the quiet, small road users. I think you could explain a lot about a large segment of people by isolating and understanding this.

If I'm held up by a cyclist, I think "Good on them, they're braver and fitter than me."

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

#328

Post by fomine3 » Thu, Jul 21, 2022, 4:33 AM UTC

smilekzs wrote: post #287

lini wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Too many unknowns with the mileage solution. The most obvious for me is travelling abroad - travelling by car between EU countries is not uncommon. Another issue is that the mileage of the car is not very hard to modify. In Eastern Europe, buying a second-hand 10 year old car, imported from Germany, is almost funny because most seem to be around 90-100 000 miles (140-160 000 km), while looking for the same make and m…

A solution has been long in place in the US for commercial vehicles. It's called IFTA. It's possible because commercial vehicles have to report their mileages to authorities frequently anyway.

Can I cheat IFTA?

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

#329

Post by adrianN » Thu, Jul 21, 2022, 4:44 AM UTC

ars wrote: post #272

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.

> 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 i…

Ground pressure is not the only way a road wears.

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

#330

Post by dotancohen » Thu, Jul 21, 2022, 6:20 AM UTC

jeroenhd wrote: post #263

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…

Based on [1] this first result on Google, a truck can carry about 300,000 tomatoes. I don't think those tomatoes are going to add up very soon. A loaded truck of about 80,000 pounds (11.5 times the weight) would have 17490 times the road impact compared to the same trip driven back home. Distributed over 300,000 tomatoes, the cost wouldn't be all that much. Despite inefficient engines and truck construction, bulk tra…

The issue isn't that 17490 / 300000 is a small number. The issue is that the road wear is not being paid by the entity creating that wear, and is disproportionately being borne by those actually trying to solve climate change problems by driving smaller, electric vehicles.

If there is currently not enough taxes being collected to maintain the roads, then start taxing those who do the most damage. That entity can then amortize the tax over their 300,000 tomatoes.