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

73 points by phobotics 4y ago

matsemann 4y ago
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. Etc. etc. Which was great to get the initial people to convert, and get the infrastructure in place. But now it's time to tax them. 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. While they don't emit carbon dioxide, they are just as deadly as normal cars. Also pollute more from the tires being heavier. Just as noisy. Need the same expensive roads. And as all cars they ruin the city.
- chrisco255 4y ago
  The point of road taxes is to pay for maintenance and expansion. Roads break down over time if you do not maintain them.
  - techterrier 4y ago
    this is paid out of local taxation. Which is why pedestrians, cylists, equestrians, tractors, cows and ducks are allowed to used the road. There is no such thing as road tax.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - blibble 4y ago
      trunk roads and motorways are definitely not paid out of local taxation
    - chrisco255 4y ago
      Dunno how it works in UK, but in US, there are local roads, state roads, and federal roads. There are also local, state, and federal gas taxes that vary by jurisdiction. The funds from these gas taxes are used to finance new highway and roadway construction and maintenance of existing roads. Sometimes, a special tax is levied at the local level for specific local roadway projects. But the big infrastructure projects are almost entirely paid for by gas taxes. Either way, the point of the tax has never been to "punish pollution".
      - zip1234 4y ago
        > the big infrastructure projects are almost entirely paid for by gas taxes. About 50% is probably correct: http://www.financingtransportation.org/funding_financing/funding/ http://www.financingtransportation.org/funding_financing/fun...
    - asdff 4y ago
      There is such thing as a road tax and not all roads allow cows and ducks and lions and bears. Note the sign on the highway onramp that says something like "no pedestrians or cyclists" and the fact that every car on the road has to pay a yearly fee in order to not be impounded by the local government for neglecting to pay for fees that go on to maintain the roads.
  - WorldMaker 4y ago
    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.
- gpmcadam 4y ago
  It's a combination. Revenues gathered via road tax have a provision for older/more polluting cars so you pay less the newer your vehicle, essentially. Some of the money is used to fund the maintenance of highways, though. Local roads are funded by council tax, so this probably dispells the anti-cycling argument because presumably the cyclists do pay council tax (unless they're on motorways which is another issue.)
  - techterrier 4y ago
    motorways, not highways
    - gpmcadam 4y ago
      No, it's highways because not all highways (major roads and motorways) are motorways. See: https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/highways-england https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/highways-england
  - semanticist 4y ago
    > Some of the money is used to fund the maintenance of highways, though. Only in the sense that some of all tax money is used in that way - VED just gets pooled with all tax income, none of it is 'ring fenced' for any specific purpose. That's why the idea of 'road tax' is so annoying, since it implies it's to be used for a specific purpose.
    - efaref 4y ago
      "Road tax" is a _tax_ you have to pay in order to use the _road_. It's the most natural name for it, which is why people call it that. Despite the words they use, it's not a vehicle tax: you can own a vehicle without paying it as long as you declare that you will not use the vehicle _on_the_road_ (a.k.a., make a Statutory Off Road Notification). It's a tax for using the roads. A road tax. That the government don't ring-fence it to use on road maintenance is irrelevant.
      - 4y ago
- martin-adams 4y ago
  It's very odd they used the term Road Tax. It's always been known as Vehicle Tax for the very reason you've pointed out. Hence why you don't need to pay tax to ride a bicycle on the road. The other area they are losing out not mentioned in the article is Benefit in Kind tax for EVs used as company cars. At some point, that will also need to end and be more in alignment with ICE vehicles.
  - techterrier 4y ago
    It's a handy dog whistle so we know they are part of the car lobby edit: spelling
    - blibble 4y ago
      or it could simply be that the commonly used term for Vehicle Excise Duty is "road tax" (even if it's technically incorrect) not everything is a conspiracy
      - techterrier 4y ago
        commonly used by people who disingenuously use it's etymology to imply that all 'road users' (by which they mean cyclists) rather than 'vehicle users' should pay it
        blibble 4y ago
        I don't see anything in the article that suggests the author wants that to happen? these hysterical responses say more about you then the people you're demonising
        techterrier 4y ago
        I dont think a carsalesman is going to feel overly demonised by being reffered to as part of the car lobby. He does know better than to conflate road and vehicle tax however.
- belorn 4y ago
  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. But I could be wrong. It would be interesting to hear if heavy bike/pedestrian roads have higher road maintenance than those that are used lightly. My guess would be that the major wear and tear comes from nature, water in particular, which mean wear and tear isn't based on usage. When it come to tire pollution those would be better taxed on the tires themselves. Bike tires tend to be much much smaller than cars so the taxation wouldn't be that big of a deal to cyclists.
  - 7952 4y ago
    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.
    - AnthonyMouse 4y ago
      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.
      - brippalcharrid 4y ago
        It's the fourth power of axle load according to the AAHSO report (https://camdencyclists.org.uk/2020/06/the-fourth-power-rule-cyclelicious/ 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.
- analog31 4y ago
  >>>> 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 fee. We're not allowed to ride on the Interstates, and we tend to avoid "big" roads for safety / comfort reasons. 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.
  - throwaway0a5e 4y ago
    >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. Which is itself a net subsidy for all sorts of other economic activity. It's subsidies all the way down.
    - robertlagrant 4y ago
      Indeed - if heavy trucking is subsidised then eventually the prices you're paying for something are lower.
  - wil421 4y ago
    > 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. Not true for a lot of states. Property tax is not used for roads. Georgia pays for roads using gas taxes and road use fees like registration (tolls contribute a very small amount). Florida is similar but they are much more toll heavy. Alabama is similar as too. All 3 states are in the top 10 roads in America[1]. I believe Georgia plans to charge higher registration fees for EVs at some point. [1] https://www.consumeraffairs.com/automotive/us-road-conditions.html https://www.consumeraffairs.com/automotive/us-road-condition...
    - Robotbeat 4y ago
- redeeman 4y ago
  so perhaps its also time for the government to admit that the prior taxes didnt have ANYTHING to do with environment, but just a way to justify money grabbing to spend on their own worthy causes?
  - unglaublich 4y ago
    Cars are a huge burden on health, safety, environment and quality of life. It has never been a secret that governments tax cars to subsidize causes that should partially compensate the indirect damage that cars do to their countries.
    - mbg721 4y ago
      We saw this play out with the money from tobacco settlements a few decades ago; states see sin taxes as a windfall that can substitute for sustainable budgeting.
  - matsemann 4y ago
    No, it's the opposite. You don't want people to drive because of the environment, health, noise, road "accidents" killing people, how it destroys cities etc. So the taxes are a direct incentive to find alternative modes of travel.
    - robertlagrant 4y ago
      Not really. They exist because cars are required. If we all became able to live our lives purely with cycling then cycling would be taxed.
    - redeeman 4y ago
      step 1: ICE cars are bad for the environment! we must add taxes step 2: ICE cars are bad, electric cars good. We remove taxes for electric cars ... too many people get electric cars ... step 3: its time to start taxing electric cars... reasons! translation: governments likes to take money from its citizens that it can spend on whatever it deems worthy, and will happily come up with a reason, sometimes justified, sometimes not.
- Robotbeat 4y ago
  The “pollute more from the tires being heavier” is a myth, by the way. There was an article that circulated claiming this, but they never actually measured the tire pollution of electric cars, just extrapolated from ICE cars with really terrible and ultimately false arguments. Electric cars tend to use low rolling resistance tires (potentially less wear… if you’re experiencing less rolling resistance, that means less energy ends up being used to produce wear, so less wear occurs… in part due to geometric effects and partly due to composition of the tires). Electric cars are also fairly comparable in curb weight due to massive weight reductions elsewhere, plus improved traction control (and the more gentle regenerative braking) means less wheel slippage and wear. And it assumes ICE cars are operating at full emissions-control mode which is also untrue especially on startup or in cold weather or if using diesel. It also assumes tire wear mass is all minute particles of the same problematic effects of ICE exhaust particles, which is a bad assumption for multiple reasons (for one, it ignores empirical measurements of particle sizes), and it ignores gaseous emissions entirely in the calculation, many of which are very problematic like carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides of various types, components of gasoline such as benzene and xylene and toluene, ozone (a major component of smog), etc. It also ignores the near absence of break wear in electric cars, thus the absence of silica dust (or iron oxide dust, or whatever the brakes and the rotors are made of, etc). In short, it is misinformation.
  - dahfizz 4y ago
    > Electric cars are also fairly comparable in curb weight due to massive weight reductions elsewhere, Seriously, this meme needs to die. A Tesla model 3 is the same weight as a BMW 340, and the model 3 is hundreds of pounds lighter than an SUV like the BMW X3. Batteries are heavy, but so are gas engines & transmissions.
    - enragedcacti 4y ago
      > 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 vehicles at the MSRP of the EV.
- mytailorisrich 4y ago
  It's a vehicle tax. It's depending on emissions at the moment as a way to encourage vehicles with low/no emissions but there is no reason for EV to keep being exempt. The issue in term of tax revenue is fuel duty and VAT on fuel. I'm suspecting that once transition is advanced enough they'll find ways to add tax on charging points/electricity used for charging, or an actual road tax on mileage or whatnot.
- innocentoldguy 4y ago
  > 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 do nothing to pay for.
  - matsemann 4y ago
    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.
    - innocentoldguy 4y ago
      But that isn't what you said. You said that people who were complaining that bicyclists don't pay their fair share for the roads are wrong because most bicyclists own a car too. I responded to that argument and not the moved goal post you're presenting here.
      - matsemann 4y ago
        I have honestly no idea what you're trying to convey. I didn't move any goalpost, I tried to restate my point since you missed it completely. Don't argue in bad faith, please.
- pif 4y ago
  > There is no "road tax" in the UK, is it? It's a fee for polluting, not using the road. It is not what you call it, but what you spend it on.
  - youngtaff 4y ago
    And it’s part of general taxation… Roads are funded partly out of local taxes, and partly out of general taxes - there’s no hypothecation of ‘road tax’ paying for roads
- nemo44x 4y ago
  > 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 dislike bikes - they get in the way of people trying to get somewhere.
  - techterrier 4y ago
    hell hath no fury like a mildly inconvenienced motorist
    - prawn 4y ago
      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.
      - supertrope 4y ago
        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.
        prawn 4y ago
        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."
- ehnto 4y ago
  In Australia and I imagine the UK, infrastructure is paid for by the municipalities from their own budgets, a portion of which is granted to them from the federal government. Larger projects are usually taken on by the state. These budgets come out of general tax revenue, which is paid by everyone via GST and income tax. So cyclists absolutely pay, and in many many cases, they're paying to build infrastructure they don't even use. The unfair burden usually goes toward the cyclist, who's historically been shortchanged on infrastructure for cycling. Registration goes toward running the registration apparatus, not into infrastructure. That's another misconception. The other contribution is from fuel sales taxes/excises, and that goes into general tax revenue as well, so is not explicitly set aside for road projects. Negating the potential income from fuel sales taxes, is all the fossil fuel subsidies, what once was 15bil income, after subsidies of 12bil, is now just 3billion in income from fuel taxes. So the money comes in from the consumer, and goes straight out to the fossil fuel industry through industry fuel tax credits. Absolutely bullshit, but it also means there's not much left of that fuel tax income to pay for infrastructure. https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/pubs/BN/2011-2012/FossilFuelTaxes#_Toc313957069 https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Depart.... Ultimately a cyclist will pay the same amount of tax, minus the fuel taxes, and get just a scrap of that tax spent back on cycling.
- DrBazza 4y ago
  > There is no "road tax" in the UK, is it? Vehicle Excise Duty since 1920 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_Excise_Duty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_Excise_Duty Road funding in the UK is just from the general pot of tax money. There are a lot of anti-cyclist types in the UK that always incorrectly (or ironically, correctly) claim that cyclists don't pay road tax (no one does) and therefore shouldn't use the road, even though just about every cyclist is an adult that pays UK tax. I certainly expect the UK, and every other country to tax EVs by mileage within a decade, and additionally toll charge on major routes, almost certainly via cameras (to also fine you for speeding), or require all cars to have a GPS blackbox (which let's face it, isn't expensive now).
- standardUser 4y ago
  "Which was great to get the initial people to convert, and get the infrastructure in place. But now it's time to tax them. " Maybe in Norway, and only Norway. Every other nation should be quadrupling-down on EV incentives. Or 10 fold. Or 20.
  - Originami 4y ago
    Road tax needs to be morphed into road-usage tax, based on time of day, location, axle weight, and distance. It should be prohibitively expensive to use congested freeways and city streets during peak hours, but free at all other times. Road expansion is justified based on peaks of usage - so by smoothing out these peaks, we can save significantly on the need to build more roads. Trip length can also scale non-linearly based on congestion: 10-20% more cars than capacity can result in 50% longer trips.
  - megablast 4y ago
    Why?? EVs aren’t good for the environment at all. Why push for them?? Why are we continuously subsidising the car industry?
- josefresco 4y ago
  > 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.
  - matsemann 4y ago
    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-for-elbilene-1.15622910 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.
gpmcadam 4y ago
"Road tax" (a levy to cover the cost of maintaining the public highway) obviously needs to be extended to cover EVs at some point. I'm surprised it hasn't already. However, broadly speaking: tax the thing you want less of. There's various strategies being raised to cover this so-called "lost revenue", including the tracking of your home electricity usage via smart boxes to tax you on charging your own car (!!) and charging cars a per-mile-tax instead of on fuel. But, if we're to believe that EVs are currently being incentivised because the Government wants to lower emissions (and thus avoid any costs of continued nationwide carbon reliance) then perhaps a study should be done to see if the cost-saving of people moving _away_ from ICEs outweighs the lost revenue of taxing petrol/diesel, in the long run.
- lettergram 4y ago
  > There's various strategies being raised to cover this so-called "lost revenue", including the tracking of your home electricity usage via smart boxes to tax you on charging your own car (!!) and charging cars a per-mile-tax instead of on fuel. At the end of the day any implementation of the methods discussed lead to absolute tyranny. To track per-mile-tax you’re going to have either government gps tracking in real-time or cameras tracking your ever my movement. Alternatively, the government will track and then likely limit power consumption for your cars. This is the exact opposite of any free market. Effectively, you’re giving total control to the government around what movement you can make and/or you’ll have zero anonymity by law.
  - planede 4y ago
    > To track per-mile-tax you’re going to have either government gps tracking in real-time or cameras tracking your ever my movement. Alternatively, the government will track and then likely limit power consumption for your cars. Maybe I'm naive, but shouldn't an odometer reading do the job just fine?
- rcMgD2BwE72F 4y ago
  We should split road taxes and carbon taxes, and ensure both revenue streams cover all the investment and expenses required for the sector but also to cover long-term effects on climate. This way, we can spend the revenues from road taxes to build and maintain our infrastructure, and the realize that the latter will just make the whole car industry bankrupt overnight.
causi 4y ago
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.
- tigerlily 4y ago
  I hear road wear scales with the fourth power of vehicle mass.
  - cocoflunchy 4y ago
    Found this discussion while looking for a source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25171899 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25171899
    - tigerlily 4y ago
      Ah, thanks that’s where I must’ve read it.
  - unglaublich 4y ago
    That's why a bike lane, being a fraction of a highway's thickness, doesn't need maintenance for decades.
    - asdff 4y ago
      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.
- throwaway0a5e 4y ago
throwaway0a5e 4y ago
How about the government just finds a way to make do? It's kind of preposterous that we're staring an economic slowdown and high inflation in the face after decades of incomes flat-lining and the .gov is telling people to cough up more. I get that EV owners are statistically richer but you're not gonna change that by raising the TCO via taxes.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  Get your broader point about strained household budgets. But taxation is deflationary. Raising taxes lowers inflation.
  - lettergram 4y ago
    Lol assuming inflation is caused by an increased money supply; not the material food shortage we are seeing. Further, this type of taxation is a regressive tax.
    - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
      > assuming inflation is caused by an increased money supply; not the material food shortage we are seeing Doesn’t matter. Fiscal taxation (spending) reduces (increases) aggregate demand directly. No need for monetary transmission channels.
      - lettergram 4y ago
        Except this taxation is supposedly going directly to spending on regular road maintenance. Which injects the funds directly back into the economy. Money supply isn’t changing here. Even if it were, demand isn’t being reduced. They’re just forcing you to spend it on roads.
        JumpCrisscross 4y ago
        > this taxation is supposedly going directly to spending on regular road maintenance Totally orthogonal. Spending is stimulative. Taxation is tightening. That the two are traditionally bundled is political convenience. We can rail against the spending bit as inflationary. My narrow point is that calling out tax increases vis-à-vis inflation is inchoate.
tigerlily 4y ago
> Smart home wallbox chargers could in theory tell the electricity grid it was a car being charged, but homeowners could just plug a three-pin extension lead into a normal socket to charge their car, circumventing any such communication between grid and charge. To encourage folk to use their wall box, offer a discount rate in exchange for utility control of charging. That way load can be shifted off peak if needed.
- timthorn 4y ago
  All new chargers installed in the UK must now be smart, by law.
  - MafellUser 4y ago
    On top of that, it is ILLEGAL to sell and install dumb EVSEs. Does not apply to third party resales but if you can't find someone to install it, it's a moot point.
faichai 4y ago
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.
- dazc 4y ago
  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 dangerous and aggressive manner, £50,000. From everyday observation, this would raise a few billion in no time at all and price some very stupid and aggressive people off the roads entirely.
  - MafellUser 4y ago
    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 difficult do you think it'd be to get them to pay £10k fine?
    - dazc 4y ago
      > 'Even getting them to pay for insurance is hard enough, how difficult do you think it'd be to get them to pay £10k fine?' In a lot of cases the fine for having no insurance is lower than the insurance would have cost. In other words, the system is seriously f*d up and needs to be changed.
smackay 4y ago
The UK Government currently spends around £11 billion on roads, https://www.statista.com/statistics/298667/united-kingdom-uk-public-sector-expenditure-national-roads/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/298667/united-kingdom-uk... so the excess is a handy revenue stream which clearly it would lothed to give up. That means the real opportunities with the switch to electrifying transportation, like moving freight traffic to rail will not be seized as that would entail even more spending. Instead we are stuck with the problem that every solution to climate change is along the same lines of "just like before but this time with electricity".
- matsemann 4y ago
  > The UK Government currently spends around £11 billion on roads How much does it spend on secondary things? At least in Norway, I think the number is that even for a normal ICE vehicle and all it's costs, you're still not paying what the government actually spends in total. With something like $1000 per car or so. Mostly because of secondary effects. Higher hospital costs vs what would have happened investing that money on public transport, walkable cities etc. Street parking is basically free compared to what that land is worth. Cost of accidents. Etc. etc.
- rcMgD2BwE72F 4y ago
  > The UK Government currently spends around £11 billion on roads, https://www.statista.com/statistics/298667/united-kingdom-uk https://www.statista.com/statistics/298667/united-kingdom-uk... so the excess is a handy revenue stream which clearly it would lothed to give up. There's no excess when you account for the effects on climate. At some point, we'll have to pay to mitigate the impact of fossil-based transportation, and any operators in the industry (from oil extraction to road constructions) will be bankrupt unless we keep externalizing/socializing the costs and pretend climate change is not caused by CO2 emissions.
- arethuza 4y ago
  I wonder about council spending on roads and spending by the devolved governments - are they included in that total?
WelcomeShorty 4y ago
Same issue here in Switzerland. I am sure this will popup in all countries that have stimulated these EVs via tax benefits. Just bought mine (Audi e-tron) and am happily surprised by all the subsidies and rebates, but it is clear that does not scale.
leoedin 4y ago
The "per unit of energy" pricing of liquid fuels is quite appealing as it encourages efficiency. Even when people are using electric cars, efficiency is beneficial. I wonder if some sort of banded electricity pricing would work - you can consume x kWh at a lower price, and then a surplus tax applies. It's fairly easy to tax public charging. That would still encourage people to seek efficient EVs.
- bhawks 4y ago
  You could achieve basically the same result by reading the odometer and giving discounts or premiums based on the make/model of the car. No need to measure/tier electricity usage.
  - leoedin 4y ago
    That doesn't reward economical driving though. EVs have a very low efficiency penalty for high performance - an EV can be both highly efficient at 55mph and have 400 HP and 3s 0-60 times.
mab122 4y ago
Why not just tax the tires? Seems like they are good indicator on how much you are using roads and how many miles you drove etc. (Safety maybe an argument. Don't do it so people don't drive on shitty old ones)
- unglaublich 4y ago
  Nice idea. Add a wear indicator and some DRM to it, and a modern service-based industry is born.
- iso1631 4y ago
  Or just look at the odometer each year at the MOT
- phpisthebest 4y ago
  Aside from the safety factor, tires do have an expiration date, like with most things tires are rated for time and mileage. ie 5 years or 50,000 miles Now most people only replace them at the milage limit like their oil because they run out their miles faster but for some people (like me) I tend to replace things on time more often because I do not drive that much
  - warmwaffles 4y ago
    > ie 5 years or 50,000 miles It also depends on the make and where you live. I stretched my Yokohama's out to ~80k miles with good tread still left when I replaced them. But I live in the southern part of the US, so we don't have to deal with snow and ice cycles that cause tires to wear faster.
    - phpisthebest 4y ago
      Heat breaks down rubber as well having "good tread" is not the only failure point or wear indicator, a tire can be bad while having "good tread"
      - warmwaffles 4y ago
rexreed 4y ago
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 personally benefit. The idea of funding roads by virtue of fuel taxes always struck me as odd.
- HPsquared 4y ago
  It's a kind of substitute for tolls, an alternative pay-as-you-go system. Edit: of course it neglects that not all roads are created equal, some have a much higher cost and value per passenger-mile (e.g. bridges)
  - rexreed 4y ago
    Tolls are paid by those who drive on the roads, not by those who benefit from the roads if they don't drive. That's why it's a shifted burden. Tolls and fuel taxes are paid by those who drive, not those who otherwise benefit. Just my opinion.
- bhawks 4y ago
  But then we wouldn't be able to put cameras everywhere and GPS trackers in people's cars?
  - rexreed 4y ago
    The steady creep of surveillance posing as convenience.
- iso1631 4y ago
  In the UK local council tax funds local roads, and national government (funded mainly from income tax, national insurance and VAT) funds major trunk roads.
  - 4y ago
srg0 4y ago
I don't see a problem replacing fuel duty with an energy tax. Make it progressive. Let say the first 3000 kWh per year are priced at residential rate, apply higher rate above that. Households without a car will pay the same price as before. EV owners will pay a tax proportional to car usage.
- rcMgD2BwE72F 4y ago
  If we revamp the fuel duty tax, why not introduce a carbon tax to pay for the impact of CO2 emissions on climate? This would make the fuel duty tax insignificant (the cost of climate change is more or less infinite now, given the current trends). Then, we can rethink the whole system and realize road-based transportation with private cars is not sustainable. And then, we can forget about fuel duty / energy tax because we have whole societies to redesign :)
  - srg0 4y ago
    Personally I would support a uniform CO2 tax on everything, but I think it's more difficult to introduce and enforce. Energy tax + fuel duty can be a CO2 tax in disguise: there are already precise tools to measure and bill energy and fuel consumption, carbon intensity at any given time is known, and energy, heating and transportation are responsible for 73% of emissions. What's left out is harder to monitor and regulate: agriculture (livestock, fertilizers, crop burning etc), construction and industrial processes, and waste. It may take a while before the society accepts that meat is never going to be that cheap again.
jacobp100 4y ago
I’d like to see a parking tax. Currently if you go to the supermarket, it probably has a car park, which is paid for by all customers - including those without cars. Having a minimum cost to parking - through VAT or just a minimum fee a company has to charge - would make people reconsider their car use
osrec 4y ago
Perhaps if the UK government more competently spent it's money, it wouldn't need to replace the lost revenue. The NHS track and trace app, which cost around GBP 40 billion, is an absolute sham. I've worked with NHS trusts that are paying GBP 500 for each lightbulb replacement in a hospital, GBP 200 for a ream of paper, amongst other things. The UK also rakes a significant amount from national insurance and income tax. You can't just keep on taxing as a way to grease the wheels of an inefficient government machine. I bet if someone was to clean up the junky contracts that corrupt MPs have lumbered us with, we'd comfortably save more than GBP 35 billion a year.
- timthorn 4y ago
  Track and trace, including the free covid tests and the staff on the phone lines, cost about £40bn. There is a lot of spending inefficiency in government spending, including that programme, but to suggest that the app cost that much is disingenuous.
MafellUser 4y ago
Completely absence from this are the loss due to lower Benefit in Kind (BIK) for Electric vehicles, and First Year Allowances for EV purchases. Driving an EV means only paying 1-2% per year tax compared to 30-40% for a locally polluting vehicles. First Year allowances mean you claim back 100% of the cost of the EV to offset any taxable income. These business rates mean owning an EV outright as a normal employee is very dumb. Would you rather pay £300 per month for a PCP on a Zoe, or £150 a month for a Taycan as a company car?
- Gordonjcp 4y ago
  Given that only two cars I've ever owned in 25 years of driving cost more than £300 to buy outright, I can't imagine paying £300 per month for any sort of vehicle.
milliams 4y ago
Does not the switch to electric vehicles offer indirect savings elsewhere, making the £35B deficit less? For example, a reduction in air pollution leading to better health and less NHS use, less greenhouse emissions leading to less spent of fighting that uphill battle, less fuel being imported giving various third-order effects.
IndrekR 4y ago
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.
- iso1631 4y ago
  You should make it proportional to the miles driven. Someone who does 1,000 miles a year causes far less wear than someone doing 30,000 miles a year That's the crazy thing about vehicle excise duty, if you do 1,500 miles a year you might use 300 litres of petrol (about £150 tax), but you could be paying another £160 in VED, making the total tax 20p per mile Meanwhile someone doing 30,000 miles at the same mpg will be paying about 10p per mile
- Robotbeat 4y ago
  I think it’d be pretty bad to penalize electric cars based on weight squared unless fossil fuels are eliminated from transportation. Then I agree.
  - cptskippy 4y ago
    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 tires is the solution because tire wear tracks to usage and vehicle weight as well? You can still have a fuel tax to penalize ICE in addition.
    - Robotbeat 4y ago
      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.
neilwilson 4y ago
Oh dear. Somebody didn't pass the geometric sequence question on their GSCE maths paper. The £35B revenue replaces itself, because money doesn't stop at its first use. What you don't spend on fuel duty, you spend on something else, which is subject to VAT, causes wages to be paid subject to PAYE, and profits to be earned subject to corporation tax. They then spend their increased income cause more tax to be raised and so on. In other words the taxation just moves elsewhere in the spending/income chain. And that's because total tax take is a function of government spending and the desire of the non government sector to save or spend. The more the non-government saves the lower the tax take is as a percentage of government spending - pretty much regardless of tax rates. Tax rates really just alter the distribution, and not so much the total. The purpose of sin taxes is to discourage people from doing one thing and start doing another. There is no 'revenue', firstly because you can't rely on it and secondly because a sovereign government has no need of revenue in the first place. That's not the purpose of taxes! Ideally sin taxes should be matched with virtue subsidies, so that people who are hard of accounting can see what is happening. For example a fuel duty should be hypothecated to an electric car subsidy and they then wane in lockstep with each other as the behaviour changes.
- phpisthebest 4y ago
  >>firstly because you can't rely on it and secondly because a sovereign government has no need of revenue in the first place. That's not the purpose of taxes! Soo much wrong here... Revenue should be the ONLY purpose of taxation, and falsehood that sovereign government steams from a combination of fiat currency and MMT, which when combined and executed on like you are implying lead to inflation can currency collapse (in the extreme) governments SHOULD NOT use taxation to pick winners and losers, nor to legislate morality, they should use taxation ONLY to collect revenue to projects and programs approved by the people, and for no other purpose
  - ErikVandeWater 4y ago
    Taxing activities that have negative externalities is a positive use of taxation. It's better than forbidding such behavior for many reasons. The simplest reason is that it's better to make revenue dis-incentivizing something bad (pollution) as opposed to dis-incentivizing something good (income).
gorgoiler 4y ago
53p (+20% VAT) per litre for a car that uses 7.5 litres per 100km is about £48/1000km. The average UK mileage has dropped a lot over the years and is now just below 7000 miles a year. An odometer duty for that would be about £200, or £17 a month. If HMRC bring in £35bn a year in fuel duty a year for 45m drivers (the number of people with active driving licenses) that’s more like £700 a head. Why the threefold difference?
- balderdash 4y ago
  Trucks/lorries might make up a big chunk of that revenue
throwawayacc2 4y ago
A road or car tax doesn’t have to go away just because the car is electric no? Am I missing something? As for the fuel tax, why not make up for it with an increase in car tax once sufficient adoption is reached? Once 80% of cars are electric, the car tax increases by an amount required to make up for the average revenue from fuel. At that point, electric cars pay just a high car tax and fossil fuel cars pay both the high car tax and the fuel duty, further incentiveiseing the switch to electric. Am I missing something? What would be the issues with this approach?
- fdsafdsfdsa 4y ago
  VED (Vehicle Exercise Duty), as it is currently known, is now based on emissions. It would be a hard sell to undo that, and base it on something else (like vehicle weight/size/etc). The most acceptable way to tax EVs at this point is probably taxing at the charging point.
  - infogulch 4y ago
    Add an additional VED component for road damage, which is vehicle miles times the fourth power of axle load.
    - fdsafdsfdsa 4y ago
      There isn't a way to do that without HGVs (heavy goods vehicles) paying practically all of the annual VED. It's pretty clear that "smart chargers" will become "smart tax revenue generators" in the near future.
sk8terboi 4y ago
rdm_blackhole 4y ago
It's the same issue in France now. Taxes on fuel/petrol brings in close to 30Bn euros per year. The taxes actually make 60% of the price when buying fuel for your car. Currently the price of 1L of fuel in France is around 2.1 euros. That is 1.2 euros per liter is going straight to the government's coffers. As always, I am expecting the French government to wake up sometime around 2030 and realize that the taxes are starting to bring in less and less money each year because more and more people are switching to EV. Then there will be a big show from the politicians that the situation is dire and we need to make up the fall in revenue by reducing the social safety net once again for the lower wage earners. As always the people with the lowest wages will be the one paying most taxes in the end. The reason for that being that if they can't afford to switch to an EV due to the prohibitive prices, then they will be the last ones on the line having to pay heavy taxes on petrol while the middle class who can afford it would have already switched a while ago. Ergo we are creating a regressive tax on poor people. As to where to find the revenue to make up the shortfall, that is going to be incredibly tough. For starters France has been running a deficit forever and the debt as ballooned during COVID. Could it continue to do so? That seems unlikely because France has pledge to reduce its deficit to fall in line with EU regulations so France needs to tighten its belt somehow. At the same time, it needs to increase the EV uptake to meet the climate action pledge so it can't start raising taxes on EV. Some subsidies may disappear but that is not going to be enough to plug the hole left by the fuel taxes. It also can't raise the VAT which is currently at 20% and is a very unpopular measure who will surely lead to an election loss for the minority party in power currently. It can't raise more taxes on the middle class as it's being squeezed like a lemon currently and would also lead to mass protests(see Yellow Vest protests of 2019 to get an idea of what could happen). Some seem to think that an increase in Ev uptake will lead to savings elsewhere, in the healthcare costs for example. But Those savings will not materialize until at least a few years after the transition to full EV has happened. Yes the air may be less polluted as the transition happens, but the damage is already done and those who suffered or are suffering due to air pollution currently will require indefinite ongoing care in the future which will be expensive.
balderdash 4y ago
I think people are starting from the wrong end of the problem. It appears we have two types of roads, access roads (think last mile roads in residential or rural areas) whose replacement cycle is driven by useful life vs usage. Then we have high throughput roads, that have enough volume to require usage driven replacement cycles. So if those access roads are y% of the miles and x% of the cost, then a vehicle “access” tax should be levied to cover that part of the system, and toll/usage based tax should be levied to maintain the usage based part of the system. Side note: to adjust for the pollution CO2 element you could add a tax to the wholesale price per MW of electricity based on generation type, in addition to a lower, purely pollution priced gas tax
- 988747 4y ago
  The actual problem is that government is going to lose 35 billion per year in tax revenue, and they are trying to prevent that. What they actually spend that money on is secondary, they just need a good story to tell to their voters :)
  - balderdash 4y ago
    Lol - yep, people always struggle with the concept of fungibility in this context. It’s like when we give $1b of food aid to a country and prescribe it can’t be spent on military hardware, and pretending we didn’t just free up $1b for military spending…
- AnthonyMouse 4y ago
  Under this model you should also account for the amount of damage done by the vehicle. Which scales with the fourth power of axle load, i.e. ~100% of the road damage is caused by large commercial vehicles, to the point that collecting it from passenger vehicles isn't even worth the collection infrastructure. It certainly isn't worth the privacy cost.
  - rgbrenner 4y ago
    Even if a road never sees a single truck, it will still need to be replaced and/or repaired eventually. Things like the freeze-thaw cycle destroy roads too.
innocentoldguy 4y ago
The state I live in charges electric car owners an extra fee when registering their cars to make up for the loss of “gas tax” revenue.
DrBazza 4y ago
A long article to just say, in the UK, the government will need to figure out how far you've driven an EV and charge you for that distance to replace the tax raised through fuel bought to travel the equivalent distance. Odometer read when the car gets and MOT? Maybe, but I'd expect more cameras, because not only can you charge people for the distance they've driven, if they're average speed check ones, they can fine you at the same time for speeding (until that pesky speed limiter starts making an appearance on European, and by extension, UK roads).
bagels 4y ago
This debate is so tedious. Why not just slightly increase property tax or income tax? Why does it have to be usage based? Most other government services are done this way, we all benefit from having roads.
- zip1234 4y ago
  There are significant negative externalities to driving.
  - zaroth 4y ago
    There are, however, much more significant positive intrinsic and extrinsic values to pervasive passenger and truck infrastructure than there are negative externalities. Namely, it’s a fundamental underpinning of modern civilization.
    - Tiktaalik 4y ago
      transportation is fundamental, that its necessarily via incredibly space inefficient personal automobile is not.
      - zaroth 4y ago
        It’s certainly fundamental to the world we live it as it exists today, and particularly in suburban / non-walkable environments. With climate change, crime, and COVID I would say that those “space inefficient” personal transports will become even more fundamental, not less.
kwhitefoot 4y ago
It's easy just add it to income tax. That way it will be properly progressive instead of the regressive tax that it is now.
lamontcg 4y ago
impose taxes on yachts, property worth over £2M and other stuff the upper class buys.
hedora 4y ago
These sorts of articles have always confused me. This would be a great problem to have! If gas usage gas halves then double the tax, and so on. Once gas taxes are 10-20x what they are today, we can talk about how to find replacement revenue. Also; the annual ongoing damage Britain is incurring from burning fossil fuels is already way above 35 billion pounds. Focusing on where the money for those repairs is coming from is probably more important.
- chickenpotpie 4y ago
  That would make the gas tax a tax on the poor, whom cannot afford electric cars
  - xxpor 4y ago
    The truly poor can't afford a car regardless, especially not at 2GBP/L gas prices already.
- tiernano 4y ago
  that aint going to work... if the tax doubles, people will start to revolt. Taxis, Trucks, Van drivers and anyone who either 1) cant afford a new electric car, or 2) cant buy one one for one reason or another (distance they travel, stuff they carry, etc) are going to be very pissed off. And if more people do go an buy electric cars, your still in the same boat...
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
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 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.
dabbledash 4y ago
Would never for one second consent to the government tracking the location of every car, and would vote against any candidate who suggested such a thing.
8bitsrule 4y ago
Tax the oil companies for the difference.

73 points by phobotics 4y ago

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. Etc. etc. Which was great to get the initial people to convert, and get the infrastructure in place. But now it's time to tax them. 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. While they don't emit carbon dioxide, they are just as deadly as normal cars. Also pollute more from the tires being heavier. Just as noisy. Need the same expensive roads. And as all cars they ruin the city.

chrisco255 4y ago
The point of road taxes is to pay for maintenance and expansion. Roads break down over time if you do not maintain them.
- techterrier 4y ago
  this is paid out of local taxation. Which is why pedestrians, cylists, equestrians, tractors, cows and ducks are allowed to used the road. There is no such thing as road tax.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - blibble 4y ago
    trunk roads and motorways are definitely not paid out of local taxation
  - chrisco255 4y ago
    Dunno how it works in UK, but in US, there are local roads, state roads, and federal roads. There are also local, state, and federal gas taxes that vary by jurisdiction. The funds from these gas taxes are used to finance new highway and roadway construction and maintenance of existing roads. Sometimes, a special tax is levied at the local level for specific local roadway projects. But the big infrastructure projects are almost entirely paid for by gas taxes. Either way, the point of the tax has never been to "punish pollution".
    - zip1234 4y ago
      > the big infrastructure projects are almost entirely paid for by gas taxes. About 50% is probably correct: http://www.financingtransportation.org/funding_financing/funding/ http://www.financingtransportation.org/funding_financing/fun...
  - asdff 4y ago
    There is such thing as a road tax and not all roads allow cows and ducks and lions and bears. Note the sign on the highway onramp that says something like "no pedestrians or cyclists" and the fact that every car on the road has to pay a yearly fee in order to not be impounded by the local government for neglecting to pay for fees that go on to maintain the roads.
- WorldMaker 4y ago
  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.
gpmcadam 4y ago
It's a combination. Revenues gathered via road tax have a provision for older/more polluting cars so you pay less the newer your vehicle, essentially. Some of the money is used to fund the maintenance of highways, though. Local roads are funded by council tax, so this probably dispells the anti-cycling argument because presumably the cyclists do pay council tax (unless they're on motorways which is another issue.)
- techterrier 4y ago
  motorways, not highways
  - gpmcadam 4y ago
    No, it's highways because not all highways (major roads and motorways) are motorways. See: https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/highways-england https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/highways-england
- semanticist 4y ago
  > Some of the money is used to fund the maintenance of highways, though. Only in the sense that some of all tax money is used in that way - VED just gets pooled with all tax income, none of it is 'ring fenced' for any specific purpose. That's why the idea of 'road tax' is so annoying, since it implies it's to be used for a specific purpose.
  - efaref 4y ago
    "Road tax" is a _tax_ you have to pay in order to use the _road_. It's the most natural name for it, which is why people call it that. Despite the words they use, it's not a vehicle tax: you can own a vehicle without paying it as long as you declare that you will not use the vehicle _on_the_road_ (a.k.a., make a Statutory Off Road Notification). It's a tax for using the roads. A road tax. That the government don't ring-fence it to use on road maintenance is irrelevant.
    - 4y ago
martin-adams 4y ago
It's very odd they used the term Road Tax. It's always been known as Vehicle Tax for the very reason you've pointed out. Hence why you don't need to pay tax to ride a bicycle on the road. The other area they are losing out not mentioned in the article is Benefit in Kind tax for EVs used as company cars. At some point, that will also need to end and be more in alignment with ICE vehicles.
- techterrier 4y ago
  It's a handy dog whistle so we know they are part of the car lobby edit: spelling
  - blibble 4y ago
    or it could simply be that the commonly used term for Vehicle Excise Duty is "road tax" (even if it's technically incorrect) not everything is a conspiracy
    - techterrier 4y ago
      commonly used by people who disingenuously use it's etymology to imply that all 'road users' (by which they mean cyclists) rather than 'vehicle users' should pay it
      - blibble 4y ago
        I don't see anything in the article that suggests the author wants that to happen? these hysterical responses say more about you then the people you're demonising
        techterrier 4y ago
        I dont think a carsalesman is going to feel overly demonised by being reffered to as part of the car lobby. He does know better than to conflate road and vehicle tax however.
belorn 4y ago
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. But I could be wrong. It would be interesting to hear if heavy bike/pedestrian roads have higher road maintenance than those that are used lightly. My guess would be that the major wear and tear comes from nature, water in particular, which mean wear and tear isn't based on usage. When it come to tire pollution those would be better taxed on the tires themselves. Bike tires tend to be much much smaller than cars so the taxation wouldn't be that big of a deal to cyclists.
- 7952 4y ago
  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.
  - AnthonyMouse 4y ago
    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.
    - brippalcharrid 4y ago
      It's the fourth power of axle load according to the AAHSO report (https://camdencyclists.org.uk/2020/06/the-fourth-power-rule-cyclelicious/ 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.
analog31 4y ago
>>>> 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 fee. We're not allowed to ride on the Interstates, and we tend to avoid "big" roads for safety / comfort reasons. 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.
- throwaway0a5e 4y ago
  >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. Which is itself a net subsidy for all sorts of other economic activity. It's subsidies all the way down.
  - robertlagrant 4y ago
    Indeed - if heavy trucking is subsidised then eventually the prices you're paying for something are lower.
- wil421 4y ago
  > 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. Not true for a lot of states. Property tax is not used for roads. Georgia pays for roads using gas taxes and road use fees like registration (tolls contribute a very small amount). Florida is similar but they are much more toll heavy. Alabama is similar as too. All 3 states are in the top 10 roads in America[1]. I believe Georgia plans to charge higher registration fees for EVs at some point. [1] https://www.consumeraffairs.com/automotive/us-road-conditions.html https://www.consumeraffairs.com/automotive/us-road-condition...
  - Robotbeat 4y ago
redeeman 4y ago
so perhaps its also time for the government to admit that the prior taxes didnt have ANYTHING to do with environment, but just a way to justify money grabbing to spend on their own worthy causes?
- unglaublich 4y ago
  Cars are a huge burden on health, safety, environment and quality of life. It has never been a secret that governments tax cars to subsidize causes that should partially compensate the indirect damage that cars do to their countries.
  - mbg721 4y ago
    We saw this play out with the money from tobacco settlements a few decades ago; states see sin taxes as a windfall that can substitute for sustainable budgeting.
- matsemann 4y ago
  No, it's the opposite. You don't want people to drive because of the environment, health, noise, road "accidents" killing people, how it destroys cities etc. So the taxes are a direct incentive to find alternative modes of travel.
  - robertlagrant 4y ago
    Not really. They exist because cars are required. If we all became able to live our lives purely with cycling then cycling would be taxed.
  - redeeman 4y ago
    step 1: ICE cars are bad for the environment! we must add taxes step 2: ICE cars are bad, electric cars good. We remove taxes for electric cars ... too many people get electric cars ... step 3: its time to start taxing electric cars... reasons! translation: governments likes to take money from its citizens that it can spend on whatever it deems worthy, and will happily come up with a reason, sometimes justified, sometimes not.
Robotbeat 4y ago
The “pollute more from the tires being heavier” is a myth, by the way. There was an article that circulated claiming this, but they never actually measured the tire pollution of electric cars, just extrapolated from ICE cars with really terrible and ultimately false arguments. Electric cars tend to use low rolling resistance tires (potentially less wear… if you’re experiencing less rolling resistance, that means less energy ends up being used to produce wear, so less wear occurs… in part due to geometric effects and partly due to composition of the tires). Electric cars are also fairly comparable in curb weight due to massive weight reductions elsewhere, plus improved traction control (and the more gentle regenerative braking) means less wheel slippage and wear. And it assumes ICE cars are operating at full emissions-control mode which is also untrue especially on startup or in cold weather or if using diesel. It also assumes tire wear mass is all minute particles of the same problematic effects of ICE exhaust particles, which is a bad assumption for multiple reasons (for one, it ignores empirical measurements of particle sizes), and it ignores gaseous emissions entirely in the calculation, many of which are very problematic like carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides of various types, components of gasoline such as benzene and xylene and toluene, ozone (a major component of smog), etc. It also ignores the near absence of break wear in electric cars, thus the absence of silica dust (or iron oxide dust, or whatever the brakes and the rotors are made of, etc). In short, it is misinformation.
- dahfizz 4y ago
  > Electric cars are also fairly comparable in curb weight due to massive weight reductions elsewhere, Seriously, this meme needs to die. A Tesla model 3 is the same weight as a BMW 340, and the model 3 is hundreds of pounds lighter than an SUV like the BMW X3. Batteries are heavy, but so are gas engines & transmissions.
  - enragedcacti 4y ago
    > 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 vehicles at the MSRP of the EV.
mytailorisrich 4y ago
It's a vehicle tax. It's depending on emissions at the moment as a way to encourage vehicles with low/no emissions but there is no reason for EV to keep being exempt. The issue in term of tax revenue is fuel duty and VAT on fuel. I'm suspecting that once transition is advanced enough they'll find ways to add tax on charging points/electricity used for charging, or an actual road tax on mileage or whatnot.
innocentoldguy 4y ago
> 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 do nothing to pay for.
- matsemann 4y ago
  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.
  - innocentoldguy 4y ago
    But that isn't what you said. You said that people who were complaining that bicyclists don't pay their fair share for the roads are wrong because most bicyclists own a car too. I responded to that argument and not the moved goal post you're presenting here.
    - matsemann 4y ago
      I have honestly no idea what you're trying to convey. I didn't move any goalpost, I tried to restate my point since you missed it completely. Don't argue in bad faith, please.
pif 4y ago
> There is no "road tax" in the UK, is it? It's a fee for polluting, not using the road. It is not what you call it, but what you spend it on.
- youngtaff 4y ago
  And it’s part of general taxation… Roads are funded partly out of local taxes, and partly out of general taxes - there’s no hypothecation of ‘road tax’ paying for roads
nemo44x 4y ago
> 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 dislike bikes - they get in the way of people trying to get somewhere.
- techterrier 4y ago
  hell hath no fury like a mildly inconvenienced motorist
  - prawn 4y ago
    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.
    - supertrope 4y ago
      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.
      - prawn 4y ago
        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."
ehnto 4y ago
In Australia and I imagine the UK, infrastructure is paid for by the municipalities from their own budgets, a portion of which is granted to them from the federal government. Larger projects are usually taken on by the state. These budgets come out of general tax revenue, which is paid by everyone via GST and income tax. So cyclists absolutely pay, and in many many cases, they're paying to build infrastructure they don't even use. The unfair burden usually goes toward the cyclist, who's historically been shortchanged on infrastructure for cycling. Registration goes toward running the registration apparatus, not into infrastructure. That's another misconception. The other contribution is from fuel sales taxes/excises, and that goes into general tax revenue as well, so is not explicitly set aside for road projects. Negating the potential income from fuel sales taxes, is all the fossil fuel subsidies, what once was 15bil income, after subsidies of 12bil, is now just 3billion in income from fuel taxes. So the money comes in from the consumer, and goes straight out to the fossil fuel industry through industry fuel tax credits. Absolutely bullshit, but it also means there's not much left of that fuel tax income to pay for infrastructure. https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/pubs/BN/2011-2012/FossilFuelTaxes#_Toc313957069 https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Depart.... Ultimately a cyclist will pay the same amount of tax, minus the fuel taxes, and get just a scrap of that tax spent back on cycling.
DrBazza 4y ago
> There is no "road tax" in the UK, is it? Vehicle Excise Duty since 1920 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_Excise_Duty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_Excise_Duty Road funding in the UK is just from the general pot of tax money. There are a lot of anti-cyclist types in the UK that always incorrectly (or ironically, correctly) claim that cyclists don't pay road tax (no one does) and therefore shouldn't use the road, even though just about every cyclist is an adult that pays UK tax. I certainly expect the UK, and every other country to tax EVs by mileage within a decade, and additionally toll charge on major routes, almost certainly via cameras (to also fine you for speeding), or require all cars to have a GPS blackbox (which let's face it, isn't expensive now).
standardUser 4y ago
"Which was great to get the initial people to convert, and get the infrastructure in place. But now it's time to tax them. " Maybe in Norway, and only Norway. Every other nation should be quadrupling-down on EV incentives. Or 10 fold. Or 20.
- Originami 4y ago
  Road tax needs to be morphed into road-usage tax, based on time of day, location, axle weight, and distance. It should be prohibitively expensive to use congested freeways and city streets during peak hours, but free at all other times. Road expansion is justified based on peaks of usage - so by smoothing out these peaks, we can save significantly on the need to build more roads. Trip length can also scale non-linearly based on congestion: 10-20% more cars than capacity can result in 50% longer trips.
- megablast 4y ago
  Why?? EVs aren’t good for the environment at all. Why push for them?? Why are we continuously subsidising the car industry?
josefresco 4y ago
> 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.
- matsemann 4y ago
  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-for-elbilene-1.15622910 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.

gpmcadam 4y ago

"Road tax" (a levy to cover the cost of maintaining the public highway) obviously needs to be extended to cover EVs at some point. I'm surprised it hasn't already. However, broadly speaking: tax the thing you want less of. There's various strategies being raised to cover this so-called "lost revenue", including the tracking of your home electricity usage via smart boxes to tax you on charging your own car (!!) and charging cars a per-mile-tax instead of on fuel. But, if we're to believe that EVs are currently being incentivised because the Government wants to lower emissions (and thus avoid any costs of continued nationwide carbon reliance) then perhaps a study should be done to see if the cost-saving of people moving _away_ from ICEs outweighs the lost revenue of taxing petrol/diesel, in the long run.

lettergram 4y ago
> There's various strategies being raised to cover this so-called "lost revenue", including the tracking of your home electricity usage via smart boxes to tax you on charging your own car (!!) and charging cars a per-mile-tax instead of on fuel. At the end of the day any implementation of the methods discussed lead to absolute tyranny. To track per-mile-tax you’re going to have either government gps tracking in real-time or cameras tracking your ever my movement. Alternatively, the government will track and then likely limit power consumption for your cars. This is the exact opposite of any free market. Effectively, you’re giving total control to the government around what movement you can make and/or you’ll have zero anonymity by law.
- planede 4y ago
  > To track per-mile-tax you’re going to have either government gps tracking in real-time or cameras tracking your ever my movement. Alternatively, the government will track and then likely limit power consumption for your cars. Maybe I'm naive, but shouldn't an odometer reading do the job just fine?
rcMgD2BwE72F 4y ago
We should split road taxes and carbon taxes, and ensure both revenue streams cover all the investment and expenses required for the sector but also to cover long-term effects on climate. This way, we can spend the revenues from road taxes to build and maintain our infrastructure, and the realize that the latter will just make the whole car industry bankrupt overnight.

causi 4y ago

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.

tigerlily 4y ago
I hear road wear scales with the fourth power of vehicle mass.
- cocoflunchy 4y ago
  Found this discussion while looking for a source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25171899 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25171899
  - tigerlily 4y ago
    Ah, thanks that’s where I must’ve read it.
- unglaublich 4y ago
  That's why a bike lane, being a fraction of a highway's thickness, doesn't need maintenance for decades.
  - asdff 4y ago
    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.
throwaway0a5e 4y ago

throwaway0a5e 4y ago

How about the government just finds a way to make do? It's kind of preposterous that we're staring an economic slowdown and high inflation in the face after decades of incomes flat-lining and the .gov is telling people to cough up more. I get that EV owners are statistically richer but you're not gonna change that by raising the TCO via taxes.

JumpCrisscross 4y ago
Get your broader point about strained household budgets. But taxation is deflationary. Raising taxes lowers inflation.
- lettergram 4y ago
  Lol assuming inflation is caused by an increased money supply; not the material food shortage we are seeing. Further, this type of taxation is a regressive tax.
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > assuming inflation is caused by an increased money supply; not the material food shortage we are seeing Doesn’t matter. Fiscal taxation (spending) reduces (increases) aggregate demand directly. No need for monetary transmission channels.
    - lettergram 4y ago
      Except this taxation is supposedly going directly to spending on regular road maintenance. Which injects the funds directly back into the economy. Money supply isn’t changing here. Even if it were, demand isn’t being reduced. They’re just forcing you to spend it on roads.
      - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
        > this taxation is supposedly going directly to spending on regular road maintenance Totally orthogonal. Spending is stimulative. Taxation is tightening. That the two are traditionally bundled is political convenience. We can rail against the spending bit as inflationary. My narrow point is that calling out tax increases vis-à-vis inflation is inchoate.

tigerlily 4y ago

> Smart home wallbox chargers could in theory tell the electricity grid it was a car being charged, but homeowners could just plug a three-pin extension lead into a normal socket to charge their car, circumventing any such communication between grid and charge. To encourage folk to use their wall box, offer a discount rate in exchange for utility control of charging. That way load can be shifted off peak if needed.

timthorn 4y ago
All new chargers installed in the UK must now be smart, by law.
- MafellUser 4y ago
  On top of that, it is ILLEGAL to sell and install dumb EVSEs. Does not apply to third party resales but if you can't find someone to install it, it's a moot point.

faichai 4y ago

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.

dazc 4y ago
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 dangerous and aggressive manner, £50,000. From everyday observation, this would raise a few billion in no time at all and price some very stupid and aggressive people off the roads entirely.
- MafellUser 4y ago
  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 difficult do you think it'd be to get them to pay £10k fine?
  - dazc 4y ago
    > 'Even getting them to pay for insurance is hard enough, how difficult do you think it'd be to get them to pay £10k fine?' In a lot of cases the fine for having no insurance is lower than the insurance would have cost. In other words, the system is seriously f*d up and needs to be changed.

smackay 4y ago

The UK Government currently spends around £11 billion on roads, https://www.statista.com/statistics/298667/united-kingdom-uk-public-sector-expenditure-national-roads/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/298667/united-kingdom-uk... so the excess is a handy revenue stream which clearly it would lothed to give up. That means the real opportunities with the switch to electrifying transportation, like moving freight traffic to rail will not be seized as that would entail even more spending. Instead we are stuck with the problem that every solution to climate change is along the same lines of "just like before but this time with electricity".

matsemann 4y ago
> The UK Government currently spends around £11 billion on roads How much does it spend on secondary things? At least in Norway, I think the number is that even for a normal ICE vehicle and all it's costs, you're still not paying what the government actually spends in total. With something like $1000 per car or so. Mostly because of secondary effects. Higher hospital costs vs what would have happened investing that money on public transport, walkable cities etc. Street parking is basically free compared to what that land is worth. Cost of accidents. Etc. etc.
rcMgD2BwE72F 4y ago
> The UK Government currently spends around £11 billion on roads, https://www.statista.com/statistics/298667/united-kingdom-uk https://www.statista.com/statistics/298667/united-kingdom-uk... so the excess is a handy revenue stream which clearly it would lothed to give up. There's no excess when you account for the effects on climate. At some point, we'll have to pay to mitigate the impact of fossil-based transportation, and any operators in the industry (from oil extraction to road constructions) will be bankrupt unless we keep externalizing/socializing the costs and pretend climate change is not caused by CO2 emissions.
arethuza 4y ago
I wonder about council spending on roads and spending by the devolved governments - are they included in that total?

WelcomeShorty 4y ago

Same issue here in Switzerland. I am sure this will popup in all countries that have stimulated these EVs via tax benefits. Just bought mine (Audi e-tron) and am happily surprised by all the subsidies and rebates, but it is clear that does not scale.

leoedin 4y ago

The "per unit of energy" pricing of liquid fuels is quite appealing as it encourages efficiency. Even when people are using electric cars, efficiency is beneficial. I wonder if some sort of banded electricity pricing would work - you can consume x kWh at a lower price, and then a surplus tax applies. It's fairly easy to tax public charging. That would still encourage people to seek efficient EVs.

bhawks 4y ago
You could achieve basically the same result by reading the odometer and giving discounts or premiums based on the make/model of the car. No need to measure/tier electricity usage.
- leoedin 4y ago
  That doesn't reward economical driving though. EVs have a very low efficiency penalty for high performance - an EV can be both highly efficient at 55mph and have 400 HP and 3s 0-60 times.

mab122 4y ago

Why not just tax the tires? Seems like they are good indicator on how much you are using roads and how many miles you drove etc. (Safety maybe an argument. Don't do it so people don't drive on shitty old ones)

unglaublich 4y ago
Nice idea. Add a wear indicator and some DRM to it, and a modern service-based industry is born.
iso1631 4y ago
Or just look at the odometer each year at the MOT
phpisthebest 4y ago
Aside from the safety factor, tires do have an expiration date, like with most things tires are rated for time and mileage. ie 5 years or 50,000 miles Now most people only replace them at the milage limit like their oil because they run out their miles faster but for some people (like me) I tend to replace things on time more often because I do not drive that much
- warmwaffles 4y ago
  > ie 5 years or 50,000 miles It also depends on the make and where you live. I stretched my Yokohama's out to ~80k miles with good tread still left when I replaced them. But I live in the southern part of the US, so we don't have to deal with snow and ice cycles that cause tires to wear faster.
  - phpisthebest 4y ago
    Heat breaks down rubber as well having "good tread" is not the only failure point or wear indicator, a tire can be bad while having "good tread"
    - warmwaffles 4y ago

rexreed 4y ago

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 personally benefit. The idea of funding roads by virtue of fuel taxes always struck me as odd.

HPsquared 4y ago
It's a kind of substitute for tolls, an alternative pay-as-you-go system. Edit: of course it neglects that not all roads are created equal, some have a much higher cost and value per passenger-mile (e.g. bridges)
- rexreed 4y ago
  Tolls are paid by those who drive on the roads, not by those who benefit from the roads if they don't drive. That's why it's a shifted burden. Tolls and fuel taxes are paid by those who drive, not those who otherwise benefit. Just my opinion.
bhawks 4y ago
But then we wouldn't be able to put cameras everywhere and GPS trackers in people's cars?
- rexreed 4y ago
  The steady creep of surveillance posing as convenience.
iso1631 4y ago
In the UK local council tax funds local roads, and national government (funded mainly from income tax, national insurance and VAT) funds major trunk roads.
- 4y ago

srg0 4y ago

I don't see a problem replacing fuel duty with an energy tax. Make it progressive. Let say the first 3000 kWh per year are priced at residential rate, apply higher rate above that. Households without a car will pay the same price as before. EV owners will pay a tax proportional to car usage.

rcMgD2BwE72F 4y ago
If we revamp the fuel duty tax, why not introduce a carbon tax to pay for the impact of CO2 emissions on climate? This would make the fuel duty tax insignificant (the cost of climate change is more or less infinite now, given the current trends). Then, we can rethink the whole system and realize road-based transportation with private cars is not sustainable. And then, we can forget about fuel duty / energy tax because we have whole societies to redesign :)
- srg0 4y ago
  Personally I would support a uniform CO2 tax on everything, but I think it's more difficult to introduce and enforce. Energy tax + fuel duty can be a CO2 tax in disguise: there are already precise tools to measure and bill energy and fuel consumption, carbon intensity at any given time is known, and energy, heating and transportation are responsible for 73% of emissions. What's left out is harder to monitor and regulate: agriculture (livestock, fertilizers, crop burning etc), construction and industrial processes, and waste. It may take a while before the society accepts that meat is never going to be that cheap again.

jacobp100 4y ago

I’d like to see a parking tax. Currently if you go to the supermarket, it probably has a car park, which is paid for by all customers - including those without cars. Having a minimum cost to parking - through VAT or just a minimum fee a company has to charge - would make people reconsider their car use

osrec 4y ago

Perhaps if the UK government more competently spent it's money, it wouldn't need to replace the lost revenue. The NHS track and trace app, which cost around GBP 40 billion, is an absolute sham. I've worked with NHS trusts that are paying GBP 500 for each lightbulb replacement in a hospital, GBP 200 for a ream of paper, amongst other things. The UK also rakes a significant amount from national insurance and income tax. You can't just keep on taxing as a way to grease the wheels of an inefficient government machine. I bet if someone was to clean up the junky contracts that corrupt MPs have lumbered us with, we'd comfortably save more than GBP 35 billion a year.

timthorn 4y ago
Track and trace, including the free covid tests and the staff on the phone lines, cost about £40bn. There is a lot of spending inefficiency in government spending, including that programme, but to suggest that the app cost that much is disingenuous.

MafellUser 4y ago

Completely absence from this are the loss due to lower Benefit in Kind (BIK) for Electric vehicles, and First Year Allowances for EV purchases. Driving an EV means only paying 1-2% per year tax compared to 30-40% for a locally polluting vehicles. First Year allowances mean you claim back 100% of the cost of the EV to offset any taxable income. These business rates mean owning an EV outright as a normal employee is very dumb. Would you rather pay £300 per month for a PCP on a Zoe, or £150 a month for a Taycan as a company car?

Gordonjcp 4y ago
Given that only two cars I've ever owned in 25 years of driving cost more than £300 to buy outright, I can't imagine paying £300 per month for any sort of vehicle.

milliams 4y ago

Does not the switch to electric vehicles offer indirect savings elsewhere, making the £35B deficit less? For example, a reduction in air pollution leading to better health and less NHS use, less greenhouse emissions leading to less spent of fighting that uphill battle, less fuel being imported giving various third-order effects.

IndrekR 4y ago

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.

iso1631 4y ago
You should make it proportional to the miles driven. Someone who does 1,000 miles a year causes far less wear than someone doing 30,000 miles a year That's the crazy thing about vehicle excise duty, if you do 1,500 miles a year you might use 300 litres of petrol (about £150 tax), but you could be paying another £160 in VED, making the total tax 20p per mile Meanwhile someone doing 30,000 miles at the same mpg will be paying about 10p per mile
Robotbeat 4y ago
I think it’d be pretty bad to penalize electric cars based on weight squared unless fossil fuels are eliminated from transportation. Then I agree.
- cptskippy 4y ago
  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 tires is the solution because tire wear tracks to usage and vehicle weight as well? You can still have a fuel tax to penalize ICE in addition.
  - Robotbeat 4y ago
    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.

neilwilson 4y ago

Oh dear. Somebody didn't pass the geometric sequence question on their GSCE maths paper. The £35B revenue replaces itself, because money doesn't stop at its first use. What you don't spend on fuel duty, you spend on something else, which is subject to VAT, causes wages to be paid subject to PAYE, and profits to be earned subject to corporation tax. They then spend their increased income cause more tax to be raised and so on. In other words the taxation just moves elsewhere in the spending/income chain. And that's because total tax take is a function of government spending and the desire of the non government sector to save or spend. The more the non-government saves the lower the tax take is as a percentage of government spending - pretty much regardless of tax rates. Tax rates really just alter the distribution, and not so much the total. The purpose of sin taxes is to discourage people from doing one thing and start doing another. There is no 'revenue', firstly because you can't rely on it and secondly because a sovereign government has no need of revenue in the first place. That's not the purpose of taxes! Ideally sin taxes should be matched with virtue subsidies, so that people who are hard of accounting can see what is happening. For example a fuel duty should be hypothecated to an electric car subsidy and they then wane in lockstep with each other as the behaviour changes.

phpisthebest 4y ago
>>firstly because you can't rely on it and secondly because a sovereign government has no need of revenue in the first place. That's not the purpose of taxes! Soo much wrong here... Revenue should be the ONLY purpose of taxation, and falsehood that sovereign government steams from a combination of fiat currency and MMT, which when combined and executed on like you are implying lead to inflation can currency collapse (in the extreme) governments SHOULD NOT use taxation to pick winners and losers, nor to legislate morality, they should use taxation ONLY to collect revenue to projects and programs approved by the people, and for no other purpose
- ErikVandeWater 4y ago
  Taxing activities that have negative externalities is a positive use of taxation. It's better than forbidding such behavior for many reasons. The simplest reason is that it's better to make revenue dis-incentivizing something bad (pollution) as opposed to dis-incentivizing something good (income).

gorgoiler 4y ago

53p (+20% VAT) per litre for a car that uses 7.5 litres per 100km is about £48/1000km. The average UK mileage has dropped a lot over the years and is now just below 7000 miles a year. An odometer duty for that would be about £200, or £17 a month. If HMRC bring in £35bn a year in fuel duty a year for 45m drivers (the number of people with active driving licenses) that’s more like £700 a head. Why the threefold difference?

balderdash 4y ago
Trucks/lorries might make up a big chunk of that revenue

throwawayacc2 4y ago

A road or car tax doesn’t have to go away just because the car is electric no? Am I missing something? As for the fuel tax, why not make up for it with an increase in car tax once sufficient adoption is reached? Once 80% of cars are electric, the car tax increases by an amount required to make up for the average revenue from fuel. At that point, electric cars pay just a high car tax and fossil fuel cars pay both the high car tax and the fuel duty, further incentiveiseing the switch to electric. Am I missing something? What would be the issues with this approach?

fdsafdsfdsa 4y ago
VED (Vehicle Exercise Duty), as it is currently known, is now based on emissions. It would be a hard sell to undo that, and base it on something else (like vehicle weight/size/etc). The most acceptable way to tax EVs at this point is probably taxing at the charging point.
- infogulch 4y ago
  Add an additional VED component for road damage, which is vehicle miles times the fourth power of axle load.
  - fdsafdsfdsa 4y ago
    There isn't a way to do that without HGVs (heavy goods vehicles) paying practically all of the annual VED. It's pretty clear that "smart chargers" will become "smart tax revenue generators" in the near future.

sk8terboi 4y ago

rdm_blackhole 4y ago

It's the same issue in France now. Taxes on fuel/petrol brings in close to 30Bn euros per year. The taxes actually make 60% of the price when buying fuel for your car. Currently the price of 1L of fuel in France is around 2.1 euros. That is 1.2 euros per liter is going straight to the government's coffers. As always, I am expecting the French government to wake up sometime around 2030 and realize that the taxes are starting to bring in less and less money each year because more and more people are switching to EV. Then there will be a big show from the politicians that the situation is dire and we need to make up the fall in revenue by reducing the social safety net once again for the lower wage earners. As always the people with the lowest wages will be the one paying most taxes in the end. The reason for that being that if they can't afford to switch to an EV due to the prohibitive prices, then they will be the last ones on the line having to pay heavy taxes on petrol while the middle class who can afford it would have already switched a while ago. Ergo we are creating a regressive tax on poor people. As to where to find the revenue to make up the shortfall, that is going to be incredibly tough. For starters France has been running a deficit forever and the debt as ballooned during COVID. Could it continue to do so? That seems unlikely because France has pledge to reduce its deficit to fall in line with EU regulations so France needs to tighten its belt somehow. At the same time, it needs to increase the EV uptake to meet the climate action pledge so it can't start raising taxes on EV. Some subsidies may disappear but that is not going to be enough to plug the hole left by the fuel taxes. It also can't raise the VAT which is currently at 20% and is a very unpopular measure who will surely lead to an election loss for the minority party in power currently. It can't raise more taxes on the middle class as it's being squeezed like a lemon currently and would also lead to mass protests(see Yellow Vest protests of 2019 to get an idea of what could happen). Some seem to think that an increase in Ev uptake will lead to savings elsewhere, in the healthcare costs for example. But Those savings will not materialize until at least a few years after the transition to full EV has happened. Yes the air may be less polluted as the transition happens, but the damage is already done and those who suffered or are suffering due to air pollution currently will require indefinite ongoing care in the future which will be expensive.

balderdash 4y ago

I think people are starting from the wrong end of the problem. It appears we have two types of roads, access roads (think last mile roads in residential or rural areas) whose replacement cycle is driven by useful life vs usage. Then we have high throughput roads, that have enough volume to require usage driven replacement cycles. So if those access roads are y% of the miles and x% of the cost, then a vehicle “access” tax should be levied to cover that part of the system, and toll/usage based tax should be levied to maintain the usage based part of the system. Side note: to adjust for the pollution CO2 element you could add a tax to the wholesale price per MW of electricity based on generation type, in addition to a lower, purely pollution priced gas tax

988747 4y ago
The actual problem is that government is going to lose 35 billion per year in tax revenue, and they are trying to prevent that. What they actually spend that money on is secondary, they just need a good story to tell to their voters :)
- balderdash 4y ago
  Lol - yep, people always struggle with the concept of fungibility in this context. It’s like when we give $1b of food aid to a country and prescribe it can’t be spent on military hardware, and pretending we didn’t just free up $1b for military spending…
AnthonyMouse 4y ago
Under this model you should also account for the amount of damage done by the vehicle. Which scales with the fourth power of axle load, i.e. ~100% of the road damage is caused by large commercial vehicles, to the point that collecting it from passenger vehicles isn't even worth the collection infrastructure. It certainly isn't worth the privacy cost.
- rgbrenner 4y ago
  Even if a road never sees a single truck, it will still need to be replaced and/or repaired eventually. Things like the freeze-thaw cycle destroy roads too.

innocentoldguy 4y ago

The state I live in charges electric car owners an extra fee when registering their cars to make up for the loss of “gas tax” revenue.

DrBazza 4y ago

A long article to just say, in the UK, the government will need to figure out how far you've driven an EV and charge you for that distance to replace the tax raised through fuel bought to travel the equivalent distance. Odometer read when the car gets and MOT? Maybe, but I'd expect more cameras, because not only can you charge people for the distance they've driven, if they're average speed check ones, they can fine you at the same time for speeding (until that pesky speed limiter starts making an appearance on European, and by extension, UK roads).

bagels 4y ago

This debate is so tedious. Why not just slightly increase property tax or income tax? Why does it have to be usage based? Most other government services are done this way, we all benefit from having roads.

zip1234 4y ago
There are significant negative externalities to driving.
- zaroth 4y ago
  There are, however, much more significant positive intrinsic and extrinsic values to pervasive passenger and truck infrastructure than there are negative externalities. Namely, it’s a fundamental underpinning of modern civilization.
  - Tiktaalik 4y ago
    transportation is fundamental, that its necessarily via incredibly space inefficient personal automobile is not.
    - zaroth 4y ago
      It’s certainly fundamental to the world we live it as it exists today, and particularly in suburban / non-walkable environments. With climate change, crime, and COVID I would say that those “space inefficient” personal transports will become even more fundamental, not less.

kwhitefoot 4y ago

It's easy just add it to income tax. That way it will be properly progressive instead of the regressive tax that it is now.

lamontcg 4y ago

impose taxes on yachts, property worth over £2M and other stuff the upper class buys.

hedora 4y ago

These sorts of articles have always confused me. This would be a great problem to have! If gas usage gas halves then double the tax, and so on. Once gas taxes are 10-20x what they are today, we can talk about how to find replacement revenue. Also; the annual ongoing damage Britain is incurring from burning fossil fuels is already way above 35 billion pounds. Focusing on where the money for those repairs is coming from is probably more important.

chickenpotpie 4y ago
That would make the gas tax a tax on the poor, whom cannot afford electric cars
- xxpor 4y ago
  The truly poor can't afford a car regardless, especially not at 2GBP/L gas prices already.
tiernano 4y ago
that aint going to work... if the tax doubles, people will start to revolt. Taxis, Trucks, Van drivers and anyone who either 1) cant afford a new electric car, or 2) cant buy one one for one reason or another (distance they travel, stuff they carry, etc) are going to be very pissed off. And if more people do go an buy electric cars, your still in the same boat...

ZeroGravitas 4y ago

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 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.

dabbledash 4y ago

Would never for one second consent to the government tracking the location of every car, and would vote against any candidate who suggested such a thing.

8bitsrule 4y ago

Tax the oil companies for the difference.