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.
On the other hand most of us would like (for example) a functioning NHS. That needs good people, good facilities, and the tax revenues to pay for both. There is a real and imminent danger that our whole public health system could collapse due to a mass exodus of skilled professionals who decide they've had enough. Arguably some parts of it already have.
Behind the headlines about Ukraine and COVID and Brexit and so on are numerous mostly overlooked yet very significant problems within our society and economy. Many of those problems are only going to get worse and by extension more expensive to eventually fix if they aren't dealt with soon enough.
If we're going to prevent those things from happening in the next few years then a lot of us are going to have to pay for it (whoever is leading the government for the next two years or after the next general election). Hopefully the less well-off who are already struggling will be looked after and the burden will fall on the better-off demographics. Of course most people don't want to pay more tax but I suspect many of those who could afford to do so without suffering too much would prefer that to the alternative of literally watching a family member die because there was no ambulance available when they called 999 in a medical emergency!
Further, this type of taxation is a regressive tax.
What should they cut? Every department will tell you they're underfunded.
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.
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.
Maybe I'm naive, but shouldn't an odometer reading do the job just fine?
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.
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.
Doesn’t matter. Fiscal taxation (spending) reduces (increases) aggregate demand directly. No need for monetary transmission channels.
Even if it were, demand isn’t being reduced. They’re just forcing you to spend it on roads.
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.
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.
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.
The costs of a cycling path that support the same flow of people is negligible compared to that of a corresponding highway.
> 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.
Would you like to calculate how much those tomatoes would cost, if everybody were paying their fair share of road wear?
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-condition...
This isn’t true where I live. Taxes on gasoline purchases pay for the roads.
Which is itself a net subsidy for all sorts of other economic activity.
It's subsidies all the way down.
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.
Isn't car wear and tear minimal to HGV wear and tear?
That is the case, which came as a surprise to me.
For things like the road bed, where the force from the surface is going to be spread out more, I'd expect the car to do more damage because total weight would be all that mattered.
But for damage at or near the road surface I'd have expected bikes to do more.
My reasoning was simple: although cars weigh a lot more they are spreading that weight over a larger contact area.
My car for example has four tires each at a pressure of 32 PSI. My bike, before I replaced the tires with wider tires, had two tires each at 110 PSI. Any given small patch of road I drive or ride over would only get about 29% as much force on it from the car as it would from the bike at any given time a tire is on that patch of road.
It would get that force for more time from the car than from the bike if the car is going less than ~3.4 times the speed of the bike and for less time if the car is going faster than that, and more different small patches of road would get force from the car than would get force from the bike.
This is similar to why if I were to put a flat metal plate on my chest and set a bowling ball on top it would not hurt, but if I were to set hold a dagger against my chest and set a bowling ball on top it would likely hurt a lot.
But something is wrong with my reasoning, and it turns out that road damage goes as something like the fourth power of the vehicles axel weight. Whether the tires are narrow high pressure tires or wide low pressure tires, from what I've read, is not relevant.
I'm not sure if that is because I was just wrong about top layer damage, or if it is just that lower level damage is just much more important and expensive, so any difference in top layer damage due to tire size is lost in the noise.
Usually it’s
* retrofitting for ADA compliance
* fixing heaving from freeze-thaw
* fixing heaving from the root systems of trees in street planters
Vehicle Excise Duty since 1920 - 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).
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_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.
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.
edit: spelling
Also, bicycles are vehicles. So surely they should pay Vehicle Tax as well?
A more accurate name would be the "Using a Motorized Vehicle on the Public Road Tax". Let's abbreviate it by dropping all but the last two words. :)
Maybe in Norway, and only Norway. Every other nation should be quadrupling-down on EV incentives. Or 10 fold. Or 20.
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.
Why are we continuously subsidising the car industry?
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.)
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.
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.
In short, it is misinformation.
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.
Do we need to go this deep into our analysis? I would think ((pi*radius^2)-(pi*(radius-tread_depth)^2))*width/miles would tell us pretty much everything we need to know about tire emissions, and most EV owners in my experience will acknowledge spending much more on tires for the same # of miles or spending the same for a good bit less # of miles. I'm not sure what the dimensional differences are on your average EV tire purchase versus your average ICE tire purchase, but if we look at model 3 base tires vs civic touring tires (biggest stock civic tire sold):
M3: 235/45R18 10/32 (Primacy MXM4)
Civic: 235/40R18 9/32 (Eagle Sport A/S)
so at least as far as stock tires M3 should have more total tread than a similarly sized/similar TCO vehicle given the larger aspect ratio and deeper tread depth. Unfortunately I can't find any non-anecdotal data on how many miles they would each get.
Of course I agree with pretty much everything you said but I do think tires are an important conversation to have around EVs, particularly when prices come down and budget conscious buyers start putting cheap, loud, fast wearing tires on their EVs.
Citation needed.
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.
There is no such thing as road tax.
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.
It is not what you call it, but what you spend it on.
Roads are funded partly out of local taxes, and partly out of general taxes - there’s no hypothecation of ‘road tax’ paying for roads
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.
I won't defend all cyclists, some of them have bad etiquette for sure. I certainly don't have traffic piled up behind me. But I'd argue they've inconvenienced you far less than your car infrastructure has inconvenienced them. I promise if they had a separated fast bike lane to use, they'd be using that instead of getting blasted by cars and trucks and dealing with people angry they're late for their next stoplight.
If you want cyclists off your road, then you should be lobbying for better cycling infrastructure.
Based on your comment, I have to assume we live in different areas. I live in the city, and generally it is better and faster to bike because one can bike almost as fast as a car due to not needing to wait for traffic and there's no need to find parking at the destination. From my POV, the motorists I have to share the road with are driving on low throughput streets and generally don't belong on the streets I am traveling down.
Do you live out in the country with 2 lane roads? A small town?
It's a speed upper limit, not a minimum. Are you upset when an agricole machine is using the public roads?
This "annoyance" against people not travelling at the speed limit on public roads is based on a lack of time management and the expectation that the road is empty. This is a selfish point of view.
When I want to control my travelling time, I walk or cycle. When I want comfort, I use public transportation or my car.
How many stupid motorists kept screaming their engine when I was commuting just to pass me then come to a screetching halt behind other cars at the next traffic light while I just pass them back to the front of the line.
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
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.
Less pollution, lower health costs, living longer, less carbon, less imports, higher efficiency, cheaper energy, cheaper transport.
https://www.mdpi.com/2032-6653/8/4/996/pdf
e.g. the above suggests the owner saves about $6000 and society gets another $10000 dollars on top, over 10 years, 120,000 miles.
But, we'd do even better if we incentivise people to walk, cycle and use public transport because the health benefits of excercise.
So I'm happy with 'road tax' returning for EVs, but mostly because road tax for ICE should always have been much higher than it ever was. Hopefully, e-cargo bikes and similar are incentivise by whatever the new scheme is.
The downside is that it would penalize soft rubber as well as the usage of winter tires.
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
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.
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?
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?
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.
To meet our goals we need to be doing the opposite, which is making private automobile use of the roads more expensive while creating more and better alternative transportation opportunities (ie. public transit, cycling).
Additionally if we shifted to other taxes, then this is a transfer of costs from relatively wealthy car owners to the relatively poorer who don't even own cars.
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)
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.
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?
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
Just bought mine (Audi e-tron) and am happily surprised by all the subsidies and rebates, but it is clear that does not scale.
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).
Namely, it’s a fundamental underpinning of modern civilization.
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.
I find it so strange that roads aren't viewed as a public service, and instead should be taxed (regressively) to cover the cost of the road by those using it.
I'm fine paying fully for my own road use, as long as I can stop paying for all the government services I don't use. But as long as the government is taking half of my paycheck, providing me with roads is the bare minimum they could give in return.
It would also be beneficial to incentivize better vehicle choices at the point of sale. Ebikes should be subsidized to the point of being free or nearly so. Other evehicles should be taxed extremely high per pound of mass. A family of four should therefore naturally gravitate toward a compact hatchback over a massive SUV that weighs twice as much like they do today when there is no incentive for getting a smaller vehicle.
Everyone else just accepts that what the system lacks in accounting for private road use, is made up for in simplicity and cheapness of administration.
Hah. Washington state doesn't even test for emissions, let alone do a vehicle inspection.
Also, those aren’t exempted under the current gas tax model anyway, so why bother?
Similar stuff for entering and leaving the country.
Not sure how I would approach private roads.
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.
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?
Count the heavy vehicles: https://twitter.com/urbanthoughts11/status/11912952051876864...
Don't get me wrong, the tax system is setup as a massive subsidy to trucking on roads that should be eliminated so this stuff can move onto trains where it belongs for everything but the last mile, but a big part of the cost is also just the space and area consumed by it all.
Between 15 to 50% of the existing roads should be dedicated to non motorized use (depending on the geography, moutains can pose some challenges at times), the rest to a dense network of autonomous buses and last miles autonomous delivery trucks. Long range goods transport should be allowed only on railways, we could remove space used by multilane highways to reallocate them to rail.
The shipping industry doesn't want to pay that tax, which is why they're lobbying to pass the tax onto the rest of us.
Privatize profits, socialize costs.
Agreed that a road wear tax based on weight makes sense though. It might make sense to use a function of weight + miles driven per year to get an even more accurate measurement of road wear contribution.
Additionally, despite a lot of people saying they want to use taxes to "handle externalities" or some other sort of "pay per usage" type manner like that what they actually want is to tax people who are on the fence between bus pass and used cheap car solidly into the bus pass camp and taxing for road wear would not accomplish that.
Additionally, when it comes to all forms of public infrastructure there's a common good argument to be made for a tax that's effectively very flat. The whole point of government funded things is that we all kick in a little and then all can use the resulting things as much or little as we want and that this low cost per use has societal benefits.
Edit:
For these kinds of activism driven discussions it's generally accepted that road wear is correlated to weight ^4
cyclist -> 100 ^4
(very) compact car -> 1000 ^4
electric hummer -> 5000 ^4
medium duty commercial truck -> 10000^4
Pick what you think is a reasonable bill for any one of those and then compute what the resulting bill for the others would be. Even if you want to do variable rate monkey business you're gonna have a hell of a time overcoming the whole "^4" bit.
That is the entire point. Why are we subsidizing other peoples' bad decisions? If you want to go shop for fast fashion every other day or drive a 9,036-pound electric Hummer the rest of us should not pay the price for your jackassery.
Maybe it'd make sense for trucks to fund the majority of wear-induced maintenance costs, but for new construction and improvement projects (e.g. increasing the number of lanes on a highway) cars should pay a significant portion of that.
EVs tend to be heavier, so they'd pay more on average.
OTOH, fuel transport trucks are very heavy and fully taxing based on the square of fully loaded weight would increase transport costs significantly. This would end up getting passed on to ICE vehicle users.
This solution works, IMO.
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
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.
This is not in any way offset by the fact that whatever that money is spent on is subject to VAT, causes wages to be paid that are subject to PAYE, and so on, even though it sems like it would eventually cause all the money to end up in the government's pockets anyway. The VAT when that money is initially spent is included in the £35 billion figure, and any taxes after the money is spent are irrelevant since the money had already become actual, final consumer spending involving actual consumption of goods and services.
This is a much more useful way to think about taxation and the need for tax. By your logic, the actual tax levels don't matter - 100% of money will end up in the government's pockets eventually after all.
Why would it not create more to purchase? If you go into a hairdresser with money in your pocket do they work harder to get the queue down or shut the shop and put the prices up.
The limit is actually available unemployment/underemployment, even now we still have millions without work that want it, less the increase in the level of saving. More saving = more space.
Hence when Tories decry their proposed tax cuts as 'debt fuelled', they really ought to hope that they are since that will reduce inflationary pressures.
Please explain this. Are you suggesting governments can just stop taxing, and print the money to pay their debts with no ill consequences?
I'm not sure what kind of incentives that creates, and if those incentives are better or worse than the incentives existing taxes create.
So, maybe?
Does someone measure 'okay the economy has grown 5%, it needs 5% more money to be printed?" No, nobody does that.
If the government prints zero money, the money supply can still quadruple, because banks create money out of thin air.
Which is exactly what they did prior to 2008. The reason government had to 'print' miney in 2008 is that they were replacing all the 'unsupported' money that was creates by banks, and then suddenly imploded.
As soon as you suggest government should print money everyone starts screaming inflation, but when private banks do it, noone blinks an eye.
The rules that allow banks to create money have changed dramatically over the past 20 years, and nobody is even discussing it.
If you save it in a tax free savings account even better. The bank holding the offsetting reserves then does the buying via the DMO cash management process.
I kind of understand your argument, but net-income in my pocket that's not spent on petrol will be spent on some sort of goods or services that has VAT on it, which is 20%. So, yes, I might spend more on goods and services, which might mean more computer shops, clothes shops or restaurants and take aways, and they in turn might grow the economy a bit, but would that convince the government to _not_ reintroduce some kind of road charging?
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
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).
(You're also wrong about the inevitability of currency collapse.)
Though cars still put out a fair bit more pollution from tire wear than bicycles do.
See: https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/highways-england
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.
You need roads to have a civilization, otherwise you have no way to transport the goods you consume, or get to the hospital quickly, etc. What you're arguing is that you don't like the current implementation.
I don't like the current implementation of medicare / medicaid / social security. It definitely is suboptimal for people's (mental) health, including those in my family. It still comes out of my paycheck. It's also an order of magnitude more than whatever gas taxes and tolls I pay.
That's just the nature of living in a democracy. If everyone paid for exactly the services they used, taxes wouldn't exist.
I just find it curious that people on HN rally against the cost of roads, when they absolutely benefit from the roads being there. Military, SS, or Medicare are services that the average citizen doesn't use at all, and cost much much much more than roads.
It's pretty clear that "smart chargers" will become "smart tax revenue generators" in the near future.
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.
I dont want the government telling me what I can or can not eat, or setting tax policy on their recommendation. I also grew up with the food pyramid as the "government approved" diet that today most people agree is terrible, and if it did not directly cause it heavily aided in the obesity epidemic we have today (in the US).
Distrust in government is our (the US) founding principle, and I have a HEAVY distrust of all government experts. As one of our presidents famously said "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are "I'm from the Government and I'm here to help"
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.
It's not irrelevant to the quoted section, which is the only thing the previous poster was replying to.
The town I’m in outside the city is not a small town. There’s very little that’s more annoying than a group of spandex clad Tour de France wannabes taking up the entire road so they can cosplay.
Source please. Sounds like a confirmation bias on your part.
> There’s very little that’s more annoying than a group of spandex clad Tour de France wannabes taking up the entire road so they can cosplay.
You sound jealous. Get a hobby yourself, perhaps?
Either way, the point of the tax has never been to "punish pollution".
As is the person who I was reply to, their comment was that the government should not need to view taxation as revenue, I disagree
>You're also wrong about the inevitability of currency collapse
In the extreme of the parent comment, were a government ceases taxation (since they do not need the revenue) and just prints money to pay for everything the collapse of that currency is inevitable.
Also, cheap tires tend to have harder, longer lasting compounds.
That said tire compound could be more or less dense or have more or less of an effect on the environment per unit so that wouldn't be captured, and low torque EVs would most likely have less wear/mile so the categorization of just EV vs ICE might be too broad.
In a more downtown area it's obviously different.
>dealing with people angry they're late for their next stoplight.
Sounds like you have some nasty bias yourself.
The danger while cycling is not the bike or falling down, it's the motorized users.
That might change if there was more dedicated bike lanes.
Don't live your life thinking everything revolves around you.
Like most bike commuters I also drive, I know exactly what's waiting for anyone who's decided to be aggressive on their way past, and it's the next stop light. I'll probably see them there, and it'll be super awkward.
The reality is probably that it's not that well coupled to any cause, and really it's just a way to farm money from the majority of the country, who need to use motor transport to live their lives. The advertised political reason will change depending on the concerns of the populace at the time.
Nope.
1) Any tractor I've been behind on a public road will pull over to let traffic pass by when possible.
2) Tractors obey all traffic lights and laws and behave predictably.
3) I've never seen a tractor driver act aggressively towards a car.
2) Most cyclist do, some do not, same as drivers 3) Same as 2), and cyclist can be aggressive when your life is at stake. I think drivers mostly forget they are in charge of a dangerous machine.
This is an infantile way of framing it. 99.9999% of road users (all types) DGAF what you do as long as you meed expectations for your type of traffic.
Pretty much nobody gets angry at slower traffic (tractors, cyclists, commercial vehicles) so long as it is meeting their expectations for what it is. If you drive a normal car and try and act like something slower don't be surprised when it pisses people off. Likewise if you cycle or have to operate heavy machinery on road and try and act like a car outside of some narrow circumstances don't be surprised when it pisses people off.
taxing exernalties then using the money for unrelated projects i.e taxing cigarettes to pay for schools, is something I would oppose
With climate change, crime, and COVID I would say that those “space inefficient” personal transports will become even more fundamental, not less.
Paying the tax to the tax collector is far cheaper than the alternative amount you end up paying to the bailiff when they confiscate all your assets.
Taxation is, ultimately, the only 'reserve' asset there is. And as you can see it is very definitely backed by real assets. All your real assets.
A bank today can give out loans and mortgages without any assets.
https://positivemoney.org/2011/04/monetary-reform-myths-1-10...
Append "in any area with a population density over 5,000 per square mile" and I'd agree with you.
(Of course the idea of there being a "general pot" for a government that backs its own currency is a misnomer in any case)
If I'm held up by a cyclist, I think "Good on them, they're braver and fitter than me."
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.
the bigger issue is the breadwinner's family will go from middle class to living in poverty. The types that don't pay insurance are not gonna pay court settlement in a timely manner.
If the owner of the car let someone else drive it then it's their issue to resolve.
We just need political will which isn't there. It's not a technical problem to solve.
but it's not perfect
(and you are currently exempted from the gax tax model if you have a electric vehicle on private roads / tracks, I doubt too many are affected by this though)
Private roads are irrelevant - electric vehicles don't pay gas tax, that's the point of this whole conversation.
uh, yes?
which wouldn't be the case if we switched to a tax based on an odometer
that's the point of this whole conversation.
Really, cyclists are getting shafted because they have to pay for so many roads they can't use.
* The general fund.
* Grants.
* Costs associated with assessing and collecting taxes.
* Justice Courts.
* Education.
Not maintaining local roads.
There is also this: https://taxfoundation.org/states-road-funding-2019/
Then there are state roads, which are almost entirely funded from state and federal (gas) taxes, and federal roads which are almost exclusively funded from gas taxes.
On an average day the roads I personally drive on are probably at least 50% funded from property and sales taxes paid by my neighbors and me. Most of my miles driven are almost exclusively on streets managed by my city. For my neighbors commuting deeper into the city driving on a US highway, its probably closer to 5-10% coming from property and sales taxes.
I don't understand, do you pay an extra tax on the battery? Sales & property tax on a $60k car should always be the same, regardless of powertrain.
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-20/mapping-h...
1. No one wants to lend to your country again because you paid them back with currency far less valuable than expected
2. Nobody wants to use your currency as a means of exchange in international transactions because it can fluctuate suddenly
3. Massive redistribution of wealth from savers and lenders to borrowers (maybe a good thing on the whole, but devastating for people headed into retirement)
4. Anything (including govt. programs) that aren't indexed to inflation are suddenly far less valuable
...
> This is similar to why if I were to put a flat metal plate on my chest and set a bowling ball on top it would not hurt, but if I were to set hold a dagger against my chest and set a bowling ball on top it would likely hurt a lot.
This is because your chest is weak and soft in comparison to the incompressible metal plate or dagger blade, which is not analogous to the situation on the road. A better analogy would be poking yourself with the tip of an al dente noodle compared to the load transmitted by a large, spongy slice of bread. Neither is going to hurt you in any way.
Whether your tire is transmitting 110 psi or 32 psi doesn't matter much because the compressive strength of Portland cement concrete is ~4000 PSI and the compressive strength of bituminous pavement is ~500 PSI.
However, soil bearing loads are on the order of 15-50 psi under constant loading, and can act as a spring or can yield at much lower transitory loads. The dirt beneath the pavement (or rather, the dirt beneath the gravel beneath the pavement) gives easily, so instead of asking the concrete to survive the compression forces caused by the contact patch, you're asking it to form a beam/plate that spreads the loads over a broad area, and asking that beam to resist deflection rather than crushing. The real damage, and the reason that damage scales with the fourth power of axle loading, is caused when a large truck rolls over the road, the ground shakes, and the roadbed flexes down into the soil under the axle and back up after it passes.
Try to imagine riding your road bike over a piece of cardboard laid on the sand. That wrinkling and creasing is much closer to actual road wear patterns than a dagger cutting your chest.
To estimate the pressure exerted on the road, you want to compare vehicle system weight/tire contact area. Velocity also plays a role.
I'd much rather get run over by average person on a bicycle than get run over by a car.
The air pressure of your car/bike tires doesn't matter - all tires could be flat. Try comparing (vehicle weight + your weight) / (vehicle contact surface area) where vehicle is either your car or your bike.
Even better would be using this as an incentive to expand and improve the quality of the much more efficient rail network (or transport over waterways, where available) to improve the entire supply chain. That would require the government to act in the interest of its people, though, so I don't think we'll see the effects of such a programme too soon if it ever makes it.
Every tax-paying citizen is already paying this heavy price! Only instead of the damage inefficient transport causes to our infrastructure being reflected in our everyday expenses, it's hidden from plain sight in taxes.
The only industry I'd expect to see killed by paying for road damage would be package delivery vans. They're driving long distances with comparatively almost no weight at all for the convenience of not needing to go to a centralized store to pick up your stuff. With the way Amazon and friends have their drivers pee in bottles, I don't see why we should subsidize those vans.
[1]: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-oct-26-mn-26434...
[1] http://ffden-2.phys.uaf.edu/211_fall2013.web.dir/connor_matt...
And if you notice the contact patch of a flat tire is much larger.
The ground pressure of any vehicle is almost exactly equal to the psi. With the exception of force carried by the sidewalls.
If there is currently not enough taxes being collected to maintain the roads, then start taxing those who do the most damage. That entity can then amortize the tax over their 300,000 tomatoes.
We could make exemptions for electric vehicles powered by green energy like we do right now for trucks and other large equipment, but that'll mostly hit the poorer populations who can't afford an electric car. Tacking road maintenance costs onto other general goods in the form of taxes disproportionately hits people who try to avoid using a car for the environment and the liveability of their city, for example by taking public transport or a bike.
A future where everyone drives electric is going to be more expensive because of electric car technology. I'd say pay the difference with two different taxes: one for car weight/wheel load, another for pollution through (similarly hefty) gas taxes. Heavy EVs pay extra for the road damage, ICEs pay for their pollution to encourage cleaner cars, and heavy SUVs/pickup trucks pay both.
The cost is already there, it's just extracted through taxes rather than through increased prices of transported goods.
The advantage of shifting maintenance costs over to those creating those costs in the first place is that it allows the market to properly optimize for those costs. If transporting those tomatoes by rail is actually cheaper overall once you factor in road maintenance costs, but you aren't charging those costs to the trucking companies, then they're just going to keep shipping tomatoes by truck even though it's less efficient. The invisible hand of the market cannot optimize for costs it doesn't know about.
But raw data is hard to find
That's fascinating, is there an equation for road wear in relation to vehicle weight and other factors?
--- EDIT ---
Ten seconds after I posted this, I see somebody else also asked this question and there is this link.
https://www.insidescience.org/news/how-much-damage-do-heavy-...
The fourth power rule, I guess it was empirically measured.
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.
It is giving people an incentive to buy larger range electric cars which also need more resources for batteries. Lighter electric cars can also use smaller motors for the same acceleration.
That seems like a bad idea.
The reason sidewalks last so long is they're made of cement rather than asphalt. If you made roads out of cement they would last just as long if not longer.
And the reason they make sidewalls out of cement is they have to. If they made then out of asphalt they would decay very quickly.
Or, just calculate it?
Car contact patch is 4 x 160cm2. https://www.tirerack.com/tires/tiretech/techpage.jsp?techid=... Car avg. weight is 1800kg. https://www.bankrate.com/insurance/car/average-car-weight/
Pressure = 28kPa
Human is 100cm2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedobarography Average human weight is 75 kg.
Pressure = 8.5kPa.
So it's simply not true what you say.
Compare that to a road where the truck literally forms grooves into the asphalt. It ripples like the viscous material it is in those conditions under multiple tons of weight. An intersection by me looks like its plaid with the grooves from perpendicular trucking traffic. And cement roads do last a long time but they aren't indestructible. I live on one. Trucks damage them and crack them up over time and the city has to fill in potholes. The more construction going on the more damage. Any big apartment build just destroys the concrete apron and sidewalk on the lot with the equipment because its that heavy. Orders of magnitude heavier than any human on a bike can be.
That's not true The ground pressure of a bicycle is higher than the ground pressure of a car.
Some bike tire pressures exceed 100 psi. Only the largest trucks have ground pressures that high. A typical passenger vehicle has a pressure of around 36 psi.
The ground pressure of someone in heels is even higher than that. There's a reason sidewalks are made of cement while roads can be made of cheaper asphalt.
Private banks used to be able to print their own currency completely: in one country each bank would have different money that coupd be redeemed for gold, and wasn't backed by the government. That was very unstable.
We basically stopped taxing multinationals after the end of cold war, we do have something new.
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.
The point is you don't see a BMW go down the road and freak out about how heavy it is. But there is this meme in everyone's mind that EV's tire polution is much much worse than ICE because EVs are much much heavier. They aren't.
My point is that this just isn't true in the general sense. I didn't choose the Civic because its an "ultra light sporty car" I chose it because it's in a very similar class of car to the model 3 and moves a lot of units, but you could look at the Camry, Corolla, Accord, or Altima and see that the heaviest trims of all 5 (including hybrids) all weigh less than the lightest model 3 currently available.
Those 5 cars cover every sedan on the top 25 sales list other than the Model 3. I'm sure there are tons of luxury sedans that weigh more than the Model 3, but their total number of units is much smaller than any of the 6 cars we're talking about and their TCO is massively higher as well. So if you weigh the average comparable vehicle on the road the Model 3 will weigh more, and the Model 3 is one of the lightest 250+ mile EVs! the Polestar 2 weighs 4400 lbs!
FWIW I agree that the tire pollution thing is a silly aspect to focus on when comparing EVs and ICE, especially considering a lot of people who believe the lie that it makes EVs worse overall are probably driving a mall crawler or bro-dozer that weighs 5000+ lbs.
https://insideevs.com/news/527966/electric-cars-from-heavies...
Model Y is the first tesla vehicle with a structural pack.
I expect that other EV manufactures will eventually follow suit. Why wouldn't they? Less batteries and materials is a win win.
https://old.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/u1926z/confirm...
But beyond that, if the only thing you ever try to compare is 0-60 performance then EVs always have an upper hand because it is one of their primary strengths, and that's great! But cars are much, much more than their 0-60 (as evidenced by a fwd car with a 5.0s trouncing an awd car with 3.1s on the track) and for many people TCO, utility, creature comforts, reliability, etc. are more important comparisons.
not everything is a conspiracy
these hysterical responses say more about you then the people you're demonising
> Tacking road maintenance costs onto other general goods in the form of taxes disproportionately hits people who try to avoid using a car for the environment and the liveability of their city, for example by taking public transport or a bike.
Run the numbers for high heels, and keep in mind they might put their entire weight on the heel.
let alone accusing them of dog-whistling
Say that all logistics companies switch to the bigger trucks and now only pay half of their costs, so e.g. 3 billion instead of 6 billion per year. Now assume that road maintenance used to cost 1 billion annually. With the new system it will cost 5.33 billion. So you have savings by the logistics companies of 3 billion per year contrasted by additional maintenance expenses of 4.33 billion per year. So your economy now spends 1.33 billion more per annum on transport, if it's through a higher base rate on your car's license or through more income taxes being redirected for road maintenance instead of building schools or whatever.
These numbers are totally made up for me, and were only meant to demonstrate that not internalizing externalities can lead to inefficiencies.
It's true that if you increase taxes for heavy trucks, customers will notice it via grocery store price increases. That's maybe the problem why it's not being done, because voters notice it way less that a road repair is more expensive and thus a school can't be renovated or something.
But the market can't optimize for a cost it doesn't know about. If you're just funding road construction and maintenance with income taxes and people aren't paying those costs in proportion to usage, then there's zero reason for the market to do anything to try to reduce those costs.
It sure is convenient that it's "not productive" to debate one of the biggest and most obvious downsides to what you're advocating for.
Don't get me wrong, I loathe the people who have a 4Runner for a household with one kid but their stupidity might just be collateral damage of an otherwise decent overall system.
Such a tax should be as close to an approximation of the actual cost of road maintenance, full stop. If it makes certain vehicles uneconomical that's the intended effect.
Of course you'd want to grandfather in such a drastic policy change, or phase it in at some % per year.
1. Taxing this based on axle weight is also stupid. In reality road wear is a function of tire width/shape/size etc., speed and numerous other factors.
How so? Is the gas tax lower than the purchase taxes?
And keep in mind many states already charge EV owners a high registration fee that more than makes up for the lack of state gas taxes. So sales tax plus personal property tax plus EV registration fee… you’re already paying nearly an order of magnitude more than the typical consumer pays state gas tax.
It’s a pretty stupid idea to charge far more taxes for far lower emissions vehicles if you think climate change is real. Regardless of your rationale about use taxes or whatever. It’s just stupid.
The main issue is comfort. Riding rough roads on hard tires gets old after a while. Also, real MTB'ing, where the trails are designed to be challenging, is its own beast.
I also prefer avoiding car traffic if possible.
Funnily enough I do MTB, and I have a full suspension and a fully rigid frame both offering their own challenges.
In many places a road bike isn't actually street legal (no bell, no fenders, no lights, of course you could add those).
At least in the US, drivers don’t drive well around cyclists, and sometimes that’s intentional to boot. Better to not share the road with people who are actively trying to hurt you with a metal object weighing several thousand pounds.
It might cost a semi truck $50k a year, but this also points in the direction of not tracking specific usage even for trucks: Just check the odometer during the annual inspection and then distribute the highway funds to states proportionate to estimated use.
Toll collection is stupid inefficient and privacy invasive.
And if people wanted, the President of the National Cycling Federation could present the Secretary of Transportation with a $5 bill in an annual ceremony.
So let say the truck has a $5000 tax to pay for yearly wear and tear on roads, but they also get a $5000 tax cut to reduce costs in the transportation sector. That will leave cars to still pay their road tax, even if in comparison they would be a tiny portion of the total road tax.
Civic Type-R is a 40k car, just like the model 3 and it probably has high markups above the MSRP on average.
So my bad its $9k-$25k MSRP, not that the minutiae of pricing is that important for this comparison. It was just to note that Honda isn't winning on weight by spending a fortune on materials or manufacturing like if I had compared the Model 3 to some supercar.
I'm not saying you're wrong; I'm saying I can't find data backing up your statement. It would be good if you were right because that would mean the world as it is currently is slightly better than if I was right.
Regardless, disincentivizing total shipped mass is not entirely a bad thing. It disincentivises planned obsolescence and poor quality products in favor of reliable, repairable goods.
Clearly it would make some truck operations uneconomical, but that's a feature. The assumption is that the cost is being paid today, but it's effectively a subsidy that society is paying for.
Even if someone's going to argue that trucking is so critical to society that the trucks can't pay their fair share of road maintenance this way of doing it still seems dumb.
If you're paying ~$30k/yr for road maintenance per truck I'm willing to bet that you could e.g. spend ~$10k/yr to retrofit the truck to be gentler on the road (e.g. just adding an extra axle), and then use the remaining money to more directly subsidize trucking.