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.
>>>> 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.
Some motorists seem to forget that cyclists don't need a 30m wide, 40cm thick, heavily reinforced highway with stabilized foundation that has to be revised every year to account for the damage caused by heavy vehicles.
The costs of a cycling path that support the same flow of people is negligible compared to that of a corresponding highway.
> My hunch is that if one were to look closely at the funding of roads, one would find that they represent a net subsidy for heavy trucking.
Road wear grows at the 4th power of vehicular weight, assuming similar tire pressures. An F-150 that weighs one and a half times what your Mazda 3 weighs, does 5 times the road wear.
Would you like to calculate how much those tomatoes would cost, if everybody were paying their fair share of road wear?
> 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.
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.
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.
There is no road tax, only vehicle excise duty which bicyclists dont pay. It goes straight into the treasury so it's not even really "used" per se it's just a way of exerting downward pressure on inflation (which is how it should be, IMHO).
> 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.
Isn't car wear and tear minimal to HGV wear and tear?
> bicycle and pedestrians could be exempted from a road tax based on fairly simple assumption: the wear and tear is minimal compared to a car. It wouldn't even surprise me if the wear and tear is so small that it can't even be measured.
That is the case, which came as a surprise to me.
For things like the road bed, where the force from the surface is going to be spread out more, I'd expect the car to do more damage 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.
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).
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.
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.
You also don't need to pay it to own a vehicle. You are allowed to own a vehicle without paying this tax as long as you promise not to drive it on the road (SORN). So by that logic it's not a vehicle tax either.
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. :)
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.
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.)
> 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.
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.
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).
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
That's a nasty bias you have. Cyclists are clearly also "people trying to get somewhere". I'd argue they're trying harder than you are.
I won't defend all cyclists, some of them have bad etiquette for sure. I certainly don't have traffic piled up behind me. But I'd argue they've inconvenienced you far less than your car infrastructure has inconvenienced them. I promise if they had a separated fast bike lane to use, 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.
As a cyclist, I am also trying to get somewhere, and I don't enjoy being on the road with motorists either.
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?
> many cyclists [...] aren't going the speed limit.
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.
But then you look at the average speed of cars and you realize that in most urban area it is roughly the same as the cyclists.
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.
leaving aside the fact that the speed limit is an upper bound on speed not mandatory… on my bike i’m more regularly held up by cars (often a single occupant) than i am by cyclists when driving my car. but overwhelmingly its cars holding up other cars.
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
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.
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.
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 :)
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…
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.
Too many unknowns with the mileage solution. The most obvious for me is travelling abroad - travelling by car between EU countries is not uncommon. Another issue is that the mileage of the car is not very hard to modify. In Eastern Europe, buying a second-hand 10 year old car, imported from Germany, is almost funny because most seem to be around 90-100 000 miles (140-160 000 km), while looking for the same make and model in a German auto website will show most cars have double the mileage.
A solution has been long in place in the US for commercial vehicles. It's called IFTA. It's possible because commercial vehicles have to report their mileages to authorities frequently anyway.
Do you think that people should only withdraw exactly what they deposited from Social Security? Do you think that a patient should pay 100% of their healthcare costs under socialized medicine?
I find it so strange that roads aren't viewed as a public service, and instead should be taxed (regressively) to cover the cost of the road by those using it.
I'm fine paying fully for my own road use, as long as I can stop 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.
The difference between roads and other things you mentioned is that current road infrastructure, especially in cities have huge costs for health, lifestyle, mental health. I don't want cars in cities and if I have to have them I want car owners to pay the full cost of making city life way worse hoping alternatives emerge.
That's mostly because the concept of tracking has been pushed over and over again politically, it just never made it. It has been on the agenda in NL since the mid 1980's.
Another easy way is to tax wear items accordingly and have inspections maintaining their condition for safety. E.g. EVs are heavier and wear down tires more than lighter cars. The state could implement a tax on tires and mandatory inspections for tread depth like they do with smog checks for emissions in gas cars. They could use the same testing infrastructure and just stock every location with a penny to measure tread. Heavy users of the roads will see a lot of wear on their tires and will be paying more into this tax accordingly in order to have a legally safe vehicle to drive, just like how owners of ancient cars that are more likely to be polluting need to take special care that the emissions controls are in good maintenance so that they pass smog.
It would also be beneficial to incentivize better vehicle choices at the point of sale. Ebikes should be subsidized to the point of being free or nearly so. Other evehicles should be taxed extremely high per pound of mass. A family of four should therefore naturally gravitate toward a compact hatchback over a massive SUV that weighs twice as much like they do today when there is no incentive for getting a smaller vehicle.
Tire tread is kind of a dangerous measure; you don’t necessarily want everyone switching to a super hard tire. Basically you can trade tread wear for stopping distance.
Every single car should be tracked at all times. They are a deadly weapon, kill a million people every year around the world, and seriously injure many more.
A good point. This sounds like the kind of thing that could be incorporated into a mileage reading at the annual vehicle inspection (which I assume the USA has??). Vehicles which are for entirely private-road use don’t get inspected, so that’s ok. Or they are specially classified somehow.
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.
It's not really an edge case. Everyone drives on paved private property (parking lots and the like). A flat 2% mileage reduction per year is probably enough to cover this for the vast majority of people. So if someone drives 10,000 miles a year, you'd charge them for 9800 miles with the assumption that they drove about 200 miles on private property that year.
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.
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?
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.
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...
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.
Conveniently ignoring the fact that roads have terrible capacity as a transport system and therefore many many many miles of terribly expensive road only exist to accommodate the space taken up by a comparatively small number of vehicles, with semi-trucks and other heavy vehicles often a minority.
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.
Imho individual cars should be banned except maybe for people with disabilities. They simply make people hateful, angry at everyone and generally unhappy. And an awful lot of space is wasted for them to stay parked most of the time.
Between 15 to 50% of the existing roads should be dedicated to non motorized use (depending on the geography, moutains can pose some challenges at times), the rest to a dense network of 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.
Came here to say the same thing. Road wear comes from heavy transport fleets, not commuter vehicles, so all of the infrastructure to monitor semis and tax shipping fuels is already in place.
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.
I would guess that huge SUVs and enormous trucks represent a not-insignificant proportion of road wear, since those vehicles are more common than semis.
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.
That would just result in a trivial tax for personal vehicles and high taxes on heavy trucks (which would just get passed on resulting in more or less a consumption tax, which isn't necessarily bad but that's outside scope for here)
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 would just result in a trivial tax for personal vehicles and high taxes on heavy trucks (which would just get passed on resulting in more or less a consumption tax)
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.
Road wear isn't the only consideration though. Cars take up space on the road while driving, and as anyone who's ever been in a traffic jam knows, there is a limited amount of road space available.
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.
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.
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.
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)
There's a pollution aspect to be considered as well. Soft rubber tires are more polluting. Would using summer/winter tires change things? Yes you'd pay the tax on 2 pairs of tires but your wear/replacement interval would be prolonged on both sets wouldn't it?
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
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.
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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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.