The current charging system - tax on fuel - doesn't do that, so why should the replacement?
There is a third option: accept that 6% increase in income tax. It would be revenue and payment neutral and would need no upfront investment
And has immeasurable mental health benefits from being outside and getting fresh air
Total road expenditure in England is about 8.5 billion , and 40 million cars in the UK in the UK, if that scales with England's share of the population (80%), that gives you 32 million in England giving you about £265 of spending per car. The article you remember was probably talking about America.
If income MUST come from the same source, what happens if public transport takes up a higher share as result of EV's generally being more expensive , would you keep the same insistence of not raising any taxes elsewhere, or do any money printing, and start increasing the tax on people's bus and train tickets?
That argument doesn't stand up. Reducing road traffic reduces accidents (not only to drivers but also to passengers and vulnerable road users) so reduces NHS costs which everyone pays via general taxation.
British Transport Police is funded by a levy on the rail industry.
You may think that, but where is the evidence?
The local authorities spent about £2bn on roads maintenance this is dwarfed by taxes raised from motorists.
| 4.5 Transport | 32,701 | 34,420 | 49,387 | 44,685 | 43,578 |
| of which: national roads | 4,820 | 5,574 | 6,153 | 5,438 | 5,660 |
| of which: local roads | 5,304 | 5,619 | 6,797 | 5,867 | 5,468 |
| of which: local public transport | 2,484 | 2,403 | 7,199 | 4,983 | 4,344 |
| of which: railway | 18,226 | 18,285 | 27,052 | 25,862 | 25,942 |
| of which: other transport | 1,867 | 2,539 | 2,185 | 2,536 | 2,163 |
Thanks for those figures. However, these are direct expenditure and my point was about the externalities of health, policing, environmental damage etc. I have no idea how much these are but I don't think we can just ignore them.
That would be an absolute disaster. Motoring would get cheaper so it would increase, subsidised by everyone whether they drove or not. Either the increase in motoring would be choked off by congestion, affecting bus services, emergency vehicles and those that have to drive, or the government would end up spending a lot more building more roads in an attempt (almost certainly unsuccesssful) to cater for it.
Tax regimes are more than just gathering revenue for running the country, - they can and are used to modify behaviour of the population. With increasing demand on the road system, just building more is not a solution, so tax will, I believe become a 'nudge' tool to encourage more active travel and use of public transport. In my opinion, revenue from private car use should appropriately be applied to improve public transport and support for active travel.
If you succeed and put cars out of use entirely, you are stuck with the same problem again.
Who said anything about "putting cars entirely out of use"?
Dart charge isn't that hard for people to understand, if you want to be extra easy you send a letter to the registered address after the journey and give people a variety of ways to pay. Cities can have their own systems without everything having to be run through a government IT system
Well whatever reduction , you still end up with the same problem if successful at your aims, which is why I don't really the idea of punitive/nudge taxation even if I agree with the aim behind it.
Punitive taxation has been around for centuries, so expect it to stay for a few more, (if we've got that much time left before society breaks down. Best to recognise that now.
Lots of dumb ideas have been around for centuries
Does the net £25bn a year income to the exchequer of VED and Fuel Duty not account for you externalities. On specific areas the NHS recovers over £170m pa from personal injury accident insurance claims, police issued FPNs raised over £250m pa and the existing London ULEZ raised over £200m last year.
I don't know. But nor apparently does anybody else.
There are a variety of estimates, although it would be fair to say they aren't necessarily from unbiased sources. £48bn is the most recent figure I can find. Academic sources seem to agree that the figure is higher than the tax take, but how much higher is a matter of methodology. Putting a financial value on noise pollution is not an exact science
Well if we take £48bn as the full that means roads are getting the same level as subsidy as rail then. The other element that seems to be being ignored in this talk of externalities is the amount of economic activity that is enabled by road transport. Surely that far out ways any cost.
I'd rather do it via differentiating between rural and urban dwellers in road tax , and letting city councils charge whatever road tolls they like, rather than either putting a camera on every corner (very expensive before getting into privacy concen) or getting into battle with the GDPR with a black box in every car.
What sources? Genuine question I'm interested in reading through them.
This would make out of town retail parks even more attractive. Plus the reason why I favour councils running any potential road pricing schemes is they know their own geography better than Westminster and can manage stuff better than some blunt demand algorithm or some civil servant looking round on Google maps
I do like your parking charges idea. It would need the least new infrastructure, wouldn't exempt old cars , wouldn't double tax people who still pay fuel duty and gives the city itself the final say. I still don't want it to be used as a 1 for 1 replacement for fuel duty tax, you'd be creating a peverse incentive for the government where increasing public transport use , even on profitable routes, would be decreasing it's revenue
This question is hard to answer, which is why I think devolving the question to district or borough councils is the best idea, with the way political leanings are between cities, towns and the countryside, you'd get the same result as if Westminster road priced based on population density anyway
As a simple (opinionated) statement true, but no relevance to this thread.
Neither did you pointing to a policy being round for a long time implying it means I shouldn't criticize the idea.
You criticising it or not makes not one iota difference, tax is there for more than just funding other public expenses, - it has been and currently is being used successfully to modify behaviour of groups of citizens. London is a prime example of that as @Bletchleyite says in posts #136 & #139, rural areas generally don't need specific taxes, but entry volumes into central London has been reduced by congestion charges as well as reduced parking and local traffic congestion. I can't criticise that success.
In my experience devolving something as complicated as you suggest to district\borough councils is a non starter. They are at best left to entering Britain in Bloom contests or installing Geoff Capes novelty shoe buffs on Marine Way. There is definitely a place for more devolved governance in England but district and borough councils aren't it.
What success in central London?
First of all, tax isn't the only way to fund expenses. I hate to sound like a MMTer , but their is numerous ways to sort out the financial issues. You can print more money, borrow , kick up taxes elsewhere or cut spending else where, all of these have different trade offs , but it's not non-negotiable every tax is replaced 1 for 1.
That ignores the behaviour modification issue mentioned in the post you quoted. Less tax on driving means more driving, unless something else is done to discourage it, and it still has many adverse consequences even if the vehicles in question are now electric (another one nobody has mentioned is the need to invest in more electric generation and transmission). There's a risk of more traffic anyway even if the tax take EVs is identical to that on IC vehicles, because EVs, once purchased, are cheaper to run.
