To give an idea of what this means:
For a 50 tonne semi-trailer with five axles, (⁵⁰⁄₅)⁴ = 10,000 units of damage.
2 tonne vehicle with two axles, 1 unit of damage.
That one truck, only 25 times as heavy as a pretty heavy car, is doing 10,000 times as much damage to the road.
Thus indeed if you have basically any heavy freight at all on a road, the rest is negligible.
It could be that four tires on a truck axle are much more effective at spreading the weight than two car tires. Or it could be that it's not much better, as the forces are still placed on a relatively small area of asphalt.
How this makes cars and trucks compare is, as far as I could understand from the literature when I dug in to it, an untested open question.
There could be a 10,000 factor difference. Or if two tires at each end are spreading the weight over 2x the surface area and you assume that matters, then you have to divide that 10,000 by 2^4 and it's now only 625x as damaging.
I suspect the reason nobody cares enough to test this is that it would still be a gap large enough to make cars insignificant.
> I suspect the reason nobody cares enough to test this is that it would still be a gap large enough to make cars insignificant.
That seems likely, yes.
My main point though is just that the study happened to use truck axles as a measurement and that can't blindly be substituted for car axles. The back of the napkin math is just there to show the difference it can potentially make.
Passenger off-road vehicles with knobby tires might be harder on roads too in a different way than weight.
It would make a significant difference to the calculations, eg 50% wider tires would mean dividing truck severity by 5.
So, getting people out of their cars onto bicycles cuts road maintenance cost.
Because of that, building bike lanes/paths can be cheaper than not building them.
(And 50 tonne trucks are very rare on most city roads, I hope)
As long as the roads are built to sustain those trucks the cars are negligible. So until cars are the big wear item, moving people to bikes is pointless from a road wear perspective.
As a Michigander, the dictionary does not contain words to express how strongly I disagree with that implication.
As a pedantic side note, this is why your batteries die, the copper leads begins to fatigue and fracture due to stresses from thermal cycling.
That isn’t an original idea. See for example https://www.vabike.org/vehicle-weight-and-road-damage/ (2009)
Also, if in Google “50 ton 5-axle truck” I get trucks that I rarely see on roads in Europe. Reading https://www.jpisla.es/resources/Download+JPIsla+20130106+Pes..., that’s because t most countries don’t allow them on roads.
Add an empty trailer and you get 35 tons (5 axles, 2400 units of damage). US max allowed is 80 tons, for a whopping 65,536 units of damage.
I don't know how full they are, but I see 5-axle tractor-trailers on highways all the time in the US, and also locally doing last-mile deliveries to larger businesses like supermarkets and home improvement stores.
I guess the differences in allowed weights might account for why US roads are often in worse shape than many in Europe, though I assume vastly different maintenance schedules play a large part as well.
[0] https://www.tcsfuel.com/blog/truck-weight-classification/
Max US ordinary large truck loading is 80k lbs, or 40 tons.
(Source, I trained as a civil engineer. Units in us practice were all over the place, but kip was generally the one that got used the most.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_goods_vehicle
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
The principle that shifting traffic from cars to bikes saves money for the government is a sound one. There'll always be a need for cars for some things -- probably not gonna have ambulance bikes, and of course deliveries for anything big needs a car/truck -- but you can certainly reduce the need. Especially with ebikes making biking more convenient and accessible.
The point isn't to individually shame unwilling people out of their cars. The point is to make biking a real, viable transportation mode for short/medium distance trips for most people in urban or suburban areas. It's entirely possible to do this with the right infrastructure.
Once you do that, people will choose biking of their own accord, because it makes sense.
But not every journey needs to be done by car.
There's many more passenger cars than freight trucks on the roads.
It doesn't change the math all that much, but the 1-to-1 comparisons in the thread didn't account for this factor.
Racetracks don't carry freight, but the surface does goes bad in a couple decades.
There's safety, exhaust emissions, tyre and brake particles, noise, etc. I'm sure some of them don't have a linear relationship either.
One of the biggest upsides to taxing vehicle weight could be to counter purchasing decisions that have shifted to larger vehicles that no longer comfortably fit in parking spaces but ride better over ridiculous speed bumps and give drivers literally the opportunity to look down on others.
Taxing vehicle weight also doesn't have the privacy implications that taxing miles driven beyond fuel consumption does. It's always struck me as one of the more sensible aspects to tax.
Add lightness, as I believe Colin Chapman put it.
1) The primary concern here is per capita road damage. If that's agreed, why is the conversation not about improving the resiliency of roads?
2) Why would the adoption of new technology automatically subject you to draconian taxes that have nothing to do with that new technology? I understand infrastructure needs to be paid for, but this is simply a cash-grab by politicians. If people started jogging to destinations rather than use cars, would it be acceptable for the government to charge a "jogging transportation tax"?
This is generally a bad thing, but very concretely it led to road traffic growing much faster than rail traffic (or canal ship traffic) even in countries with a very dense rail network.
Comparing this with free public education, by not charging user fees to attend school, we are subsidizing (a) having children, and (b) educating them at the expense of the childless and I guess people who don’t want to educate their kids. We subsidize those because we believe they are truly public goods that are better for everyone in the long run. Encouraging people to drive more and ship more things by truck is not necessarily better for everyone.
Hence greatly increasing chances of finding better or any employment and at least partially reducing pressure employers can come up with.
...
You load sixteen tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store
...To each their own.
That said, you should listen to the podcast “Nice White Parents.” It points out that this model of underfunding the schools and making up for it with donations is essentially letting wealthy families buy their way out of the problem while leaving disadvantaged students behind.
I can't help but see this as a regressive use tax in many ways, since it'll likely apply to lower value items at a higher proportion which is what poorer people would be buying. The end user pays in either case, but doing it through taxation policy allows for a measured approach.
Here in Sydney we just opened a tolled tunnel, and to ease congestion up above on the older commuter road all trucks must use this tunnel. I don't know all the factors but it sounds like the best option for the people, they have a choice and trucks pay their way.
If everyone rode bikes or the bus 90% of the time, there would be mostly empty roads in the 10% of time that they do use a car.
If you had to pay a significant price per km in congested areas, you'd probably drive less, but it would be a nicer experience when you do drive.
There is no benefit to discouraging use of highways at night, or uncongested suburban/rural roads. The thing you really want to prevent is congestion.
And even that is not inherently best solved through punitive fees. If you can reduce congestion by e.g. building more housing near where people work so they don't have to commute as far, that's preferable to levying fees the drivers can't avoid because a viable alternative to a long commute isn't actually available.
Sometimes turning a four lane road into a six lane road really does resolve the congestion, even accounting for the increase in use that comes from the reduction in congestion. And then you don't gain anything by discouraging use there.
The number of cases where you actually want to discourage use is very small, to the point that they may not even really exist, given that most uses are productive (and already have to overcome the inherent cost in fuel and time). The best case for it would be something like Manhattan during rush hour, but even there you might be better off to use the carrot instead of the stick and e.g. stop charging fees for use of the subway.
Furthermore, continuing to build more travel lanes to alleviate congestion has been shown to simply lead to more traffic. It’s a circular problem.
We are finally seeing this turn around in a very painful way in Silicon Valley. There’s no longer political will, nor is there tax revenue, to keep expanding the highways. As a result, commute times have gone up dramatically. As a further result, over the past decade, I’ve watched previously undesirable near suburbs like Sunnyvale and Santa Clara be bid up dramatically in housing price as people have realized that spending 3 hours per day in their car isn’t worth having a giant house with a giant yard in the far south suburbs like Morgan Hill and Gilroy.
This is like arguing against rope because it was the primary enabler of lynchings.
> Furthermore, continuing to build more travel lanes to alleviate congestion has been shown to simply lead to more traffic. It’s a circular problem.
It isn't. What those studies are showing is that congestion suppresses demand, so if you relieve some of the congestion, some of the demand comes back. So to relieve congestion you'd need enough lanes to carry not the existing level of traffic, but the amount there would be if there wasn't any congestion suppressing it.
This is clearly demonstrated in China where they build multi-lane highways to nowhere as a jobs program and then traffic does not magically appear to fill them.
The problem is that in some places, satisfying all of the demand by only increasing the number of travel lanes would require like twenty travel lanes, which isn't ideal. But that doesn't mean you can't reduce congestion there by adding travel lanes, only that you need other solutions there too. Add a travel lane or two but not ten, build more housing closer to businesses so people don't have to commute as far, stop charging user fees for mass transit etc. By doing these things together you can alleviate congestion without needing twenty lane highways.
> We are finally seeing this turn around in a very painful way in Silicon Valley.
The problem there is totally unambiguously not "insufficient highways" and is in fact "insufficient housing" which induces those long commutes for whoever can't afford the existing housing close to the city where the jobs are (and also outrageous housing costs for the housing that is, because nobody wants that commute). Build more housing.
The world doesn't heat up slower if we manage to use roads 100% during nighttime too.
Same for wear and tear.
We're talking about electric vehicles which don't have that. That issue can obviously be solved for gasoline and diesel vehicles via fuel taxes (which encourage people to buy electric vehicles).
> Same for wear and tear.
As discussed, nearly all of the wear and tear is a result of large heavy vehicles and the amount caused by passenger vehicles is negligible.
Possible formula to account for all the variables:
annual tax = F * (A + [BC{D^E} ] )
A = constant for non-loading based degradation (frost heave, slope maintenance). Base tax
B = constant to scale the following terms
C = distance driven in km
D = axial weight
E = exponent to account for non-linear relationship of axial weight to road degradation
F = adjustment for usage (could adjust for anything - user type, income class, vehicle class, etc etc)
A lot it is caused (around here anyway) by water permeating and expanding as it freezes.
In South Australia we get temperature below zero maybe once every 10 years.
Victoria has some snowfields, but they are a relativity small area.
Bitumen damage from melting is a real issue though. See the pics on https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-07-05/melting-road-in-far-n...
It is also much more relevant in places with sub-zero nights, i.e. a thaw/frost cycle. In relatively warm places like Australia this effect does not occur. Roads are much cheaper per km than in places with snow/ice, even with heavy vehicles.
I’ve seen weight limit signs on certain roads, I wonder if instead they should be PSI limits?
So that would mean the first still has to pay 5x the tax of the latter.
There are three main reasons for a tax to exist:
1. To bring revenue
2. To create incentive
3. Social justice (or illusion of it)
Revenue from a specific tax is almost never used for a specific purpose. All revenue goes into a large bin from which the government takes to finance everything.
Revenue from fuel/road tax is not used to finance building roads. Infrastructure is financed from budget or by private companies who then can impose tolls on road users.
Fuel tax (besides obvious goal of creating revenue) is there to create incentive to drive less and to drive more efficiently (using less fuel). This is not to preserve roads but rather to preserve capacity and environment.
I can only assume that tax on electric vehicles is as a response to increasing use of EVs. Initially, EVs were exempted from taxes to create incentive to use them more. Now that it is pretty clear EVs took off and will be widespread no matter what, some countries start to remove those exemptions to ensure continuing revenue stream.
Unless an earmark pays 100% of the costs of something, the earmark is totally an illusion. Even if it does pay 100% of the costs, it is often mostly an illusion.
In practice, most earmarks fall into the former category, and thus are entirely about manipulating the public. Not that I'm necessarily objecting to manipulating the public.
===
worked example:
If fuel taxes bring in $100, which is spent on road maintenance, and then topped up by $40 of money from general revenue, that implies that the government thinks that $140 is the point at which marginal benefit drops below marginal cost. In other words, if there was no fuel tax, they'd probably still try to spend $140, or thereabouts. The earmark is entirely illusory.
If fuel taxes bring in $100, which is spent on road maintenance, and is not topped up, then that implies that the government thinks that the point at which marginal benefit drops below marginal cost is some number below $100. If there was no fuel tax, their spending on road maintenance would go down. Go down to what? Let us suppose that it would go down to $60. Then the fuel tax earmark is 40% reality, 60% illusion.
The reality is, roads would be maintained the same way with or without earmarked tax revenue.
Think about it.
Scenario a) X dollars from fuel tax are revenue for federal budget. Federal budget decides whatever it wants to do with the money, but roads require Y dollars for maintenance.
Scenario b) X dollars are earmarked for road maintenance. Federal budget can't do anything else with the money but spent them on road maintenance. Roads require Y dollars for maintenance. X is covered from earmarked revenue, and the difference comes from federal budget.
Did ANYTHING change between scenarios? In both cases taxpayers paid X dollars of fuel tax and Y dollars for road maintenance.
Earmarking tax revenue for a cause that requires greater amount of money and would be covered anyway is just PR mechanism to placate people / opposing party. Opposing party might know it is just illusion but still needs to placate their own constituents.
The goal of this is to create another tax revenue stream without angering your voters. And so we complicate what is relatively simple so that general population thinks the tax is for their benefit. It still is but for a different reasons.
https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/what-highway-t...
I would say that 60% of taxes might be raised for health and education this way.
I suspect that EVs weren't exempted by design, but just slipped through the gap. Australian road tax is applied to petrol/gasoline/diesel. The number of EVs hasn't warranted changing this formula (the alternative being a tax on kms traveled). In Australia, EVs still haven't taken off (as there haven't been any incentives to buy them; in fact as they tend to be expensive, they often fall under the luxury car category and get taxed even more), so there are still very, very few on the road. It's very slowly changing, and this change is definitely looking into the next decade more that the next year, but still strikes me as odd timing - just when momentum is building to EVs, this will dull that momentum (at least without an incentive to _purchase_ an EV.
Anyway, shifting fuel taxes onto tires might make sense. All cars use tires, no matter the fuel, it requires no odometer reading, and a tire has a designed application & load range which ought to translate reasonably well to anticipated road wear.
Second, the problem with tires is that depending on what and where you drive you’ll use them considerably faster. I live a few miles down a very windy chip-sealed[2] road, that I have to drive down any time I go anywhere. As a result(best I can tell) my tires tend to go bald 10k-20k miles early. Chip seal is used because it is cheap, seems regressive that I’d be taxed at a higher rate for a poorer road.
[1] https://streets.mn/2016/07/07/chart-of-the-day-vehicle-weigh...
Maybe we want to lower transport costs by charging trucks less. Maybe we want to encourage electric car viability by charging them less. I mean, tax policies have outcomes. Doesn't it make sense to target outcomes we want?
Obviously the road needs to be paid for and fuel taxes won't work if people don't buy fuel. That said, I think it's inevitable that whatever comes next is a policy... encourage some stuff, discourage other stuff, benefit certain people/sectors and such. ATM, encouraging electric vehicle adoption with a fuel tax exemption doesn't seem crazy.
It does create a regressive dynamic, where new electrics are subsidized by legacy ICE. By the time that represents more than a rounding error the fuel tax deficit will be big enough that the tax system will be changing anyway.
A better approach is probably a time-of-purchase tax. =
Many good things are unpopular. Shutting down coal mining operations is unpopular with miners. Staying at home to avoid spreading a disease is unpopular, but we have to do it anyway because it's important.
Switching to EVs is important for slowing down climate change, and should be incentived (incentivised?).
What those 2 Australian states did translates directly into accelerated Climate change and Coastal cities sinking.
California was cutting $10,000 checks to rich people buying $80,000 sports cars called Teslas. You could be a solo driver in an HOV lane for a long period of time, in a part of the world where rich people's negative experience with the outside world is disproportionately traffic.
For every two Teslas worth of subsidies, for rich people who might actually drive very little, you could buy a poor person who actually needs a car a whole Prius.
> Encourage drivers to move to lighter vehicles which cause less wear and tear on the road
As other people said everyone benefits from roads. Cyclists still need food delivered to grocery stations in trucks. Parents still have their kids driven around in busses. Everyone needs construction vehicles to build more housing.
The vast majority of the value of roads is realized by commuters. It's not even just the long-ass trip some sucker makes commuting from his low cost community in the boonies. There are a dozen different trucks that need to go that same trip to wildly inefficiently provide him with services.
The most logical thing to do would be to tax surburban and rural residents at a state level, and sending that money back to cities. That lifestyle is so preposterously inefficient as an alternative to paying a landlord absolutely more but relatively less to live in a city. Suburban and rural dwellers just externalize their costs to the city people collecting their garbage, running their government, banks and hospitals, teaching their kids, training their police, firefighters, running their courtrooms, etc. - stuff they imagine is in "their" communities but is essentially welfare from vastly richer cities.
Additionally, heavy taxes should be levied on the city dwellers that devastate nearby communities to externalize their water supplies, their power generation, their food growth, etc.
I think you’ll pretty quickly find that you can make whatever lame arguments you want how people should and shouldn’t live. Just tax the specific negative externality you want to reduce and move on. Don’t sit there and moralize about other lifestyles.
Australians love 4 wheels drive and bigger cars. In some cases it's justified for obvious reasons: rough environments with less infrastructure (bush, outback..). In other cases it is for softer reasons: a big camping culture, having a big car being a social status, towing your boat/jet ski etc.
Also a few other points to consider:
_ Australia enjoyed economic growth for a long time and Australians are rich.
_ Fuel is cheap. According to www.globalpetrolprices.com right now a liter of gasoline is 0.74 euros compared to 1.33 for France
_ The road infrastructure is more favourable for big cars than in Europe (big/plenty parking spots in most towns in Australia).
Australia has half price petrol to Europe and you see this in both car size and engine size.
Also I have read (newspaper so who knows) that Australia allows far more fuel inefficient cars than Europe.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-10-11/australians-car-not-a...
But equally we have a lower percentage of diesel cars which is great for not dying
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/09/170918093337.h...
Having more people pay tax does not mean there is a net increase in tax collected.
Some of the children from a large rural families will move to cities and make careers that pay lots of taxes. Cities almost always have lower birthrates than countryside.
Even just maintaining replacement rate fertility requires an average of 2.1 children TFR, which means some families would need to have 3 or 4 children to get there since other families will have only 2 or 1 child.
A 180-200 BHP sedan can tow a trailer quite easily. You don't need a big SUV for that.
What you're saying is likely not true.
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https://www.bitre.gov.au/sites/default/files/is_091.pdf:
“The average rate of fuel consumption across all Australian vehicles in 2016 was 13.1 l/100km. However, this includes buses and trucks which are overwhelmingly used for business purposes. Given that this study is focused on the vehicle costs of Australian households (and not businesses), Figure 1 presents the average rate of fuel consumption for the three types of vehicles which have significant private use, namely passenger vehicles, motorcycles and light commercial vehicles. Motorcycles are relatively fuel efficient using 5.6 litres of fuel per 100 km travelled in 2016, compared to 10.6 l/100km for passenger vehicles and 12.0 l/100 km for light commercial vehicles.”
Maybe our sulferous crap fuel has something to do with it too. I don't know.
Inside cities, Australia definitely does have higher average speeds than inside most European cities though.
Point is, road conditions and driving style affect fuel economy far more than the marginal difference between vehicles of a similar size class.
But when Im in traffic in the morning the number of 'consumer' (non work purpose) SUV / 4WDs is fairly significant and they would all be doing at least the average.
Now Holden/Ford have shut down here everyone seems to drive a Toyota Hilux / Landcruiser. Tradies get tax benefits buying an expensive Hilux, can use it as a family car as they have dual cab and can take it in the bush doing 4x4. Landcruiser are popular with those who drive in the outback due to being suited to that terrain.
As a lot of cars on the road are Hilux utes the average driver wants a similar sized SUV “as they are safer”
You also have Australia’s lack of commitment to emission policies, manufacturers use Australia to offload cars that don’t meet emission standards elsewhere in the world.
https://www.budgetdirect.com.au/car-insurance/research/avera...
Australians still by V8’s but not that many of them can be...
https://www.budgetdirect.com.au/car-insurance/research/avera...
For example, https://afdc.energy.gov/data/10310 gives motorcycles as almost 2x as efficient as cars, almost 3x as efficient as "light truck / van".
Given that enormous amount of metal that's not being hauled around, I would have expected a bigger difference. Nonetheless, for single-occupant travel, halving transportation carbon footprint would be quite a great thing.
>There are a few independent studies that shed light on the issue, however. One published in 2008 by Swiss researchers took real data from several motorbikes including a BMW R1150GS. The GS highway CO2 equivalent is a stunning 380 g/mile (17% worse than the Dodge)! They found that a 1993 Honda Shadow VX600 with only 583 ccs spews a whopping 408 g/mile. That is twice as much as a new Honda Civic!
>Other studies would suggest the problem is even worse. Global MRV tested out their portable emissions equipment in 2011 comparing 12-motorcycles to 12-cars of varying years (this was featured on an episode of Mythbusters). Motorcycles were almost universally terrible, with motorbikes from the 2000’s producing 3,220% more NOx and 8,065% more CO2 than cars of the same era. California has the largest motorcycle ridership in the country, and in 2008 the LA Times reported that while motorcycles accounted for 1% of all miles traveled, they were responsible for 10% of the state’s smog-producing emissions.
Taken from https://autowise.com/motorcycle-vs-car-emissions/ .
I've had my M1 since 1994, so I enjoy riding, so please don't take this as all negative. But it's important to look at the real data, which is much worse than people think with regards to emissions and pollution.
But the modern class of commuter bike has got to be pretty good. Drag coefficient is poor but they're also a much smaller area, and city driving is more forgiving for aero.
Per my previous comment, motorcycles are more efficient that cars, in terms of consumption of fuel. (though not as much as I'd have thought)
But they're also worse on emissions, which is the public harm that is of greater interest here.
And yikes, those numbers.
//
The good news is that as batteries improve, bike like the all-electric Zero line are going to get both more popular and more affordable. I'm looking forward to when I can get one!
I was about to maim him. I hate loud vehicles.
Melbourne, the State Capital of Victoria, has a big problem with congestion at peak hours.
If road use charging like in Singapore or London was introduced, it would shift usage to non-peak hours, and raise sufficient revenue to offset fuel excise.
But that's politically difficult - whereas applying a tax to EVs, which currently very few people use, is much easier.
Encouraging the adoption of cleaner but more expensive technology is always going to be regressive, no way around this.
A lot of environmental regulation has strong regressive effects, it hits coal miners much harder than people sipping 10$ coffee on their macbook.
Suppose I am driving from New York to Alaska; I fill up my car with gas then drive into Ontario. I have now paid New York a gas tax but I'm driving on Ontario roads; Ontario gets paid nothing for this wear and tear.. until I run out of gas inside Ontario. Then Ontario gets their cut. This continues all the way until I reach Alaska. The money isn't distributed perfectly, but it is distributed.
Now imagine I am instead taxed by the mile. If the car is registered in New York, does New York get all the milage tax? Do they give any of that to Ontario when I tell them I was in Ontario? Probably not, and it would require a lot of book keeping for me to keep track of all the places I've been. Does Ontario instead check my milage at the borders and charge me an exit fee? That seems impractical and potentially problematic. Is some sort of vehicle tracking system used to fairly distribute the money wherever I drove? Such mass surveillance is obviously problematic.
I don't know what the answer is, except for imposing a tax anywhere I purchase gas (or electricity.) That's the least bad solution I can think of.
In my (admittedly uneducated) opinion, road taxes should be overwhelmingly be paid by commercial vehicles since they contribute much more to road damage, their costs will be passed on to consumers, and the largest consumers are the wealthy. Mileage might make the most sense for that type of tax, and I think wouldn’t unfairly burden the poor. Maybe multiplied by the value of the cargo?
If every part of the system needs to be progressive it's much more difficult to get the behavioural incentives you want.
(I think we do it smarter for electricity: the first x kWh at one rate, then up from there, among other billing complexities).
It works roughly like this for trucks through the “International Fuel Tax Agreement”. Like the “World Series”, its international because it applies to Canada and US:
https://www.google.com/search?q=international+fuel+tax+agree...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fuel_Tax_Agree...
When I think about transportation I think about a paper I read about development of rail. The US and UK's experience is you run into market failure with private rail. The broad based benefits and network effects are diffuse, too many people and businesses benefit indirectly. Which means you can't charge high enough fares to pay for a optimal system.
RFID tag for your car with roads reading your entrance and exit. Then a bill at the end of the month from a single body that then divides the tax back to the area that maintains the various roads you used. High traffic roads get proportional funding. You could even have seamless integration with private roads. If someone thinks they can make money out of an expensive by pass the government doesn't want to build they can.
It would also require different governments to cooperate; New York would have to be able and willing to redistribute part of my milage tax to a foreign country when that country says my car has been there. I don't know if that's feasible, but cynically I assume it would be difficult at best to put into practice.
I don't find 'some surveillance happens already, so we may as well go all in' a compelling argument.
You can have mass surveillance at a stadium and no surveillance outside the stadium. Likewise, you can have mass surveillance on a toll road and not on county roads.
Part of your point was the difficulty of inter-state cooperation in this regard, which is incorrect, or at least the difficulty has already been overcome, because this data has been shared with SunPass for ~20 years.
And no one made an argument that because we have a little we should have a lot. My point was that what you find intolerable of is already happening.
There are places in the US where people live in no-income-tax states but shop across the border on no-sales-tax states. This is obviously an abuse, but it's never been enough of a problem to really crack down on.
If we can reduce our problems to known problems that aren't a big deal, that's good enough! Ship it!
As a Canadian, I can’t offer my items as “no tax” if I include US as a shipping destination.
I think it's ok for one particular tax to be regressive if the general taxation scheme is not.
So yes, luxury tax does kick in at a lower number (which I find silly), but I think overall, you're still creating a situation where electric is paying less to use the same roads.
That said - Agree with the line you quoted. I think an even and fair tax makes sense, but I don't see how you do that at the local level when the fuel tax is federal.
While it's arguable about how successful this is in either pragmatic or policy terms, dropping the context that the government is investing in both:
a) cross city train tunnel
b) outer suburban loop
c) airport line through Sunshine interchange
d) faster trains from Geelong upgrade
is to likely lose some important perspective.
This is on top of Melbourne's (which makes up easily the vast majority of the population of the state) already impressive public transport infrastructure.
Again, maybe this seems weird because people are interpreting it from the frame of private vehicle ownership, where the comparison is between ICT and EV. But that's not the correct comparison: it's actually a policy of moving between private and public transport. And from that perspective, it can also arguably make sense from an environment perspective as well.
And it's not like the remainder living out in rural victoria (where there is no PT infrastructure) are going to be picking up EVs en-mass, so it probably doesn't effect them in any fundamental way.
edit: oh wait, you mean to imply that EV vehicles don't have the CO2 impact of ICE vehicles, and thus there's not an incentive to switch to public transport? I'm guessing that's still wrong (in that our mass transport is still more efficient overall). But there's also other pollution issues aside from CO2, and the general efficiency in terms of distance travelled and efficient use of space and traffic issues that come from preferential PT use.
Regardless, the government, both state and federal, is investing major dollars over the next 10 years on infrastructure which assumes the opposite, and given the current infrastructure is already there, i think its a bit premature to talk of the future with such certainty.
And what of the damage that non-electric vehicles do to the environment? Shouldn't we be accounting for that?
At least roads can be easily repaired.
Wait, that can't be true. That's an insane number if correct. Here in EU a car that averages 7-8L/100km is considered to have poor fuel economy. My previous car was a Mercedes AMG that over 4 years averaged 12L/100km and that was considered absolutely abysmal by everyone, people were wondering how I can afford the fuel for it. And you're telling me that the average for Australian cars is higher than that??
1. Ford Ranger
2. Toyota Hilux
3. Toyota Rav4
4. Hyundai i30
5. Mazda CX5
6. Toyota Land Cruiser
I live in Europe now, and you simply can't compare the driving to Australia. Some roads are genuinely scary with the occasional cow or roo to hit.
Electrification is much more feasible in Europe, and the sooner the better. Every little diesel engine sounds like a truck. Now if only they would stop piling the taxes on electrics ...
"Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
"But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet."
Terry Pratchett, https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/72745-the-reason-that-the-r...
Odometers can have their values changed at will, at least in ICE vehicles, often for valid reasons.
Unless auto manufacturers are required to fit much more secure odometers, I can't see them in their current incarnation used as the basis for a tax.
* One litre of petrol creates 2.3kg of CO².
* A going market price for an offset is $25-50 per metric ton
So the tax per litre to offset the CO² is 6 to 12 cents.
I don't need to drive my car on a road to derive value form it. In the same way that I don't have children but still benefit from schools.
Property taxes should be the source of funding for infrastructure projects.
Use taxes are regressive and result in underfunded infrastructure with the wealthy paying less and adding another barrier to the poor making ends meet.
Also congestion. Charging based on how much congestion is on a roadway while a car uses it will reduce traffic during peak times and increase how much economic value the road transportation network contributes by making the most valuable use-cases get priority access to roads during peak demand periods, while spreading out driving across a larger range of hours to reduce overall delays to traffic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congestion_pricing
Traffic is basically due to a scarce economic resource - road space during peak times - having no pricing to prioritize its use. People thereby pay for road space during rush hour by paying in time stuck in traffic, which is a very inefficient economic mechanism for determining the allocation of scarce resources.
But what about my mates who own the trucking companies? Are you implying they should pay their fair share?
This is just not realistic to apply, and especially in Australia. You'd need someone to actually record those numbers, which would be a massive overhead of salaries on its own. Then you have crazy distances... you'd either send the inspector to that single farm 300km from the nearest town, or force people running it to being the trucks in for a check monthly.
Let the drivers report the odometer reading, and add the amount for the last period to the new cost.
You'd get some folks who lie, but there's already inspections in place for sales in some states. If the owner wants to sell the vehicle, require an odometer check and a final payment.
Basically - I don't really think there's a ton of extra admin cost here. Most folks will self report just fine.
Plus, we should be encouraging emissions inspections anyway. At least in the US many states require yearly or bi-yearly inspections to confirm nothing is wrong with the emissions systems in the vehicle. Good way to encourage basic maintenance and to vet manufacturer emission claims against real world data.
It's tied to yearly vehicle registration there too, and includes an odometer reading.
Growth should pay for growth, so, no, we also don't need to pay for new roads.
Roads are also funded by property tax.
If you want to tax fairly based on road wear, you have to tax by axle weight to the 4th power * distance driven.
That said, there's a pretty simple solution that doesn't send the same "we are punishing EV owners with an extra tax" message: have a road usage tax for everyone, and slightly decrease the fuel tax.
But please, PLEASE, keep most of the fuel tax. Climate change is a real, urgent issue, and everything that encourages change away from fossil fuel should be kept.
How about means testing through progressive taxation of income or wealth?
With all the energy resources at Australians' disposal, it sure seems off-kilter to not be rewarding those who chose to go more efficient.
Would that there were Australias own local industry capable of competing with Tesla .. and I say that as a once-proud Australian.
With a local industry leading the way, as usual, the Australian government could get a clue.
However, the will of the people is not there. Or at least, the technology to disrupt Australia's coal and oil junkies, isn't there.
So back to your post, one thing I'm utterly against is taxing per distance driven. Why?
Privacy. There are already talks all over the place, discussions in government, of having a GPS tracker counting distance. Some even discuss real time uploads to the government, others monthly dumps.
Sorry, no. No, no, no. In fact, not sorry. :P Because talk about full time surveillance! I realise that in some nations, like the UK, who have RFID/TPMS trackers, and license plate trackers all over the place, this might seem normal.
But I do not want that here.
For example, tolls where you pay cash is a solution. Obviously, that is adding a transaction cost, which is not desirable.
But let's think of a more privacy secure way to create an easy pass like system.
The obvious problem of easypass systems is they track cars by license plates and thus create a massive database of which car went through when.
But it could be legally required to purge the license plate data of cars that paid.
You could get a signal when going through the tollway that indicates the amount to pay. You could send a transaction via a cryptocurrency with a signed message on the transaction and then a separate API call to the state tollway system telling them which license plate was just paid for by the transaction.
Then any vehicles that had paid would be converted into effectively cash records with the license plate number purged.
Thus, data is only retained on those who broke the law and didn't pay.
While obviously this requires a government to see privacy as enough of a concern to adopt such data purge policies, it is totally possible.
If anyone else can think of a way to allow pay for road usage solutions that are more privacy secure, I'd love to hear them.
They spy where they are not allowed, play tricks with the letter of the law. For example, 5-eyes, where Canada is not allowed to spy on Canadians, and the UK on UK citizens, so each spy on the other's citizens, then hand the data over.
Or recent stories in the US, of the government buying data from the private sector. They can't spy, so they pay the private sector to spy.
I have zero faith that any scenario where data is harvested, that it won't be illegally/immorally/sneakily used. And history, that all important metric, 100% backs up that this sort of thing happens again, and again, and again.
So point #1? There's no scenario where we can ever trust 'track and delete'. Nor, can we ever trust any 'black box' in a car. EG, if we cannot open it, examine it (something highly unlikely in a metering device), no way will I ever trust it.
Number 2? Tolls are beyond impossible. I think you must live in a population dense area, to believe they are viable.
Yet think of rural routes, side roads, or just normal non-freeway roads. There are many 100s of millions of miles of these, and they greatly outnumber freeways. They cost upkeep too.
I often go 6 months without driving on a freeway, where I live. I know many people who drive thousands of km a month, yet are entirely on rural roads.
There isn't even network connectivity, including cell, in some of these areas. Phones. Loads of roads have no power lines, are just 'connect this dirt road to this dirt road', yet see a thousand cars a day.
As a side note, right now, we aren't paying per km. People driving a sports car, get 1/2 or 1/4 the gas mileage of a little smart car or some such. Yet, they both pay the same for gas.
Two things bother me here:
1) The whole reason most jurisdictions have 'tax people when paid', is because many people cannot save, and even if they could, literally have no money left at the end of the year.
If there is some 'pay later' or 'show up yearly, be tolled, and pay' scenario, this won't work well. Not at all. Collections alone is a horrible cost on any service, which costs immensely.
2) We already have odometers, which are theoretically sealed, illegal to monkey with, tied to car value, and with a HUGE history of laws / court action wrapped around them.
Anything can be monkeyed with or hacked, ANYTHING, so my point here is that odometers are already in the car, show distance, and have laws protecting them. And even, already, mechanics fully aware of the punishment for tampering with them.
(Odometer replacement even legally requires setting the replacement to the same as the old, etc, etc, or making an indelible note of it.)
But I also take objection to the government knowing how much I drive. Or when.
Really, I don't think this is much of a problem though. The whole reason Tesla went with electric, is because Musk wanted reliable gear for Mars. Can't use O2 burners there, so H2 was out.
With the recycling costs, slow charging of batteries, this is only a stopgap.
H2 is where we're going, over the next decade. Once that happens, taxation will be back where it was anyhow.
At the pump.
> 13.1 litres per 100km
This seems crazy high even by US standards. My 300 horsepower 6 cylinder BMW, for example, uses 9.7L per 100km, and I drive mostly in the city.
Fuel tax is 43 cents a litre. Australian cars right now avg about 13.1 litres per 100km. So you're looking at ~$5.6 per 100km for fuel tax.
This tax is adding $2.5 tax per 100km for electric.
Right now, EVs are absolutely creating an regressive tax situation with regards to fuel. Those who can afford to buy newer, efficient cars can usually save money on tax over those who can't. For electric, it was worse - because they do tend to be more expensive to purchase up front, and they paid no fuel tax at all.
And frankly, infrastructure is expensive, and governments need to plan on continuing to maintain it.
That said - I think the only real answer here is a more thorough overhaul of how you tax road usage. Perhaps it's time to ditch the fuel excise tax entirely, and tax all drivers based on (vehicle weight * kms driven * some constant).
Encourage drivers to move to lighter vehicles which cause less wear and tear on the road, and drop the disparity between fuel and electric. They both use the same tires.