Victoria follows South Australia and imposes electric car road tax

Re:Victoria follows South Australia and imposes electric car... by stouset on Saturday November 21, 2020 @02:19PM (#25172021)

Taxing mileage (and gas) also has the unfortunate property of being generally regressive. Roads benefit us all, but those who drive the furthest are often the poorest who live far from city centers.

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?

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Re:Victoria follows South Australia and imposes electric car... by repsilat on Saturday November 21, 2020 @03:59PM (#25172721)

Progressiveness should happen elsewhere -- in income taxes and transfer payments. The road user charges can be regressive without making the whole system regressive.

If every part of the system needs to be progressive it's much more difficult to get the behavioural incentives you want.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Victoria follows South Australia and imposes electric car... by bigbubba on Saturday November 21, 2020 @02:24PM (#25172071)

This seems like a pretty good solution; the infrastructure is already in place for weighing trucks at borders. Raising taxes for trucks to replace gas taxes for cars would also incentivize the use of trains, which would be nice.

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