RAC prof: Road charges can end the ripoff of motorists The head of the RAC Foundation - the RAC's independent roads research charity - says that the English highway system can no longer be run the way it now is, as a colossal money-spinner for the Treasury. He advocates a move to "pay as you go" road use. Stephen Glaister, a retired professor of transport and infrastructure, lays …
So you take the money out of the general exchequer (NHS, Education, Pensions and Benefits) and give it to shareholders (usually financial institutions) - how does that help the population?
By the way; France used to have low fuel duty, no road tax, but high (private) road tolls. Theoretically, once the road was paid for, it went back into public ownership, and the toll was dropped. It didn't happen. France still has swingeing tolls (it costs me about €60 to go 500km) AND fuel duty comparable to the UK. (road tax for private drivers abolished in 2001) and most of the private autoroutes are only two lane. At least they ban certain HGVs from the roads during busy weekends.
The RAC is a "gentleman's" club on Pall Mall, masquerading as a motoring organisation; take no notice of them, they only say it to annoy the plebs.
Stamp duty is a tax that discourages people from moving closer to where they work. I reckon moving house should be made as cheap and easy as possible so when you move job it's easy to move closer and cut down on commuting. Or maybe you should only pay a (higher) rate on the difference in price of the house you are buying compared to the house you're selling so people moving for convenience rather than because they're loaded don't pay tax.
Why tax/penalise people who just want to cut down on their commute?
"You must notify HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) of your intention to produce biodiesel. For details please contact the Excise and Customs Helpline on Tel 0845 010 9000 (+44 2920 501 261 outside UK).
It is the responsibility of producers to show HMRC that their product meets all aspects of the legal definition and sufficient tests must be carried out to prove that the specification is met. If a product does not meet all aspects of the definition it is a fuel substitute and will attract a higher rate of duty.
Biodiesel that can be shown to meet the full definition will attract a duty rate of 20 pence per litre lower than the sulphur-free diesel rate."
It's the same for using vegetable oil etc.
http://customs.hmrc.gov.uk/channelsPortalWebApp/channelsPortalWebApp.portal?_nfpb=true&_pageLabel=pageExcise_ShowContent&id=HMCE_PROD1_024771&propertyType=document
You can make 2500 litres of biodiesel for your own use per year without paying any duty.
If your biodiesel-making equipment is obviously portable, then you can probably add to that an extra 2500 litres for each petrol car driver in your street (but the sum of these unused allowances is shared between all biodiesel users in the street).
I'd missed the date where the 2500l personal allowance was introduced... relying more on Dick Strawbridge than own experience.
http://www.vegetableoildiesel.co.uk/twyntub100.html
Not exactly a cheap option though - over £2500 ready made for the smaller machine, with a year's payback only if the waste oil is scrounged for free. However, if portable includes 'mounted in a Transit van' then process away. 2500l should be enough for a couple of vehicles at average mileage, which would extend the payback period if not all is produced (I guess it can't be stored for ages without degrading).
However, most high-pressure common-rail cars need a significant amount of work on the fuel system to prevent any problems, and changes in the way the car is used. Here's what one SMART For2 CDI owner has to say:
"I have an eberspacher engine preheater which heats fuel filter, fuel rail and the engine block which in turn heats all the injectors and injection pump. This process takes ten minutes, and allows startup on the mixed 50/50veg to diesel without any smoke. It also reduces wear. The engine is a direct injection common rail unit, and is therefore prone to problems related to cold oil."
So that's a 10-minute warm-up before driving off. This driver reports 'all fine' but then says that only 1000 miles out of the car's 50k has been driven on this. One driver of another car says his was fine on a 50/50 mix of bio with regular, but the fuel pump gave up after a mile on 100% biodiesel, which sounds like an expensive way to find out how to deal with using it.
Thanks for the heads-up
The thing about sparsely populated countries is that they still suffer congestion in the densely populated areas. It's just that this congestion is obfuscated by the miles and miles of clear roads linking the densley populated areas. So the statistics on which the whole report is based are totally pointless.
"more would be charged at peak times, for instance, encouraging drivers to time their journeys when the roads are little used and so spreading traffic out more across the day or week"
Yeah, like my employer will understand my need to be late from work or to leave early so I can avoid increased traffic and higher charges. Imagine them being so progressive!
...and now for the Tin-Foil Hat News.....
Signs of a rise in fascism:
1) Mandatory requirement to carry identification (NID, NIR etc. etc.)
2) Decrease in civil liberties (Curtailing of the right to protest, s44, anti-terrorism laws)
3) Increase in surveilance (Cameras everywhere, GCHQ plans to tap phones & internet comms)
4) Increase in covert policing (Kettling, police officers disguising identity, FIT)
5) Clampdown on freedom of information (Photographers, Bloggers, Public Speakers)
6) Monitoring of movement/restriction of freedom to travel (See this article)
How many more signs do we need?
>>"3) Increase in surveilance (Cameras everywhere, GCHQ plans to tap phones & internet comms)"
You mean they're not *already* doing it to people they consider of interest?
What have we been paying them to do for the last 65 years?
>>"4) Increase in covert policing (Kettling, police officers disguising identity, FIT)"
I'm not sure I'd count ketting and covering up numbers as 'covert' in the strictest sense.
>>"6) Monitoring of movement/restriction of freedom to travel (See this article)"
How does charging people to drive restrict their freedom to travel any more than charging them to get on a plane/train/bus does?
The RAC are completely out of touch with reality. Congestion is falling, because we are driving less. We are driving less because we have had the worst recession in 80 years and UK fuel prices are at an all time record high. These factors are directly linked.
Global oil supplies can no longer keep up with exponentially growing world demand. Even before the US stopped deep water drilling. When the financial bubble was at maximum inflation in 2008 oil production was stalled at 86M barrels/day, and the price just kept going up until the Western World's debt bubble burst. We are now stoney broke, and being systematically outbid for soon to be declining oil supplies by China and the developing world. We are simply going to have to consume less, and drive less, year after year. The supply is limited and we cannot afford it.
So, it will be electric cars, biofuels or nothing. Mostly it will be nothing. If it takes double double dip, triple dip or permanent recession, then that is what will happen. We will be consuming a lot less oil in future.
www.theoildrum.com
I've never understood this whole "discourage people from driving at peak times by introducing road charges" thing.
I'm already discouraged from driving at peak times by the fact that the roads are busy. It's much nicer to drive at times when they are emptier. However, I'm not on the road at rush hour for my own amusement - I'm there because I have to be at work on time. Road charging wouldn't make a blind bit of difference to peak hour congestion, except to make it more expenive to Joe Public. The citizens of Manchester and other places had the sense to realise this - it's just the politicians who are stuck in a jam.
Governments (read politicians) across the globe are essentially the same : totally inept at organizing a piss up in a brewery, refusing to accept responability for the misery they inflict upon their constituants, and only interested in maximzing llegislation that lines their own pockets.
That being said, we can conclude that, however much is being stolen from the people they govern by means of taxes, levies, fines and other exises and VATS, they will always end up short.
Therefor, reducing the income from road taxes by whatever means, will automatically lead to an increase in taxes somewhere else.
THEY will NOT squander less, so YOU will have to pay more.
The professor is of course right. Reducing road taxes is however an exercise in futility.
I have lived in Germany for about 10 years now and still find the differences in transport strange.
The equivalent of VED is about the same here in Germany (about 100 euros per annum for my car). The petrol is now about the same price (the exchange rate made it cheaper in the UK for a while). Insurance is about 400 Euros a year and is probably a bit cheaper than I would pay in the UK.
I drive to work - it takes about 10 minutes as there is not much congestion. I park for free in the company car park. I could take the tram - it stops 400m from my house and little bit further away from my work.
Public transport is far more frequent than in the UK and my impression is that it is generally cheaper.
Given the tax burden in the UK and Germany is about the same, why the hell is the public transport in the UK so poor? All the UK governments and local authorities ever do is increase taxes but never deliver a viable public transport system or even adequate parking. Where does all the money go in the UK? Germany has a welfare state, schools, etc. but still manages to build and maintain viable public transport without the need to continually extort more money from motorists. WTF is going on in the UK?
For all his cleverness Prof Glaister is missing the point. I recall that a lot of the public outrage that led to the famously supported Downing Street petition was not because of road pricing per se, it was anger at the suggestion that the Government (or any other Agency) wanted to install spying devices in people's cars that would track thier every movement.
And it doesn't actually matter whether those were to be owned and operated by the Government, MI5, the RAC or Bobo the Clown - there was *huge* resistance to the concept of being tracked everywhere.
Now many would argue (correctly) that in ANPR we have such a system anyway by the back door, but there is a threshold of personal space which I still believe motorists are not willing to accept and these GPS tracking devices are where the line is. It's like putting CCTV in people's homes.
Prof Glaister seems to have spent all his research looking at spreadsheets and doing calculations. He can't possibly have spoken to any road users before proposing this flawed piece of drivel. In addition did anyone at the RAC actually check the document? They boast about about looking for completely new and different solutions to congestion, and then just trot out the same old (rejected) tax proposals.
There's one big advantage of taking the cost off fuel duty and onto a road usage tax. I could ditch my dull 1.6L 4-pot and replace it with a hulk of V8 Mustang, for little to no increase in running costs. Hardly ideal as an environmental policy, but the numpty that wrote this report doesn't seem to care.
In New Zealand they even stick 3rd party insurance onto the cost of petrol. Result? Very few hit-and-runs, because everybody automatically has insurance to cover any prangs they created. You can still be done for dangerous driving, so it's not carte blanche to play bumper cars on the public highway though...
As someone who drives a fuel efficient car a less-than-average distance each year, I welcome a sensible approach to road charging. Perhaps they could include some sort of tax on fuel, so people who use more of it pay more, and people who use less, pay less? Oh, they do that already do they?
It seems we have more proof that Winston didn't always get things right. Didn't anyone at the time point out the flaws ? Or is it the case we pay no ring fenced demands to date ? Some areas of tax/expenditure clearly fits hypothecation. You need x done, and you don't think it should be funded from the general kitty; then you charge those who need x to raise enough money, and no more.
When one group of society is unfairly targeted it isn't honourable to approve of it, nor to claim that if one allowed oneself to be manipulated by those who are meant to serve, it could be avoided.
Get a fucking grip.
Everywhere I walk in this city I am assaulted by constant fumes and noise pollution, I see other pedestrians scattered by inconsiderate drivers and the pavements are all cracked and potholed from twunts parking on them. Then I see the ignorant self-centred moaning drivel being spouted by some people on here and it makes my fucking blood boil.
Costs a huge amount to implement, administer and maintain, is likely to confuse a lot of people, and a massive black market for ways to circumvent the system will spring up overnight.
Contrast to just having a simple tax on fuel, which is a pretty good proxy for the amount that people drive, and even takes in to account how polluting you are/how much scarce resource you are using.
>> ">>"6) Monitoring of movement/restriction of freedom to travel (See this article)"
How does charging people to drive restrict their freedom to travel any more than charging them to get on a plane/train/bus does?
"
By installing GPS monitoring equipment in your vehicle to determine the charges for road-use that will apply to you. Thus, someBODY will have a nice complete record of your movements. No doubt it'll be handily stored next to your phone & email logs, and your DNA records.
Done nothing wrong? You don't need to have. With this level of information those in power will be able to fabricate whatever they like about your activities. Watch carefully, I predict that over the next few years it will become strangely 'unfashionable' to openly criticise government policies too.
>>"By installing GPS monitoring equipment in your vehicle to determine the charges for road-use that will apply to you. Thus, someBODY will have a nice complete record of your movements. No doubt it'll be handily stored next to your phone & email logs, and your DNA records."
That might impinge on your privacy (or at least your car's privacy) but it doesn't necessarily impinge on your freedom to travel,
If you're planning on going somewhere (for legal, dubious or illegal activities) which is so sensitive that merely parking close to your destination could arouse suspicion, then even now you'd probably be better advised to walk the last bit of the journey.
Secretly plotting to overthrow or embarrass the government? Probably best not all drive to the house of your cell leader.
Visiting your mistress (or your Mistress)? Might be an idea to park a street or two away.
Were anyone to get flagged up as someone whose driving records were of interest, likely their movements could be followed fairly well from their mobile records, who they have talked to could be found out from phone and email records, etc.
It seems like the people who would have reasonable reasons not to have their movements possibly traceable would also have to be careful to avoid leaving trails by any other methods.
If they were going to bother being that careful, then they could probably manage to get to suspicious locations other than by driving straight to them.
>>"Done nothing wrong? You don't need to have. With this level of information those in power will be able to fabricate whatever they like about your activities."
Why would they bother?
Aren't there enough people they are concerned about?
If The Powers That Be really wanted to frame me for something, they could easily do it already by planting a little bit of forensic evidence, just as they could easily have done in the past by getting police to make up a confession.
Vehicle movement records alone wouldn't necessarily be much use - if someone could find out my car had been driven from Bristol to Ipswich and back on given dates, that would be useless information for someone trying to frame me for a crime in Ipswich unless they also knew I was in the car, and that I didn't have an alibi for the time they wanted to frame me for.
For all they knew, I could have driven to Ipswich and then immediately got a lift to Edinburgh with 4 impeccable witnesses.
If they'd need to have had contemporary surveillance to be sure where I was and what I was doing, how would the vehicle records actually help them?
Honestly, the feeling I get is that some people have a pretty inflated idea of their own importance.
Given how easy it was for the government to pretty much ignore all the Iraq protests, on the scale *they* were on, I'm wondering which people think their own opinion (and their presentation of that opinion) is so universally convincing and so threatening to the Establishment that a massive state conspiracy will frame them if they even think about speaking their mind?
If such people actually do exist, what is their past history of actually doing anything meaningful?
To frame a critic in order to silence any others only seems likely to really work when people widely suspect that charges were trumped-up.
Try doing it a few times and it gets pretty hard to get anyone to believe that the charges are actually correct.
That's the kind of thing you can only really get away with when you already have a seriously oppressive state, and as such, it's more a symptom than a cause of loss of freedom.
"It's vehicle excise duty, a tax on how much you pollute."
No it isn't. It is a tax on the emissions per mile at the point the car was manufactured.
How much car tax you pay has got nothing to do with how much you actually pollute.
You think that someone that pays £400 pollutes more than someone that pays £100? Possibly. It depends on how much they actually drive. That is why the tax system is a cash cow and has got nothing to do with pollution.
I pay a high rate for my car but I guarantee you I pollute less than plenty of people driving little "green" cars.
As for "pay as you go" .. its a stupid idea. We already have a system of charging by use and it's called fuel duty. Increasing fuel duty is free. Pay-as-you-go is going to require millions (if not billions) of pounds to be spent on technology. Just put up fuel duty. The more you burn the more you pay. If you drive a better car you can drive a few extra miles for your money. It's simple.
But a nationwide network of spy cameras would be a nice earner for the companies that get their brown envelopes in first.
...all that will happen is that road charging is added, there will be no drop in VED or tax on fuel and everybody will wind up paying more.
The comment about paying for the roads already through the usage of fuel is a good, but as noted, damn unpopular one.
Also, comparing the UK other countries by way of simple metrics when it comes to road building just isn't possible / sensible. The UK has a much higher population density than most other countries in the "top road" list therefore the stresses on the road network and the availability of land to build roads on is very different.
I think somebody already mentioned this, but: there is no need for the tax disc anymore, it needs to be got rid of and instead put on fuel duty, so you only pay for what you use. There is no need for black box recorders / GPS / ANPR tracking which is just an excuse to spy on drivers.
I own a number of cars, but I can only drive one at a time, so why do I have to pay for road tax on all of them when they are not parked on the road, you can SORN but that's not all that convenient.
>>"There is no need for black box recorders / GPS / ANPR tracking which is just an excuse to spy on drivers."
That'd be 'spy on people driving on public roads', I guess?
Would you have a problem with black box data being used in accident investigation?
For example, if someone was doing 70 in a 30 zone just before they were involved in a serious accident, do you think it's unfair for data from their vehicle to be used against them, and if so, why is it unfair?
Some people might see a car as an extension of their personal space, but unless they're driving it around on their own property, how that little bubble of personal space moves around does affect other people in all kinds of ways.
>>"I own a number of cars, but I can only drive one at a time, so why do I have to pay for road tax on all of them when they are not parked on the road, you can SORN but that's not all that convenient."
If I owned a load of houses, I'd still have to pay council tax on them all, even if I only lived in one at once.
If there was going to be some kind of discount for multiple vehicle ownership, that'd be fine if everyone played by the rules, but it'd be pretty certain that some people would start to take the piss, and register as the keeper for multiple vehicles that ended up being driven by other people.
Unless, of course, there was an automated way to make sure that only the registered keeper drove their vehicles, or that multiple vehicles weren't being driven at the same time, but that'd probably be getting too 1984-ish for some people....
So the Treasury makes a serious profit by taxing road users. Ending the direct tax on road users isn't going to stop the Treasury making a serious profit, they'll just get the money from somewhere else.
Like VED, fuel tax and mileage charges....(after all, the VED and fuel tax infrastructures are already in place). Now you all know that after a new tax is introduced the old tax might be reduced a tad but it will creep back up. (Remember VAT? It replaced purchase tax but because it was on everything it initially collected a lot of extra money. That was back when it was 7% or less.....remind me....what it is now?)
...and, of course, the mileage charge infrastructure will need paying for.....(good eatin' for the well connected)
I agree with other postings on here that HGVs are a big contributor to the congestion on the roads and to how many repairs need to be done to the roads so something needs to be done to solve the problem, On a recent journey down the M6 during the day after rush hour every time the motorway became congested and slowed down it was because of some inconsiderate truck driver who had tried to overtake another truck while on a hill so slowed the flow of traffic down from 70 to 40 while everyone had to file round his truck to get past him.
An easy solution to this would be to charge the HGVs more to use the motorways during the daytime and hopefully then that would encourage them to travel overnight when the roads are quieter or take 1000s of trucks off the road by putting the good onto the railways which is what our Victorian ancestors designed the railways for in the first place. Sure this may mean a loss of jobs in the haulage industry but and increase of jobs in the railways.
What a load of backward thinking twaddle,no wonder the people that run Great Britain PLC have a problem if this is all a "great mind " can come up with.
Its simple.
Abolish all road charges and road tax.
Just tax fuel !
That way all users both great and small will pay every time they start their vehicles.
The Tax collection system is already in place when you buy fuel, no one escapes, its impossible to fiddle and even visitors to the UK will then be paying to use the roads.
Benefits include clearing out a whole swath of civil servants and tax disc distributors at the the DVLC offices and reduce the cost of computers and system maintenance.
Saving tax payers a lot of money all round.
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