Maybe all those here paranoid about the Government knowing more (than they already do) about them, could propose how owners of road vehicles should be charged for using the highway when they don't use taxed fuels. It would be interesting to see who they think should pay and how that would be levied.
-
Our booking engine at tickets.railforums.co.uk (powered by TrainSplit) helps support the running of the forum with every ticket purchase! Find out more and ask any questions/give us feedback in this thread!
Could a pay-per-use road charging scheme powered by vehicle data reporting be viable?
- Thread starter NotATrainspott
- Start date
- Status
Sponsor Post - registered members do not see these adverts; click here to register, or click here to log in
R
RailUK Forums
Already been done - ideas include higher road tax, mileage tax, parking tax.
Or we significantly increase electricity charges with discounts for those on low incomes.
If you are worried about traffic then reduce the road space with more bus and cycle lanes
So how high would a road tax be, average the total miles so that those who don't cause congestion and wear and tear pay for those who do, how will mileage tax be levied, how will those who don't park their cars on the public highway be contributing?
So how will using electricity for heating homes, (i.e. as most of us will be eventually) be as expensive as thhat used for persoanl transport, (which many will not indulge in)?
Or ban car use from wherever public transport provides an adequate service, that will please the road warriors.
Bletchleyite
Veteran Member
If we pursue the approach that Passivhaus is the goal, then yes, probably.
NotATrainspott
Established Member
- Joined
- 2 Feb 2013
- Messages
- 3,224
Road tax meaning the mileage-independent charge for owning a roadworthy vehicle. Ramping it up means the barrier to entry to owning any vehicle increases dramatically, but then the incremental cost of using it a bit more would be minimal. That means restricting cars to a choice few richer people, but then letting them use the car as much as they like. This is not acceptable.
Mileage charges don't work because a mile in Camden is a hell of a lot more problematic for society than 10 miles in the Western Isles. Set the charge for the Western Isles, and people will use their cars unnecessarily in Camden. Set the charge for Camden and it would cripple large parts of the economy. It would also have no recognition of time of use. Driving at peak times would be no more expensive than driving at 3am. This is a double whammy of bad before you even get to the problem of car mileage recording being attacked. That already happens today - it would happen even more if it were the basis of a tax.
Parking tax doesn't work unless you make it impossible for people to park outside designated spots. That would mean huge enforcement costs. You'd end up with fewer cars parked but more of them driving around aimlessly (e.g. two people where one drops off the other then waits).
Charging the electricity cost doesn't work in a world where people can generate their own electricity at home with PV cells. Using 10kWh of electricity to heat your home is not a problem; using 10kWh to drive around unnecessarily is.
The thing we want to minimise is unnecessary use of vehicles at any time of day, in any place. The only system which can efficiently deliver that is one based on the actual usage of cars in terms of time and place. Any other system creates perverse incentives which make it impossible to implement.
If you are really bothered you could zone it based on registered address, and massively increase the fines for mis registration of the car.
Most destinations are already restricted or easily made pay and display - town centres, shopping centres, beauty spots. Don’t need to restrict everywhere, just destinations.
We can want lots of things, but that doesn’t excuse a massive infringement of privacy rights.
Just as Restricting domestic abuse with internal CCTV would have huge societal gains, but totally unacceptable privacy costs.
DynamicSpirit
Established Member
You're again comparing two things that are so totally different in their magnitudes that they really aren't comparable. Firstly because when you are in a car, you are in a public space - and I think it's generally accepted that when you are in a public space, the degree of privacy you expect is vastly lower than you would expect when you are in your own home. Secondly because we are talking about monitoring the locations NOT of people but of CARS. There is a huge difference - not least because, even if you know the location of a car, that doesn't by itself tell you who is inside it (although admittedly you may be able to get clues from other pieces of information).
Cars are really, seriously, not people. They are huge machines that, although very useful when used correctly, are also incredibly dangerous when used incorrectly, and which, by their nature usually spend almost their entire lives occupying public spaces - and in the process preventing those public space being used by others. We already accept the significant loss of privacy involved in having all cars registered to particular owners, and that owning a car entails a significant responsibility (for example, insurance, etc.). To my mind, it's misleading to compare monitoring where a car is with something that specifically targets looking at people.
NotATrainspott
Established Member
- Joined
- 2 Feb 2013
- Messages
- 3,224
What is mis-registration? If you have two homes, what proportion of the time do you need to spend in one to be able to register your car there? How does this fix someone driving in from the countryside into a major city each day? Any and all systems you create will be attacked when the financial incentive to do so begins to appear. How would rental or commercial vehicles be taxed? A lorry doesn't necessarily have a single home base if it's owned by a large company. If I rent a car at Heathrow Airport and drive it into Camden, but my driving license is registered in the Western Isles, then what do I pay? Why should someone parking their car for 6 hours near home in Wick, then driving down to London, then parking for 6 hours in Camden be charged a different amount of tax than someone parking 6 hours near home in Camden, then driving to Wick, then parking for 6 hours in Wick?
This is why the simplest system wins. A tax system based on the facts of where the vehicle was at any given time is exceedingly hard to cheat. It is not trivial to hide the location of your 2 tonnes of steel on the public highway. ANPR fraud (e.g. plate cloning) would be fairly easy to notice given that the same number plate turned up in two places with no corresponding data trail of how it got there.
There is no limit to the creativity people have in finding new places to park if they can save a little bit of cash. That's why a tracking system works - it doesn't care how clever you are.
Unfortunately for you, your new EV with its fancy permanent tracking system and remote connectivity with your phone already creates exactly the digital data trail you're afraid of. Some car finance companies demand the installation of a tracking device to minimise difficulty of repossession. Uber know all the journeys you've been on through their app. Governments already have the legal powers to demand this data from those who hold it when they are in possession of a valid court order.
Only if you connect it to your phone and let it do that.
You are proposing a huge invasion of privacy for little significant gain.
NotATrainspott
Established Member
- Joined
- 2 Feb 2013
- Messages
- 3,224
The data is still recorded even if you don't connect it to your phone. That data is vital for the development of driver assistance and autonomous driving features.
There is essentially no incremental privacy loss on top of what already exists and what will become unavoidable. The world is changing and customers are demanding things from car manufacturers which can only be done by recording vehicle location data.
The gain is that you can, for the first time, accurately and efficiently charge vehicle use according to the negative externalities it produces. Efficient charging means more draconian measures (e.g. banning vehicles entirely) in certain places is no longer required, meaning that less damage can be done. Again, you need a system which will allow nominally car-free urban areas to continue to function with delivery vehicles and occasional visits by private ones.
Is it recorded against your name by a government organisation?
Clearly untrue. The government currently doesn’t know where my car is, nor where it was last Thursday, nor can they pull up everywhere I have driven in the last year.
The stuff car makers need can be anonymised without affecting its usefulness, and isn’t held by the government.
That isn’t enough of a gain to justify the huge cost and privacy implications over using a simpler, blunter method.
NotATrainspott
Established Member
- Joined
- 2 Feb 2013
- Messages
- 3,224
Fundamentally irrelevant when private actors are compelled to hand over any information relevant for a lawful investigation upon receipt of a court order.
The difference vs the iPhone decryption cases is that then, the government was demanding that Apple create a new version of its software with nerfed encryption. The problem then was that the data being demanded was encrypted client-side on the phone, and Apple themselves did not have the key to unlock it. The new software would have loosened the security that prevents brute-force attacks to find the encryption key.
Vehicle positioning data is clearly highly confidential and would be subject to GDPR privacy restrictions (as in, companies would be obliged to keep it encrypted whenever possible and restrict access to it to the absolute bare minimum range of systems and individuals within their organisations). However, companies would have access to it in an unencrypted form - it wouldn't be particularly useful to collect, otherwise - and hence they will be subject to lawful court orders for access by the state.
Because you have an old car. We're talking about the world 10, 20 years from now, when EVs have completely and utterly replaced internal combustion vehicles for almost all use-cases. ICE vehicle use-cases will be restricted to the use-cases we now have for horses. Even the poorest in society will find it cheaper to own and operate an EV than an ICE, just as horses rapidly became more expensive than ICE vehicles a century ago. We'll just stop bothering to tax old vintage ICE vehicles as it won't be worth the effort, as they'll be used only for leisure and historical purposes.
For certain use-cases, yes. The GDPR creates an obligation for data controllers to anonymise or pseudonymise their data whenever the identifiable form is not required for a use-case. For instance, there is no need to hand the complete, identifiable vehicle data set to the marketing department for them to come up with stats on vehicle usage for publication. The identifiable forms must be held for no longer than is required for the business purpose, or to follow relevant laws. Identifiable data is already being held for the purpose of meeting RIPA and other legislation.
And as I've exhaustively demonstrated, the simpler, blunter methods you advocate are too susceptible to attack for them to be viable ways of taxing vehicle use. The aim is to accurately account for the negative externalities of vehicle use on the public highway. A system like this would not be acceptable for tracking pedestrians or cyclists because the negative externalities they produce on the public highway are so small as to be irrelevant. This would likely also apply for various categories of small vehicles designed for only local use, and for the few legacy ICE vehicles kept for historical purposes.
Tetchytyke
Veteran Member
All fuels*- including domestic gas and electricity- are taxed.
(*unless you are a diesel vehicle user and make a home-brew using old chip fat).
There are many ways of replacing the lost revenue from fuel tax- income tax would be the fairest, of course, but you could also charge stamp duties on vehicle purchases, or higher road tax.
As an aside, I find it interesting how so many people immediately jump to *the* most regressive form of taxation, which is a fixed charge per mile regardless of income.
Last edited:
Gaining a court order against a reluctant private firm is a massively bigger step than just linking into a government database and hoovering whatever they want.
That Apple vigorously defended the rights of their customers, unlike a government organisation would
You have not demonstrated that the marginal gain is worth the huge damage to our right to privacy
Vespa
Established Member
I can see the discussion getting a bit Kafkaesque.
Simply put. I would refuse to cooperate with such a scheme that is open to abuse, infringe on my civil liberties and a potential government cash cow to be milked dry, is incompatable with British values. expectation of privacy and freedom from state control.
Criminal will find ways to disable monitoring devices of any kind, they are not going to obey any laws anyway.
Give someone too much power, they will abuse it.
Josef Goebbels mollified the German people concerned about Gestapo State monitoring by saying
"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear"
And we know what happened with that !
Any attempts to impose such a scheme against an angry electorate will find that they'll wish they hadn't and it will make the Poll Tax riot look like a genteel tea party by comparison.
Simply put. I would refuse to cooperate with such a scheme that is open to abuse, infringe on my civil liberties and a potential government cash cow to be milked dry, is incompatable with British values. expectation of privacy and freedom from state control.
Criminal will find ways to disable monitoring devices of any kind, they are not going to obey any laws anyway.
Give someone too much power, they will abuse it.
Josef Goebbels mollified the German people concerned about Gestapo State monitoring by saying
"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear"
And we know what happened with that !
Any attempts to impose such a scheme against an angry electorate will find that they'll wish they hadn't and it will make the Poll Tax riot look like a genteel tea party by comparison.
Last edited:
cactustwirly
Established Member
Why do we need to use GPS, the mileage is recorded at every MOT, so can't you use that?
NotATrainspott
Established Member
- Joined
- 2 Feb 2013
- Messages
- 3,224
That assumption no longer holds in a world where people fit photovoltaic panels to their roof and use that to charge their cars. We're talking about a seismic shift in energy away from the world of centralised sources. The more you tax centralised sources, the faster the shift away from them will be. In future, all free roof surfaces (excluding heritage buildings) will end up being covered in PV cells by default. Even if the economics don't stack up to fit them at an arbitrary time, they will when the capital cost of a PV roof is the same as a standard replacement roof. That's already essentially true with PV roof tiles like the Tesla Solar Roof.
There are two reasons the state may wish to tax something.
The first is to raise revenue, to cover spending in health and education and so on.
The second is to attempt to impose the costs negative externalities on private transactions. We want to tax carbon emissions because otherwise, people will buy and use carbon fuels without considering the impact they have on other people. The same is true of vehicle use. Pedestrians and cyclists do essentially no damage to the public highway. Vehicles cause potholes, make noise, cause tyre pollution, take up valuable space and make areas unpleasant for non-car owners to be.
Taxation for the purpose of covering negative externalities is very different to taxation for revenue raising. The optimum amount of tax to raise against negative externalities is £0. That's because the tax is only paid when damage is being done, and that damage exceeds the gain from that additional revenue. With a comprehensive carbon tax, the end result would be £0 revenue as everyone in the economy completely de-carbonised, so there'd be no carbon emitted and no carbon tax to pay.
This is a largely orthogonal concern to the progressive/regressive nature of taxation. Negative externalities are bad regardless of how rich or poor the person causing them is. We don't give white van men a pass on flytipping rules just to give them a leg up against the bid waste firms like Veolia!
In any case, negative externalities are almost entirely a regressive cost. The people who will suffer the most from pollution of any kind are the poor. The rich have the means to avoid the impacts. Rich people can live in nice traffic-calmed suburbs and then drive through the car-dominated dense urban areas where poor people have little choice but to live.
Companies comply with legal court orders and government requests within hours. Apple, Google etc have entire departments whose only role is to respond to these requests, within hours. We heard about the iPhone case because the request was not legal and it was well outside the norms of data handover.
The monitoring device is not a black box hooked up in the dashboard somewhere. It is the car. Your next new car is a computer that happens to have the ability to drive around. VW have been churning out ID.3 EVs for months now but they're all waiting in storage, because the computer software on board is not ready yet. The car is fundamentally useless without that software being complete. This isn't some crazy Silicon Valley startup with mad ideas about how the world will work. This is Volkswagen AG, and this same MEB technology is going to be fitted to every VW, Seat, Skoda and low-end Audi produced from the middle of the decade onwards.
Because you can't tell the difference between a 2 mile drive taking Tarquin and Constance to school in Camden and a 20 mile drive across the Western Isles to pick up a pint of milk. We don't want the first one, but the second one is unavoidable. A purely mileage-based scheme would either undercharge unnecessary urban drives or cripple rural areas.
DynamicSpirit
Established Member
I disagree. Income tax would be grossly unfair because it would mean that people who don't drive, and therefore don't do anything to cause congestion (or pollution from eg. tyre particulates that even electric vehicles cause) will be paying for that congestion and pollution. The point of charging vehicle owners for road use is that you are getting them to pay for the harm to other people and to wider society that they cause by driving. And the fairest thing is surely for the people who choose to cause the harm to be the ones who pay for it.
(Taxing by road use is also the most accurate thing from the point of view of a functioning free market, since it means that people who drive are more accurately paying the actual costs of their motoring).
DynamicSpirit
Established Member
The same argument could be applied to any law on the statute book! I'm pretty sure you wouldn't be arguing to abolish the laws against - for example, violence, or burglary or fraud on the grounds that criminals can and do commit crimes and find ways to evade detection. So why should it be any different for a law requiring motor vehicles to have devices that allow you to accurately charge for road use? (And which coincidentally would be likely to a dramatic effect in making many serious crimes harder to commit) The point of having the laws is that the (hopefully) deter most people from breaking them.
bussnapperwm
Established Member
- Joined
- 18 May 2014
- Messages
- 1,510
Easy way to do it. Add a tax onto the insurance premium and make it a legal requirement to inform the insurance company of the reading on the odometer at each application/renewal, with a tax of (say) £1 per 10 miles.
cactustwirly
Established Member
There is a thing as insurance premium tax...
DynamicSpirit
Established Member
How does that solve the problem that in a fair system, you'd almost certainly wanting to charge more for a mile driven in Camden than a mile driven in the Orkney Islands? (Because the mile driven in Camden causes a lot more harm to more people)
Tetchytyke
Veteran Member
Everyone in the country benefits from the road network and should, therefore, pay for its upkeep. Even those who do not drive will take buses, or use bicycles, or buy essential goods that are delivered using the road network, or they will work for employers who rely on the road network.
Since when was the aim a "functioning free market"? A functioning transport system would be better.
"Polluter pays" is all very well except it always unfairly penalised the poorest, who generally won't have the option of choosing when they travel. It's why poor people have been priced off Britain's railways at peak times, with the negative consequences that causes.
And that's before we consider the practicalities. If you charge solely by time period then it's not about congestion, it's about price-gouging. And if you charge by specific road, you just encourage rat-running; it's also pretty much impossible to always track someone to a specific road using commercial GPS.
The whole thing is a solution looking for a problem.
And you know it would be like speed limits - the rich folk well connected to the plod/councillors would get their roads made expensive to discourage proles from driving by.
Tetchytyke
Veteran Member
Yup, as you see now with bus routes and the siting of bus stops, etc. 20p for residents, £20 for the scuffers. You know they'd do it in Darras Hall!
And on top of that do you then give residents a discount (and if so how far does the discount extend, end of your street?) or is it just tough cheese if you live on a busy main road in the inner city (again, more likely to be poorer people).
Tetchytyke
Veteran Member
Nonsense. The sole and only point of tax is to raise revenue. The answer is always "more tax". Governments just have to find the question.
We've seen that with road tax. Emissions dropped off a cliff, so most people were paying a lot less tax. So the government changed the rules. My 2019 Qashqai is cleaner than the 2009 version, yet my car tax is £120 a year more expensive than the 2009 version. It's almost as though the objective is revenue raising.
More tax. More intrusion into my personal life to enforce the tax. And more tax to pay for the enforcement. And more intrusion to enforce the extra tax. And then even more tax to pay for all that enforcement...
If using public transport was the objective, a return from Manchester to London wouldn't cost £360 and a return on the bus from my old house in Newcastle to the nearest shopping park (just under 1.5 miles, ample free parking) wouldn't be £3.80!
Vespa
Established Member
The difference is Just laws and Unjust laws.
To enact anti car laws with aim of fleecing motorists would be considered Unjust laws and contrary to peoples values and freedom of movemrnt, this route leads to civil disobedience.
Just laws are those against societal morality, it will not deter criminals who will break them anyway, it does set out that its morally wrong and will be punished with defined jail terms.
I do realise this is a pro rail group, many of us on this site are car owners and do travel long distances instead of using trains where convenient as railways don't cover everywhere is convenient enough.
Punitive laws against car drivers will only back fire.
NotATrainspott
Established Member
- Joined
- 2 Feb 2013
- Messages
- 3,224
But some point are more responsible than others for the damage that gets done to the road network! The heavier the vehicle, the more damage is done. That is true at every scale. Bicycles essentially do no damage at all - cycle paths are made of much thinner asphalt and are repaired far less often than normal roads. The cost and complexity of tracking bicycles well exceeds the cost of the damage they do to road surfaces, while the use of bicycles has a net positive effect on public health.
A functioning transport system depends on the true costs of different options being exposed to the people making decisions. Charge people the appropriate amount for driving and they'll see that taking public transport is actually a cheaper and more efficient option not only for them, but for everyone in society. The only way to make the roads work for those who have no choice but to use them is to make sure that everyone who is better off using something else is able and knows to use that something else. This is a fundamental fact.
The poorest in society do not own cars. This is an absolute shock to most middle class people. They use taxis and buses instead - not even trains. Therefore, any and all measures that help with car ownership completely bypass these people. Indeed, the easier it is to own a car, the harder it is to get by as someone who doesn't own one. Making it easy for people to own cars means there are fewer buses and taxis and their services are more expensive, slower and less reliable.
The poorest in society are the people who suffer the most from pollution. The places which end up being unpleasant to live in because of cars end up being the places where poor people are forced to live.
You use the tax levels as a way to spread out and reduce traffic loads. What you then do with that money is up to you. If you are concerned about the impact of the tax on the poorest in society, then why not use the extra money you receive to subsidise transport for them? If you really needed to, you could even use it to subsidise private motoring for poor people. If you charge a poor person £5 a day for driving in the peak, but then subsidise then by £5 a day in return, then they end up no worse off. However, because the tax and subsidy are still separate, it's possible for the poor person to still see that going earlier or later or taking the bus or whatever else would save them money.
A tax which results in people polluting less results in the government having to spend less money later on to fix the problems it causes. We want to tax negative externalities because eventually the rest of us have to deal with those consequences somehow. A mechanism to reduce expenditure is functionally the same as one to increase revenue but more efficient.
And besides, this is coming up because the existing tax system we have relied on will simply cease to function once EVs become the norm. We've never had to think about this until now.
The emissions rules which dictate the current tax system are an attempt to encourage car manufacturers and consumers to shift to cleaner cars. The rules are not fully thought-through, and that is why they've had to update them. The idea that a car emitting 99g/km of CO2 should pay nothing while a car emitting 200g/km is nonsense. The damage is done for every gram of CO2 emitted. Banding it so that there's some arbitrary level at which we decide to stop charging is just about giving car manufacturers something they can aim at and actually reach. Once enough manufacturers are reaching (well, according to their test reports!) those arbitrary bands, the government has no choice but to go and reset the bands to another similarly-reachable target.
A far better solution would have been to implement this through a carbon tax on petrol and diesel. We know that a litre of a type of fuel creates exactly a certain amount of CO2, so we can turn a charge per gram of CO2 emitted back into a tax level on fuel. That would have avoided these arbitrary bands which lead to absolutely terrible decisions being made. As a car manufacturer there's no incentive to do anything but the bare minimum required to reach the zero taxation band. That's why so many plug-in hybrid models have exactly 50km of range - that's all you needed to qualify as a zero-emissions vehicle under EU rules. A pure carbon-through-fuel tax would mean there would always be an incentive to increase efficiency and ultimately stop burning fossil fuels entirely.
Ah yes, because the complete failing of the current system where cars are unfairly subsidised and public transport is unfairly ignored by the state is clearly the best sign that a future system where car use is efficiently taxed couldn't work.
What about the people who don't own a car?
Any and all rules which make life easier for those who own a car make life harder for those who do not own a car! How is that fair?
I have nothing against car use when that is the most efficient way to do a journey. The purpose of this taxation system is to ensure that these sorts of journeys are not unduly burdened. There is a long tail of journeys which are unusual and difficult by anything other than a private car journey. No one is ever going to switch to the train to drive from Norwich to the Western Isles. On a journey like that, you will be on the dedicated trunk road network where the negative externalities of motoring are minimised.
The problem journeys are the ones which could be done by some other means. People driving in from dense suburbs into denser urban areas. People using their cars to take their kids to school even though it might be faster to cycle there instead of being caught up in traffic created by other people making similarly pointless journeys.
Any magical aggregated tax system that avoids tracking precise locations of vehicle usage will inevitably bias in favour of the school run and away from the people doing unavoidable journeys. That is what is not just or fair. Why should the people driving from Norwich to the Western Isles suffer because someone wants to take Tarquin and Constance the 2 miles to school in a 2 tonne SUV?
Vespa
Established Member
Anti car taxing scheme is punitive, it will be oppossed, what do non car owners have to do with this ? What's your point ?
Why punish car owners not non car owners ?
Why favour one group over another ?
All it will do is turn it into a government cash machine with little to show for it, improvement to railways and public transport is not guaranteed, I don't trust the government to use these powers wisely.....
Unintended consequences......
Why punish car owners not non car owners ?
Why favour one group over another ?
All it will do is turn it into a government cash machine with little to show for it, improvement to railways and public transport is not guaranteed, I don't trust the government to use these powers wisely.....
Unintended consequences......
DynamicSpirit
Established Member
You misunderstand the point. When you drive a car, other people incur costs because of your actions. Your car may cause congestion, which holds up other people's journeys. It will cause pollution which other people have to breathe in (electric vehicles will reduce but not entirely solve that problem). On some cases, other people die because of the pollution your car causes. The energy in most cases causes greenhouse emissions which everyone else has to pay to fix (or workaround). You're slightly harming your health, which then puts pressure on the health service that everyone else has to pay for. Even when you're not driving, if you park your car on a public street then you're preventing other people from using that public space and possibly - depending where you've parked - causing an obstruction that disrupts other traffic. Your car will inevitably cause some damage to the road surface, which other people via taxation have to pay to put right. Your car causes noise which makes life less pleasant for other people. And in locations where pedestrians are around or where people live or go shopping etc., it generally makes the environment less pleasant for those people. Each mile you drive also carries a risk of an accident, in which pedestrians etc. are more likely than you to be injured or killed (thanks to the protective shell you are sitting inside). If the Government does not impose a cost on motorists to drive, then you're getting the benefits of driving, while everyone else has to pay the very significant costs. That is not fair and wrong. It turns out it's also economically damaging because, if people don't pay the full costs of their decisions, that causes a distortion of the market, which - according to standard accepted economic theory - is likely to harm overall wealth in the country (the mechanism is a bit hard to explain in a post like this but the effect is real).
A scheme to charge cars appropriately is not punitive - if implemented correctly, it's a way of making sure that drivers pay the actual cost of their decision to drive, rather than forcing everyone else - including non-drivers - to indirectly pay.
Last edited:
- Status