Could a pay-per-use road charging scheme powered by vehicle data reporting be viable?

DynamicSpirit said:

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.

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Thats what Vehicle Excise Tax is for otherwise known as "car tax" , pashing motorists with more tax when they have no option but to use a car is the wrong way to go about it.

Persuasion, incentive and better transport links is the better route.

There's no public transport to where I work, for timed I'm due to start otherwise I would have used it already, I work in an industrial estate in the middle of Nowhereville, I got transferred there.

People who don't have cars don't pay VED, insurance, parking, fuel, maintenance, purchase cost, its actually cheaper not to own a car, its necessity for some.

NotATrainspott said:

But some point are more responsible than others for the damage that gets done to the road network!

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HGVs and buses do pretty much all the serious damage to the road network, not private motor vehicles. So if we're talking about "damage" then HGV levies will need to rise massively. I can't wait to see the effect that has on inflation when the levies get passed on to consumers at the supermarket.

And if we make private bus operators pay for their damage, guess what happens to bus fares!

NotATrainspott said:

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?

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Your rationale is a garbled mess. We were talking about paying for damage to roads, or emissions, and now we're talking about the school run and SUVs and your subjective opinion about what is an essential journey; people drive the school run because they work and don't have a spare 90 minutes in a morning for a 2-mile stroll there and a 2-mile stroll back, but long-distance journeys are rarely "unavoidable" and drivers could always take the train.

DynamicSpirit said:

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.

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Infrastructure damage is primarily caused by heavy vehicles- HGVs and buses. It's fair to say everyone benefits from those vehicles being on the road.

It's also fair to say the logistics and bus industries don't pay for the true cost of the damage they do. But if you pass the burden to them, you get inflation in the shops and higher bus fares, so it's treated as national infrastructure.

Remind how a policy of "making the user pay" is going on the railways? Oh, it's now £360 for a return from Manchester to London. That'll persuade people to take the train

Vespa said:

Thats what Vehicle Excise Tax is for otherwise known as "car tax" , pashing motorists with more tax when they have no option but to use a car is the wrong way to go about it.

Persuasion, incentive and better transport links is the better route.

There's no public transport to where I work, for timed I'm due to start otherwise I would have used it already, I work in an industrial estate in the middle of Nowhereville, I got transferred there.

People who don't have cars don't pay VED, insurance, parking, fuel, maintenance, purchase cost, its actually cheaper not to own a car, its necessity for some.

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Have you ever considered the possibility that many motorists, yourself not included, could in fact switch away from private motoring?

The only way to ensure that there is space on the roads for journeys which cannot be done by another means is to reduce the number of non-essential journeys. You can add all the road capacity in the world and it will make no different - the easier it is to drive, the more unnecessary journeys will be done to use up that space.

And of course, the outcome of a tax like this would be to encourage people to make use of public transport more across the entire UK. That would mean bus services would have far more passengers, making them run more efficiently. I'm not talking about squeezing more people onto the limited bus services that do run. If you can increase public transport takeup by 4x, then you can run 4x as many buses to handle that number of passengers without affecting cost per passenger. However, because the roads would then be clearer, the bus services would then run faster and more reliably than before, so you'd get an extra bunch of passengers on top of that. Then, because the bus service is just more frequent in any case, even more people will find the bus to be a more effective option than using the car, so you'll get even more demand, and hence even more justification to run better bus services. Rural and suburban areas will go from no or minimal bus services to a fast and sensibly frequent service. Denser urban areas will start to see passenger demand exceed the capabilities of bus services and will now for the first time in decades be able to economically justify more intensive measures like trams and metro systems. It's a virtuous cycle that results in ever-better places to live. How nice would it be if you actually didn't need to drive at all most of the time? You could save money and time - that metro service would cut a huge amount of time off a congested car commute.

The fact that successive governments have assumed that everyone can own a car is a critical reason why we have poor people today. In many areas of the country, jobs and homes are built in places which are fundamentally inaccessible to non-motorists. Poor people can't get jobs that they could do well, nor find homes that would suit them and their families better. A world based around cars is one of tyranny against the people who can't make use of them. That includes the young, old and disabled too. How many old people are fundamentally dependent on being able to drive to have any quality of life whatsoever? How many road accidents and tragedies are caused by old people driving? A world of public transport is open to everyone, including those who own cars.

Tetchytyke said:

HGVs and buses do pretty much all the serious damage to the road network, not private motor vehicles. So if we're talking about "damage" then HGV levies will need to rise massively. I can't wait to see the effect that has on inflation when the levies get passed on to consumers at the supermarket.

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That would be precisely the point of this system. All vehicles would be charged according to the cost of the damage they cause to the public highway and the environment.

If that means the supermarket industry has to pay an extra £10bn a year in tax, then the government can choose to subsidise groceries or individual incomes by that same amount and individual people won't be any worse off. However, the incentive would be there for supermarkets to invest in more efficient ways to move their goods around.

It's all about the marginal changes which can be caused by the tax shift. Today there are all sorts of measures which are eminently technologically feasible which don't happen because the costs of the existing system aren't accounted correctly. For instance, we have plenty of lorries driving containers from railhead to railhead because the cost of putting it on a freight train is too high compared to the cost of driving it. We know that rail services cause far fewer negative externalities than lorries - trains are much more efficient against friction and railway tracks can handle far more weight without being damaged.

And if we make private bus operators pay for their damage, guess what happens to bus fares!

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The government giveth and the government taketh away. If we create a tax system which charges bus companies £5bn a year, then it is our prerogative to put that £5bn back into bus company subsidises. This is still entirely effective because it means bus companies are still incentivised to reduce the damage their services cause while still running the same service. The only way that you're going to get bus manufacturers to start competing on how light and non-damaging their bus models would be is to make the costs obvious. While bus services are good for society, it's still better for society if they are run with less damaging vehicles.

We're talking about something not incomparable to track access fees. ROSCOs are incentivised to order lighter train models since their TOC customers will have to pay less money to NR. NR likes that because they'll then have less maintenance to do.

Your rationale is a garbled mess. We were talking about paying for damage to roads, or emissions, and now we're talking about the school run and SUVs and your subjective opinion about what is an essential journey; people drive the school run because they work and don't have a spare 90 minutes in a morning for a 2-mile stroll there and a 2-mile stroll back, but long-distance journeys are rarely "unavoidable" and drivers could always take the train.

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Because all of these things are true. We need a system which can handle all of the things which go wrong with people using the public highway. Some of these things are true today and in future, and some of these things will go away with EVs.

I'm not the one to decide that a journey is non-essential. By charging a fair and transparent price for use of a road at any one time, we leave that decision up to the person making the journey. Simply encouraging them to not drive is not an option. People respond to financial incentives far more than anything else. One of the reasons for that is that we use financial incentives everywhere else, and non-financial incentives are not often able to overcome financial ones.

Here's a thought. When we start charging parents £5 for their drive to school in the morning, it is going to create a lot of annoyance amongst parents who need to take their kids to school. When they're not going to be effective at stopping the policy on a political level, they're going to be left trying to come up with something else. Maybe one bright spark in the school gate WhatsApp group will realise that there are enough parents living close enough together that it would be efficient to talk to a bus company about setting up their own school bus. With 50 parents paying £5 a day, that would mean anything under £250 a day would mean a saving for all of them. So, they go about setting it up (I expect this would be in some way orchestrated through the education authority, but whatever) and they all start saving a little bit of money. However, now, instead of 50 2 tonne SUVs (even electric ones!) clogging up the roads and possibly running down pedestrians because they're too busy on their phones to pay attention to the road, you now have one 10 tonne bus with one professional driver. This bus service means parents don't even need to drive their kids to school any more, saving them time too.

The option of setting up a bus route exists today. Why doesn't it happen? Because if some bright spark suggests it to the school gate WhatsApp group, they're going to say it'd cost £3 a day and get nowhere. People already own a car - why would they want to pay £3 voluntarily? The idea would go nowhere. 50 2 tonne SUVs would continue to descend on the school gates each day; eventually, one of their parents will hit a pedestrian and send them to hospital; someone who could be gainfully employed as a bus driver ends up not having a job; and parents end up having to waste time whether they like it or not driving their kids to school. This is a fairly good demonstration of how the fact we don't charge for negative externalities results in everyone being worse off.

NotATrainspott said:

The government giveth and the government taketh away. If we create a tax system which charges bus companies £5bn a year, then it is our prerogative to put that £5bn back into bus company subsidises.

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So how does that tally with "paying for the damage caused"? Either bus companies pay or they don't!

Or is the damage OK if it's a mode of transport you personally approve of?

NotATrainspott said:

eventually, one of their parents will hit a pedestrian and send them to hospital

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But what if the school bus driver will confuse the brake for the accelerator and mow down a group of pedestrians?

After all, that would never happen. Oh, wait:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/225838.stm

NotATrainspott said:

By charging a fair and transparent price for use of a road

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A fair and transparent price would be a flat rate. A flat rate wouldn't need any of your solutions looking for problems.

I'm guessing, though, that you would choose to have variable pricing, increasing prices for journeys you personally don't think are necessary?

NotATrainspott said:

Have you ever considered the possibility that many motorists, yourself not included, could in fact switch away from private motoring?

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Everyone *can* switch away from private motor cars. Go back to canal barges or, heck, go the whole hog and go back to horses and stagecoaches.

I find NotATrainspott post to be a bit of a garbled mish mash of wishful way out there thinking process that has no bearing on the real world.

I think to im going to have to agree to disagree on this and move on into the real world.

Tetchytyke said:

So how does that tally with "paying for the damage caused"? Either bus companies pay or they don't!

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Imagine you're a smoker. The government decides to tax you £5 per day extra on cigarettes but gives that £5 back to you. If you do nothing you are financially unaffected. But if you give up smoking you are £5 a day richer.

In the same way bus companies will be unaffected directly, because the government recognises that buses make an important contibution to getting people around in a more sustainable way so it would be a bad idea to make them less economic. But they have an incentive to move to lighter vehicles that would damage the roads less and pay less tax.

Tetchytyke said:

So how does that tally with "paying for the damage caused"? Either bus companies pay or they don't!

Or is the damage OK if it's a mode of transport you personally approve of?

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Bus company has old fleet of heavy buses. New tax comes in and they have to pay £1m a year extra in tax. To ensure we don't lose essential bus services, the company gets that £1m back immediately.

Bright spark in the bus company realises that buying a new fleet of lightweight buses will cut that tax down to £500k a year. The bus company orders the new buses, gets rid of the old ones, and their tax payment drops to £500k a year. They initially still receive £1m a year in subsidy - they get £500k extra profit because they made the quick decision to switch to more efficient vehicles.

Over time, as the government watches bus companies replace their fleets, they see that they can reduce the amount of subsidy without it affecting bus services. Any companies which have been lazy and not bothered to replace their fleets would have their subsidy cut by the same amount as the ones who have been proactive. The proactive companies aren't burdened by the tax so much, and the lazy companies lose out.

While bus companies are ideally contracted by the state to run services, the actual operation of them is left to the company's directors. The state just needs to know that buses of a suitable passenger quality are being used on the right number of services per day. The efficiency of those buses doesn't really need to be part of the service contract - it's just a cost the company would have to consider when bidding to run bus services. It may be more efficient to keep a fleet of older, less efficient vehicles in reserve for only during the peaks than to replace all of them with more efficient vehicles. This isn't unlike how cargo airlines make use of old, inefficient aircraft that can't be used in passenger service any more. Cargo planes spent a lot of time sitting around doing nothing waiting for an overnight shipment leg, so it doesn't matter so much that they pollute more when they're in service.

But what if the school bus driver will confuse the brake for the accelerator and mow down a group of pedestrians?

After all, that would never happen. Oh, wait:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/225838.stm

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You really are scraping the bottom of the barrel when you're using exceedingly rare examples of bus crashes to dismiss the idea that replacing 50 cars with 1 bus is a bad idea.

A fair and transparent price would be a flat rate. A flat rate wouldn't need any of your solutions looking for problems.

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Ah yes, because the people in rural areas are going to be absolutely delighted that their vehicle usage tax is high so that Tarquin and Constance can be driven 2 miles to school in Camden in the back seats of a 2 tonne SUV without inconveniencing their mummy and daddy.

You can say that a flat rate solves problems all you like. It doesn't make it true.

I'm guessing, though, that you would choose to have variable pricing, increasing prices for journeys you personally don't think are necessary?

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You don't actually need humans to set the prices. With the vehicle data, it'll be possible to tell how many journeys are being made. We'll be able to experiment with different prices in different areas, roads and times.

Everyone *can* switch away from private motor cars. Go back to canal barges or, heck, go the whole hog and go back to horses and stagecoaches.

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If you need to use straw men in your argument, then you're not winning.

Vespa said:

I find NotATrainspott post to be a bit of a garbled mish mash of wishful way out there thinking process that has no bearing on the real world.

I think to im going to have to agree to disagree on this and move on into the real world.

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The world is a brutal and unforgiving place which is getting more and more complicated with every passing day. There is no viable alternative. The wishy-washing thinking is when you think you can apply the failed ideas of yesteryear to fix the problems of today and tomorrow.

NotATrainspott said:

You really are scraping the bottom of the barrel when you're using exceedingly rare examples of bus crashes

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You're the one who brought up crashes, not me.

NotATrainspott said:

Ah yes, because the people in rural areas are going to be absolutely delighted that their vehicle usage tax is high so that Tarquin and Constance can be driven 2 miles to school in Camden in the back seats of a 2 tonne SUV without inconveniencing their mummy and daddy.

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The more miles you drive the more damage you do to roads and the more gases you emit. So, using your logic, they should pay more.

Or is it really that your new idea is actually not about damage or pollution and more about you disagreeing with some journeys and wanting to punish people who do things you don't agree with?

I'm also not sure what relevance "a 2 tonne SUV" has to anything, given that the top five most popular cars in the UK are all small hatchbacks, and the most popular SUV weighs well under 2000kg.

edwin_m said:

Would you charge the same for an elderly person who can't walk far and just drives their Ford Fiesta short distances at quieter times, as for the young "executive" who drives their SUV everywhere including to the office in the city centre and the gym?

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If we're charging for "damage and emissions" then yes. Or are we really just wanting to rinse people we don't like driving cars we don't agree with?

Sounds like envy to me.

edwin_m said:

Imagine you're a smoker. The government decides to tax you £5 per day extra on cigarettes but gives that £5 back to you. If you do nothing you are financially unaffected. But if you give up smoking you are £5 a day richer.

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I'm not sure what your point is?

If "damager pays", then bus companies should pay more because it is the weight of the vehicle that does the damage to the road surface. Why would we be giving them a tax rebate?

If they buy lighter buses then lovely, they pay less. But why would we be giving them a tax rebate?

Tetchytyke said:

You're the one who brought up crashes, not me.

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You used an exceedingly rare example of a bus crash as a counterpoint to my point that 50 cars being replaced with one professionally-driven bus means a massive increase in safety for all.

School buses are the safest mode of transportation.

The more miles you drive the more damage you do to roads and the more gases you emit. So, using your logic, they should pay more.

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There are different negative externalities involved in vehicle use. These are:

Carbon emissions per unit of fuel used.
This is an area where there's no difference in damage caused by burning a litre of petrol in Camden or in the Western Isles, because the damage it causes is global rather than local. Carbon emissions alone are able to be efficiently taxed by a carbon tax, applied as a tax on petrol and diesel. For this externality alone there is no need for a vehicle charging scheme.

Other emissions like NO2, noise and particulates (brakes, tyres, road, partial combustion products).
This is a much harder area to tax because the impacts of this pollution is largely local, and tied to population density. 100g of NO2 emitted on the Western Isles does a lot less harm than 100g of NO2 emitted in Camden, because there are far fewer people around to suffer as a result and there is greater ability for the natural environment to remove the pollution. In urban areas, NO2 and other particulates are able to linger around because tall buildings prevent the wind clearing it away. Efficiently charging for the externality does requite some degree of vehicle tracking here, on top of what we know about the state of the vehicle.

As an example, we can avoid local NO2 emissions in local areas with hybrid systems. It's okay-ish to emit NO2 driving down the motorway but then switch to electric propulsion when you arrive in town. If you just use an aggregate figure, that might not be true. Let's say the hybrid mode is slower than the diesel mode and it's up to the driver to decide which mode to drive in. How do you force drivers to switch to hybrid mode when in town? If the car reports its hybrid/diesel state, then hybrid driving would be made cheaper than diesel driving, especially in urban areas.

Road damage
This is dependent on three factors:

• The speed of the vehicle
• The mass of the vehicle
• The nature of the road surface

The first two are obvious but the latter one is interesting, because the negative externality is about the economic and environmental cost of the repairs. Resurfacing a kilometre of road in the Western Isles is different to resurfacing a kilometre of road in Camden. In rural areas, the lower traffic volumes make it easier to do the repairs, and less localised pollution affects other people.

Different types of roads are also going to be damaged at different rates. Modern well-designed highways can take more punishment than older ones. You need a way to charge more to drive an HGV over a bridge from the 18th century than one from the 21st. It may be more efficient for a lorry to drive a longer distance to avoid such a bridge - an efficient charging scheme that takes everything into account would allow for this. A pure mileage-based scheme would create perverse incentives for vehicles to take the shortest distance route - e.g. driving through the middle of a town rather than on a bypass.

Space utilisation
The bigger the vehicle and the faster it goes, the more room it needs on the roads. Distances between vehicles have to increase as speed increases to ensure a safe stopping distance between them. This factor is why variable speed limits on motorways can increase capacity by reducing the limit.

The only way to efficiently tax this is to know how big a car is, how fast it's going and where it is. There's not much of a problem allowing a 44 tonne lorry to go up and down the motorway network, but there very much is a problem letting it into your local high street.

Bigger cars clearly take up more room than smaller ones. If all you need to do is little errands around town, then why would you need something much bigger than a Smart car? The fact that size is not penalised is creating all sorts of problems. We can't fit as many cars in towns today as we were able to 60 years ago.

Safety
The faster and more you drive, especially in areas where pedestrians and cyclists will be found, the more risk there is of something going terribly wrong. People need to stay on appropriate roads for as long as possible, driving at the correct speed for the road conditions. As I said above, this may even mean driving slightly longer routes - making more use of bypasses and main roads rather than rat runs.

A tracking system would obviously result in speed limits becoming almost impossible to avoid - we'd know you were driving at 30mph in a 20mph zone, and fine the vehicle owner instantaneously.

Obviously the economic outcome of this would be to reduce the number of road deaths and casualties. Each death or injury on our roads is exceedingly expensive for society.

Or is it really that your new idea is actually not about damage or pollution and more about you disagreeing with some journeys and wanting to punish people who do things you don't agree with?

I'm also not sure what relevance "a 2 tonne SUV" has to anything, given that the top five most popular cars in the UK are all small hatchbacks, and the most popular SUV weighs well under 2000kg.

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Some journeys are more essential than others. The charging system would make people re-evaluate whether they are making the best use of resources by using a type of vehicle on a sort of journey. Many will switch to more appropriate travel methods while still being able to make the journey they need to make. Most cars on the road are only being used by 1 person, yet have the space for 5. With a system which penalises vehicle size, people will switch to smaller cars when they're on their own, and only use a larger one when they have no other choice.

Tetchytyke said:

If we're charging for "damage and emissions" then yes. Or are we really just wanting to rinse people we don't like driving cars we don't agree with?

Sounds like envy to me.

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It isn't envy. I could afford a very nice car if I wanted. However, I live in an area where a car is fundamentally unnecessary day-to-day, and I have easily borrowed a car from a car club whenever I have needed one. With these measures, more and more of the country would be able to live like me. The option of private motoring would always be there, but only as one option amongst many.

How nice would it be to not need to put all that money into a depreciating lump of steel? How nice would it be to be able to go out for dinners and get a bit tipsy without needing to worry about getting home again safely?

I'm not sure what your point is?

If "damager pays", then bus companies should pay more because it is the weight of the vehicle that does the damage to the road surface. Why would we be giving them a tax rebate?

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Because we don't want to create a shock in the transport system which would result in undesirable impacts like bus services being cut back at the same time as we've just knocked lots of people out of their cars. We'd end up phasing in the entire system, but we can treat different transport sectors differently. A lot of the value of the policy can be made by just making the existing car fleet drive around less - we don't need to replace all of them yet. Meanwhile, the bus fleet would be under more demand than ever. The damage of holding back bus services would exceed the gains from getting rid of a few less efficient buses.

Actually a simpler proxy for existing fuel duty without tracking everyone’s movements 24/7/365 could be a tax on charging - EV reports each time it is topped up and owner receives an appropriate charge. If the aim is to discourage unnecessary travel it would be neither here nor there whether the electricity was drawn from the national grid or the owner’s personal solar panels.

NotATrainspott said:

We'd end up phasing in the entire system, but we can treat different transport sectors differently.

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So it's not about the damage caused by and the emissions of a vehicle, it's about whether you believe a transport type is acceptable? Now I'm confused!

NotATrainspott said:

The bigger the vehicle and the faster it goes, the more room it needs on the roads.

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Rural driving takes place at higher speed, but you think rural drivers should pay less? Now I'm really confused!

NotATrainspott said:

The fact that size is not penalised is creating all sorts of problems. We can't fit as many cars in towns today as we were able to 60 years ago.

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Source for the second sentence please!

Size is penalised; cars valued at over £40,000 already attract an additional charge.

Tetchytyke said:

So it's not about the damage caused by and the emissions of a vehicle, it's about whether you believe a transport type is acceptable? Now I'm confused!

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Buses are more efficient than private cars at moving people around. This is not rocket science. You look at energy consumption, emissions (of all kinds), space utilisation and accident rate per passenger kilometre and it's a fraction of that of cars. An inefficient bus carrying lots of people runs rings around even the most efficient of personal vehicles. Even if we did charge the full road use of buses from day 1 buses would still be far ahead in efficiency terms. The reason we want to give bus companies more time to adjust is that the costs outweigh the benefits. We're talking about an increase in public transportation usage that would probably put all serviceable buses in the UK back on the roads. It would take some time before bus manufacturers could spin up production of newer, more efficient buses. Car travellers can shift to bus if their own cars aren't efficient enough; where would bus travellers shift?

We want people to continue to be able to move around. We're trying to find a more optimal way to enable that. We know we can shift people out of cars and onto buses and other modes of public and active transportation where that is appropriate. We target the tax at where the biggest gains can be made. There's a lot more good to be done reducing car travel in Camden than there is doing the same in the Western Isles.

Rural driving takes place at higher speed, but you think rural drivers should pay less? Now I'm really confused!

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Is it that difficult to understand that the different negative externalities of driving occur at different rates in different circumstances?

Driving at 60mph down a rural road is unlikely to cause harm. Driving at 60mph down your local high street is likely to end in tragedy. We already accept this through different speed limits.

Source for the second sentence please!

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Have you ever seen how much bigger a modern supermini (Corsa/Fiesta size) is compared to one in the past?

A new Vauxhall Corsa F is 4060mm long by 1765mm wide, and between 980 and 1090kg in mass.

40 years ago, the Corsa/Nova A was 3622mm long by 1532mm wide, and between 735 and 865kg in mass.
The class above Opel Kadett E of the same era was 3998mm long by 1662mm wide, and between 850 and 1010kg in mass.

In 40 years, the most average of cars has grown to be larger than the class above it!

The original Mini was 3054mm long by 1397mm wide, and 580-686kg. A new VW Up! (being a typical A class vehicle) is 3540mm by 1641mm and 929kg.

New cars don't fit in garages built 60 years ago.

Size is penalised; cars valued at over £40,000 already attract an additional charge.

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That's a non-sequitur. You can have big vehicles under that price (notably used ones!) and new small vehicles above that price.

I’m wondering what is the specific problem that the OP is seeking to answer and why such an elaborate solution is the right answer. It seems, although I am open to persuasion otherwise, that the proposal is looking to introduce a charging system which aims to place a value or disbenefit to society on vehicle movements and rewarding or penalising in line with those values. Which are somewhat open to debate.

I also note that the civil liberties arguments have been somewhat lightly dismissed. Perhaps society is ready, perhaps not. I would suggest the government Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation might have a view on how quickly we should move into the realms of these proposals and, crucially, where the notion of trust fits in to this.

87 027 said:

I also note that the civil liberties arguments have been somewhat lightly dismissed.

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I don't think they have. I would be more inclined to say that I haven't seen any serious civil liberties arguments in this thread. What I've seen is several people suggesting that there is something wrong in terms of civil liberties with monitoring where cars are without really saying what the problem is.

The way I would look at it is :

(a) People who use public transport already automatically create a some kind of log of their journeys through the process of buying tickets. For example, TfL has complete data of what journeys I've made for at least the last few months, possibly longer (I'm not sure how long they keep the date for), and if you are on a bus or a train, there's a high chance you are on CCTV. That's all accepted and - as far as I'm aware, relatively non-controversial. Having cars self-report their location isn't quite the same thing, but seems somewhat comparable in terms of the amount of data collection. Those citing 'civil liberties' as a reason not to collect data on location of cars don't seem to have come up with any justification for why it's apparently less acceptable to collect data for cars than it is to collect similar data for public transport users.

(b) If you want to use civil liberties as an argument, then it would help if you could clarify exactly what civil liberty you think is being eroded. What legitimate/ethical activity can you do today that you would not be able to do if cars self-reported their locations for the purposes of road charging?

DynamicSpirit said:

Those citing 'civil liberties' as a reason not to collect data on location of cars don't seem to have come up with any justification for why it's apparently less acceptable to collect data for cars than it is to collect similar data for public transport users

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Public transport does not deliver you to your final destination in the same way a car can. TfLs information will show that your left their system at a certain station, but won't then show where you went after that. Cars may be similar if you park them in a car park and then walk to your final destination, but it's far more likely to be parked directly outside wherever you've gone

DynamicSpirit said:

People who use public transport already automatically create a some kind of log of their journeys

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Only if you choose to use an Oyster card registered to your address. You can opt out and use other methods

DynamicSpirit said:

If you want to use civil liberties as an argument, then it would help if you could clarify exactly what civil liberty you think is being eroded. What legitimate/ethical activity can you do today that you would not be able to do if cars self-reported their locations for the purposes of road charging?

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_privacy#Universal_Declaration_of_Human_Rights

Universal Declaration of Human Rights[edit]
A right to privacy is explicitly stated under Article 12 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honor and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

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Meerkat said:

Only if you choose to use an Oyster card registered to your address. You can opt out and use other methods

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_privacy#Universal_Declaration_of_Human_Rights

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But that doesn't - as far as I can see - answer the question. I asked, "What legitimate/ethical activity can you do today that you would not be able to do if cars self-reported their locations for the purposes of road charging?" The link you provided doesn't appear to specify any legitimate activity that you would be unable to do if cars self-reported their location.

87 027 said:

I’m wondering what is the specific problem that the OP is seeking to answer and why such an elaborate solution is the right answer. It seems, although I am open to persuasion otherwise, that the proposal is looking to introduce a charging system which aims to place a value or disbenefit to society on vehicle movements and rewarding or penalising in line with those values. Which are somewhat open to debate.

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The specific problem moving forward is that you can no longer use fuel consumption as a proxy for vehicle use. The existing tax system already has glaring flaws. When EVs come around, it is going to be exceptionally difficult to even just re-create the existing tax system without creating new flaws on top of it.

If you have to come up with a new tax to replace it, you design the most effective one you can. Mass vehicle tracking wasn't possible in the past but it is a technologically trivial matter moving forward. Doing it means that voters can decide how best to handle traffic and pollution and risks in their area. If a town wants to become a rat-run and for no one to ever get a parking space if they need it, then they could be free to set the road use charges in their area to be low or zero.

I also note that the civil liberties arguments have been somewhat lightly dismissed. Perhaps society is ready, perhaps not. I would suggest the government Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation might have a view on how quickly we should move into the realms of these proposals and, crucially, where the notion of trust fits in to this.

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Meerkat said:

Only if you choose to use an Oyster card registered to your address. You can opt out and use other methods



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_privacy#Universal_Declaration_of_Human_Rights

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These rights are not universal. The principle that some individual rights can be infringed by the state to better protect the rights of others is well-established.

In this case, you have some abstract notion of the right to privacy (a right which is already fairly loose given that your future EV and your current phone are already going to track you and the government will have the right to request that data through a court order) being infringed in order to protect other people's right to life (reduced accidents and pollution) and free enjoyment of their public spaces (fewer cars, driving slower). Giving one person the right to drive a car around means infringing on the rights of people who don't have a car to have that same mobility.

All the government would need to do to make the creation of this scheme legal in the eyes of all human rights courts in the world is to set out exactly this balance. People can take all the court action they like but it won't make the idea of this scheme go away.

The reason this is contentious is that we have a large number of middle class and above people whose personal identities are wrapped up in the 'freedom' that their car gives them. With a car, someone can live in their little suburban castle and stay apart from everyone else other than the people they invite into their life (that inevitably means fewer minorities). The idea that there are people who don't own a car who suffer from the fact that others own their cars is an anathema. The fact that their own children and grandchildren are moving back away from this world into one of cities with public transport and density is incomprehensible. And in the end, the car-based suburban lifestyles of the second half of the 20th century will fail completely once people realise that old age means you can no longer drive, and being on your own in your little suburban castle means you have no one around you to help.

Sounds like you have a bee in your bonnet about those who live in semi-rural areas who have no option to use a car due to public transport being of limited use? Such as using the phrase "Suburban Castle", sounding like envy of those who live in such places

Failing that we could all move back into high-rise tower blocks in urban areas, where use of the car is minimal due to lack of parking & more ability of using public transport, which runs at higher frequency than twice a day, which goes where you want to head to and doesn't take ages. There are some rural bus routes which can take ages to reach the "big town" due to going via all the small villages where it might pick someone up once in a blue moon (because with only 2 buses a day, even the OAP with a freebie pass will drive to the big town, rather than catching the morning bus and hanging around for hours for the afternoon bus.

"Driving at 60mph down a rural road is unlikely to cause harm"

Only some rural roads, there are plenty around this area where the speed limit might be 60 mph, but only fools will travel at that speed due to tight bends and random narrower sections, and also the risk of coming across large animals which have walked out into the road.

Kite159 said:

Sounds like you have a bee in your bonnet about those who live in semi-rural areas who have no option to use a car due to public transport being of limited use? Such as using the phrase "Suburban Castle", sounding like envy of those who live in such places

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I don't envy them - quite the opposite. What we're observing is a shift away from suburbs and back into denser urban areas. That doesn't necessarily mean the end of private gardens - reasonable density can be achieved with terraced housing or by careful urban planning with family homes intermixed with flats. The earliest suburbs (pre-WW2) still work well too, since they were still designed to operate without everyone owning their own car. The key is that people are able to live a reasonable day-to-day life without a car. You have shops, schools, community facilities and the like all within a reasonable walking distance. You also have longer-distance public transport within easy reach, so it's possible to head into a nearby larger town or city for more specialised work, shopping, leisure or educational purposes.

I'm lucky enough to own a traditional Victorian flat that will be only a few minutes' walk from a tram stop in a few years. The quality of life I have here leaves nothing to complain or be envious about.

Failing that we could all move back into high-rise tower blocks in urban areas, where use of the car is minimal due to lack of parking & more ability of using public transport, which runs at higher frequency than twice a day, which goes where you want to head to and doesn't take ages. There are some rural bus routes which can take ages to reach the "big town" due to going via all the small villages where it might pick someone up once in a blue moon (because with only 2 buses a day, even the OAP with a freebie pass will drive to the big town, rather than catching the morning bus and hanging around for hours for the afternoon bus.

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You don't need to live in a high-rise tower block. In most cities, consistent 4-6 storey flats provide more than enough density for strong public transport provision to work well. You only really need enough density for your day-to-day things (shops, schools, cafes) to be within walking distance. After that, you won't need to own a car, so you'll make use of whatever public transport is available.

NotATrainspott said:

The reason this is contentious is that we have a large number of middle class and above people whose personal identities are wrapped up in the 'freedom' that their car gives them

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This does sound rather like class war envy....tax what I don’t do

NotATrainspott said:

These rights are not universal. The principle that some individual rights can be infringed by the state to better protect the rights of others is well-established.

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Infringed by the state for specific security reasons, not an ideological taxation drive

NotATrainspott said:

In this case, you have some abstract notion of the right to privacy (a right which is already fairly loose given that your future EV and your current phone are already going to track you and the government will have the right to request that data through a court order)

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Privacy is not an abstract notion, it is significant part of the freedom from tyranny.
And you repeatedly use comparisons which are irrelevant as they aren’t direct and can be opted out of.

Could 5G change a lot of things like allowing cars to position themselves and even driverless. Just imagine in a few years we could see driverless busses controlled from a centre, similar to train signalling. I am also led to believe a lot of things could be operated with 5G Even street lights. And on the subject of pay per road the system can charge people and I think 5g would be better to operate it. Vehicle data I would envisage be worked by 5g.

R G NOW. said:

Could 5G change a lot of things like allowing cars to position themselves and even driverless. Just imagine in a few years we could see driverless busses controlled from a centre, similar to train signalling. I am also led to believe a lot of things could be operated with 5G Even street lights. And on the subject of pay per road the system can charge people and I think 5g would be better to operate it. Vehicle data I would envisage be worked by 5g.

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5G is a defining moment in the ability to run edge compute (ie close to consumers or access points and not in a datacenter) at scales not yet achieved. So yes.. all these sorts of things will now be possible in a much cheaper and faster fashion in time. And it should keep us going for a long while until 6G is finally an agreed-upon 'thing' in terms of desired throughput and standards.

DynamicSpirit said:

"What legitimate/ethical activity can you do today that you would not be able to do if cars self-reported their locations for the purposes of road charging?"

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"If you've nothing to hide you've nothing to fear" is a fatuous argument.

It is also very important to note that any inch-by-inch charging data would not just be open to the DVLA. The data will, naturally, be shared with the registered keeper of a vehicle, otherwise charging errors could not be challenged.

That, in turn, is just another way for an abusive partner to keep tabs on their victim, and is likely to put vulnerable people at risk. Especially if the car notifies someone's abusive partner they've just been to see Citizens Advice, or a divorce lawyer, or a women's refuge.

"I don't like people driving SUVs in cities", which appears to be the OP's primary motivation, is a pretty poor reason to deliberately put people in harm's way.

87 027 said:

I’m wondering what is the specific problem that the OP is seeking to answer

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Middle class people driving nice cars, so far as I can tell.

Maybe some people supporting this should think how they would have felt if Thatcher proposed it during the miners strikes - would have been great for tracking the flying pickets.....but then if they didn’t have anything to hide....

Meerkat said:

Maybe some people supporting this should think how they would have felt if Thatcher proposed it during the miners strikes - would have been great for tracking the flying pickets.....but then if they didn’t have anything to hide....

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If I recall correctly, the flying pickets were not merely people exercising their right to strike: They were trying to forcibly prevent others who wanted to go to work from doing so. I don't see any reasonable justification for that. I'm not entirely sure what the law was at the time, but I'm pretty sure that today that would be illegal, and rightly so. So I don't think you'd be on good grounds using that as an example.

Of course, there is a separate issue of police brutality at the time. It's perhaps worth bearing in mind that, to the extent that vehicle tracking could have made any difference, it would also have shown the locations of all police vehicles - so arguably it could have made it harder both for the flying pickets to intimidate other people and for the police to act unethically or illegally. Obviously the real issue at the time was the confrontational culture on the part of both the pickets and the police, which doesn't really have anything to do with vehicle tracking.

Tetchytyke said:

It is also very important to note that any inch-by-inch charging data would not just be open to the DVLA. The data will, naturally, be shared with the registered keeper of a vehicle, otherwise charging errors could not be challenged.

That, in turn, is just another way for an abusive partner to keep tabs on their victim, and is likely to put vulnerable people at risk. Especially if the car notifies someone's abusive partner they've just been to see Citizens Advice, or a divorce lawyer, or a women's refuge.

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Thanks, I think that's the first actual example I've seen that seems specific enough to provide a possible valid argument against data collection.

As point of info, I think @NotATrainspott is arguing for street-by-street level charging. I haven't argued specifically for that as I think that's too complicated. I'd prefer to see some system of road pricing based on geographical area: Something like, a low rate-per-mile charged in rural areas and a higher rate-per-mile in towns and other built up areas - and perhaps a third higher rate for city centres and other places where people really should be thinking twice about driving. So basically a few different bands making it easy for people to understand how much you'd be charged for a particular journey.

In terms of the domestic abuse argument. I would think that the best way to prevent domestic abuse is to provide far more support to victims - increase Government funding for safe houses and other measures to help anyone at risk. The Government ought to be doing that anyway. In terms of vehicle location data, that seems a bit of an edge case - particularly since I would imagine many abusers would, as part of their abuse, be preventing victims from using their cars anyway. Overall, if car location data is available to the Government, that's surely on balance going to reduce crime a fair amount - and will therefore save very many people from becoming victims of crime.