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