Skip to main content

Paying for travel

There's a lot of debate going on in the UK over the fact that the Chancellor of  the Exchequer (isn't that a wonderfully archaic term when you actually look at the words) has announced that he is not going to increase petrol duty by 3p from August, putting it off to January at least.

Leaving aside the political insults flying about U-turns (get a grip politicians! When are you going to realise that admitting a mistake or the need for change is a good thing?), it has been useful in exposing the debate on what we should do to tax driving. There are two broad needs, to raise revenue (in principle, though not explicitly to pay for the road network and secondary costs thereof) and to discourage use of fossil fuels/high carbon emission activities/pollution.

At the moment there are two weapons in the government's armoury. There is an annual car tax (formerly known as road fund licence), and there is fuel tax. The annual tax is ridiculous. Although it has gradations for emissions, it is still a tax that gets cheaper per mile the more you drive. It is totally counter-functional and ought to be dropped immediately.

As for fuel duty, while it is proportional to the amount you drive and how much of a gas guzzler your car is, it is very heavy handed because it applies equally to someone driving through a crowded, polluted city with a superb public transport system and someone driving in the depths of Cornwall, where the car is an absolute lifeline, the nearest shop is 10 miles away and there is practically no public transport system.

I heard on the radio the other day a Labour person saying what we really needed to do was to go back to the idea of a road pricing scheme, which would monitor exactly where you are driving and charge you accordingly, something the previous government was interested in, but that was squashed because of a ridiculously biassed campaign against it resulting in a huge anti-petition, based much more on emotion than logic.

The trouble is, the Labour plan is also a disaster. It requires far too much technology to work, needing every car to be fitted with a tracking device, and a vast computer system to monitor and collect movement data. It is also hugely Big Brotheresque. There has to be a better way. And there is. Here's Brian's cunning plan to sort out this mess:

  1. Dispose of car tax immediately. This will lose some revenue, though not as much as you might thing as it's quite expensive to administer. If necessary slap on a bit of extra fuel duty.
  2. Find a workable way of doing road pricing. The most important thing is that it should be passive - active systems, requiring technology in the car, are too complex and costly. I'd suggest doing it only on motorways, major trunk roads and in cities to keep costs down, using a camera system like the London congestion charge.
  3. Once you have the road pricing system, remove the fuel tax entirely.
  4. If a load of people whinge about it in a petition, ignore them. You can't always be popular. But if you make it clear that petrol prices will drop by around 70p a litre, people may be more enthusiastic.
Successive governments have been too timid about this. Get your act together, guys.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's recent gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some ex

Is 5x3 the same as 3x5?

The Internet has gone mildly bonkers over a child in America who was marked down in a test because when asked to work out 5x3 by repeated addition he/she used 5+5+5 instead of 3+3+3+3+3. Those who support the teacher say that 5x3 means 'five lots of 3' where the complainants say that 'times' is commutative (reversible) so the distinction is meaningless as 5x3 and 3x5 are indistinguishable. It's certainly true that not all mathematical operations are commutative. I think we are all comfortable that 5-3 is not the same as 3-5.  However. This not true of multiplication (of numbers). And so if there is to be any distinction, it has to be in the use of English to interpret the 'x' sign. Unfortunately, even here there is no logical way of coming up with a definitive answer. I suspect most primary school teachers would expands 'times' as 'lots of' as mentioned above. So we get 5 x 3 as '5 lots of 3'. Unfortunately that only wor

Which idiot came up with percentage-based gradient signs

Rant warning: the contents of this post could sound like something produced by UKIP. I wish to make it clear that I do not in any way support or endorse that political party. In fact it gives me the creeps. Once upon a time, the signs for a steep hill on British roads displayed the gradient in a simple, easy-to-understand form. If the hill went up, say, one yard for every three yards forward it said '1 in 3'. Then some bureaucrat came along and decided that it would be a good idea to state the slope as a percentage. So now the sign for (say) a 1 in 10 slope says 10% (I think). That 'I think' is because the percentage-based slope is so unnatural. There are two ways we conventionally measure slopes. Either on X/Y coordiates (as in 1 in 4) or using degrees - say at a 15° angle. We don't measure them in percentages. It's easy to visualize a 1 in 3 slope, or a 30 degree angle. Much less obvious what a 33.333 recurring percent slope is. And what's a 100% slope