http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/10504764.stm


That is going to be popular.



If they cut fuel duty then it will mean variable rates because of the vehicle used. Also road tax is a way to ensure vehicles are up to scratch and insured. Though that would be easier if it were a simple £10 tax.

Private company doing it is no better than the government. Certainly no more efficient. Plus they will want a profit, and with the expense involved a very large one of a few billion at least.

Compensation for delays, just look at Ryanair to see how that will work.

I can't stand the idea.
Mainly because it will be expensive to run. At the moment road tax (annual) and fuel duty is easy to collect and can all be spent on useful things (roads, NHS etc)
But a scheme like this will cost billions in hardware and millions to run every year. It's an inefficient use of tax.

Plus, where are people going to go? Trains are full (at rush hour) and expensive. Most people don't live on a bus route to work and those that do would still often be quicker sitting in the jams for a bit. Even with bus lanes, buses are unreliable at rush hour. Outside (regulated) London they're expensive too. It's £1.80 for the two miles from my house into town, and there's no discount for a return ticket.
For example. It takes my missus about 35 minutes to drive the 17 miles to work. Based on 40p a mile running costs, that's £13.60 a day. Sure the THREE buses she could take would only work out at about £10 per day, but the total commute would jump from just over an hour to about five hours. If they used this scheme to increase the price of travelling at rush hour, it'll price a lot of lower paid workers out of jobs. After child care cost my missus doesn't earn much. It wouldn't take much for her to be as well off not working.

It worked for the commercial traffic (the HGV Maut on the Autobahn), here in Germany, but the government have just rejected it as unworkable for cars and bikes.

The only way would be to increase the tax on fuel.

It would make the roads the preserve of the rich and great if you are rich enough to afford it a disaster for everyone else. Plus this will be for all new roads, and where will these roads go? Tear up more green belt?

'Privatising the roads' is as much political suicide as being caught on camera assaulting the waxwork dummy of the queen at Madame Tussaud's.

Why am I suspicious that the cut in fuel duty and removal of road tax will either not happen or will happen several years after the new charges are brought in?

I can't make an informed opinion at the moment, "per mile" road pricing with a reduction in fuel prices and road tax sounds on the face of it like an awful idea, but until I have actual numbers I can't predict.

I drive 75 miles from Stratford-upon-Avon to Nottingham to work and it takes about 2 hours to do, I spend about £100 a week on fuel (at the current rate of 116.9p) I've looked into public transport but that would make my journey nearly 8 hours long and cost about £140 a week, it's just not feasible.

My Mister works about 50 yards behind our house so (as he says) between us we do a 4 hour commute each day, it's just that I'm doing all of it. Moving nearer my work would just offset the cost of travel to include both of us, which wouldn't save us any money or time. The only way to change our circumstances would be for one of us to move jobs, nearer the other and (if it were him) move house as well. We certainly can't afford to move house and frankly we're perfectly situated for family and we like where we live so that's not really an option, so the only choice is for me to move jobs.

I've worked out that I can sustain petrol prices up to 121.9p before it becomes too expensive for me to commute (when I started work here petrol was at 91.9p) and I have actually started applying for jobs much closer to home, but I have also set wheels in motion for a hefty payrise in my current job which will take the pressure off, it's just a case of whether petrol rises above 121.9p permanently before I can sort out the payrise

So, that was a lot of rambling, but I'm basically not sure whether it's a good or bad plan because there are no real numbers I can use to compare.

I would expect that this would cost more than now, the government could not afford to lose a huge chunk of revenue. So this in all likelihood will be on top of the current costs, if they did it for new roads only. If the government were to extend it to all roads then while they might scrap some taxes though they would have a problem with tourists. If petrol were tax free you would see people coming from France and Ireland and filling up and and returning across the border. That would have other ramifications. Plus it would have no green impact on choice of vehicle and efficiency. If they priced based on a theoretical output of CO2 they could seriously underestimate the emissions. So I cant see an end to fuel duty. Road Fund License could be reduced but not scrapped. They need it to check ownership of vehicles and whether roadworthy and insured. So overall it must add to the costs of motoring but that would have the same impact as congestion so drive more off the road.

The report makes one very good point : once we all move to low/zero emission alternate power source vehicles (electric, fuel cell, whatever) a large chunk of the revenue (fuel duty) will disappear anyway. The government can't recoup that by transferring the tax burden to the new power sources because it would be utterly politically unacceptable to place the amount of duty on water or the domestic electricity supply that they place currently on petrol and diesel. If every house in the country saw it's electricity bill go up five times overnight and it was patently obvious from the bill that the increase was tax, you'd find MPs hanging from lamp posts round the country. Plus as current rules stands, not only would such vehicles pay no fuel duty, they would also pay minimal VED.

To put it bluntly, some time in the next decade or two the revenue the government currently gets from personal transport is going to pretty much dwindle to nothing. So they really need to be considering the alternatives right now, regardless of whether they plan to reduce fuel duty for the remaining hydrocarbon powered vehicles or not.

Jon

Don't know whether to laugh or cry at that...

I'm just fcuking glad I don't drive or need to

That is sooooooooooo being sigged!!!

Good job I changed it to 'assaulting' before I posted it...

Strangely the first time I read it, I didn't read "assaulting". I read something much worse.

At that point there will have to be a road pricing system to cover the cost of road maintenance. I suspect that they might develop it but not implement it until the majority of people are using zero emission vehicles, so that the fuel duty encourages people to switch.