Road Pricing 2.0 is two years away - Lets kill the Cabinet

Cars are bad for you.

JNR wrote:I'm still not convinced in all this carbon rubbish. What we need is a way to generate electricity and power cars that is efficient. Wind turbines aren't a viable way of producing electricity, nor is solar, nor is any so called 'green' method. They cost too much and some say that the initial 'carbon costs' are so great they negate any future rewards. What we needed was the government to step up some years ago, perhaps a decade ago when New Labour got into power and start a programme where they rolled out nuclear fuel, by far the most effective energy source we have.

I must take umbrage with this - wind and solar are both proven technologies for producing electricity with minimal environmental costs (ones which can be compensated for, unlike current generation power technologies). In particular, there is much excitement around the rolling out of Solar Thermal Energy, which has the potential to alleviate much of the power needs of Africa, Europe, Central Asia, and southern North America if implemented correctly. I point you in the direction of the Desertec proposal, which has rightly raised many eyebrows and openly made a few rich men reach for their wallets.

Cars are a necessary part of life (this 'back to nature' nonsense that assumes we and our societies can survive without the devices is extremely naive) but switching to the hydrogen economy is an imperative. There are the problems with transport, of course, but a decentralised grid is much preferable to the current inefficient system (not to mention it suits small-scale solar, wind and hydroelectrical systems which save on the point of purchase).

It is interesting you bring nuclear into the equation as the solution, when it clearly is not. There is not enough fuel on this Earth to fuel a wide-spread conversion of industrialised economies towards nuclear for more than a century, if that. Even if we did it is merely postponing the inevitable - so why not change to the renewables now? We have to do it eventually, environmental reasons be damned. Not to mention it being as dangerously emitting as the technologies it replaces, when taking the full life cycle into account (as you do with the cleaner technologies, but don't with nuclear, queerly).

Alvin Flummux wrote:I'd make it my mission to kill you all with your heavy-polluting, anti-environment wankery. It makes me genuinely angry to see such **** being bandied about.

The government needs to pour as much money as it can into low-cost, low-carbon cars.

Interesting. Murder in self-defense if he is threatening to destroy your eco-system? It's wondrously satirical.

Oh. Wait. You're serious.

You insufferable bore. Go outside, child. Go on! Shoo! Interact with some humans, see their smiles. Maybe read a book.

Skarjo wrote:And how long does it take you to get to work by bus?

For me, giving up my car would be relatively simple. For my girlfriend, it would be impossible. She gets one bus a day running through her village, and one back. Shame they run at eleven and three, both useless for any worker.

Give me a useable alternative and I'll listen.

I've always manged to find work in my home town so not having a car has been not that big a deal. I admit that that is rather a unusual position to be in though as most have to go a tad further afield for the job they do.

Why do we need this? Surely we can just use the odometer feature built into EVERY car all ready.

This just sounds like a colossal wast of tax money to hoik in more money that will be wasted by these tax hungry ass vacumes.

This will just errode our privacy and let 'big brother' take over. If it does come into force it wont be long until it's used to catch a paedo and 'justify' its existance.

Gyurcsany wrote:
Alvin Flummux wrote:I'd make it my mission to kill you all with your heavy-polluting, anti-environment wankery. It makes me genuinely angry to see such **** being bandied about.

The government needs to pour as much money as it can into low-cost, low-carbon cars.

Interesting. Murder in self-defense if he is threatening to destroy your eco-system? It's wondrously satirical.

Oh. Wait. You're serious.

You insufferable bore. Go outside, child. Go on! Shoo! Interact with some humans, see their smiles. Maybe read a book.

Owned.

The whole car tax system is wrong. The ony tax they should have is on fuel! that way if you buy an uneconomical car, you need more fuel and hence pay more tax. You drive more miles, you use more fuel and pay more tax. etc etc. paying to drive on roads is a double whammy. Why should a car that is only used weekly pay the same as a car that drives every day? the system is unfair. keeping it on fuel is the only fair way to tax drivers based on usage.

The system really needs to be incentivised, too. It doesn't always work, and the take up may be slow, but doesn't it make more sense (in an ideal world) not to penalise everyone for something that, by and large, can't be helped?

To an extent, this has already happened, what with more efficient cars costing less to tax. The problem is, everything else has been made more expensive, and the efficient cars aren't exactly cheap. So people are stuck paying more tax than they ever had to because they can't afford the alternative.

The proposed system would actually work fairly well if it was implemented properly and it wasn't intrusive, so a few changes would have to be made:

1) Road pricing isn't variable depending on where you drive, so locations won't be tracked, ONLY mileage.
2) Relating to the above, there is a flat rate per mile for each tax band, so the less efficient cars have a higher cost per mile, but the more efficient cars pay less.
3) Fuel tax is cut entirely and incorporated into the per-mile road tax (this appeases people on psychological levels - they're still paying but fuel is cheaper in nominal terms).

The result is that price of fuel is set entirely by supply and demand, as it should be, with no duty forcing the price up, and cars are taxed only for the distance they drive based on automated readings that are collated every six/twelve months (depending on preference).

Furthermore, the government does its own bit for the environment by scrapping the paper tax discs, as they're superficial these days since it's all computer based at the DVLA. Drivers are notified prior to their payment date of their mileage and how much it'll cost. Methods of payment are the same as they are now: cash and cheques at the post office, and card transactions. Card details are, of course, not stored anywhere, because that's always asking for disaster.

As mentioned before, the fuel duty is incorporated into the road tax in addition to a set figure based on tax bands, with the most environmentally friendly cars only paying the fuel duty portion.

That's a moderately realistic outlook, as removing one form of tax entirely without compensating (especially with this bloody government) is never going to happen. The advantage, of course, is only mileage is tracked and sent to the government's bumbling third party of the month, and most people declare their average mileage when getting insurance or their new tax disc.

Gyurcsany wrote:There is not enough fuel on this Earth to fuel a wide-spread conversion of industrialised economies towards nuclear for more than a century, if that.

Can you prove that?

Road pricing is a terrible idea, and just another easy revenue-generator for a lazy Government. End.

The fox hunters warned you. The smokers warned you.

Now the balloon is warning you. Go outside and march or something. Don't drive though. Lazy bastards.

I only use my car at weekends and occasionally in the evening to visit mates or go to the shops etc. I'm already paying road tax but I don't use my car much so I'm not getting as good value out of that as someone who drives every day (we are of course ignoring fuel prices for the moment). If they started charging me per mile and scrapped the annual tax then perhaps I would be better off by a tiny bit but having to stop and think about whether or not I can afford to go and visit a friend is uncomprehendable to me at the present, this is why I have a contract phone and not a pay as you go so I don't have to worry that I might not have money to phone home in an emergency.

And that's just my situation, someone who drives everyday and has to drive everyday would be so unbelievably SOL that it doesn't bear thinking about. My Mum has to drive to the Hospital where she works because it's two towns away, there's a closer one but she couldn't get a job there. WTf is she going to do if this nightmare comes reality.

Like JNR my best mate and his GF are both teachers, they each work in different schools though so they have separate cars out of necessity, they just brought a small house a year and a half ago and are already starting to struggle under the weight of rising everything prices.

Anyone who says "use public transport" is either very lucky that the system fits their needs, lives close enough to not need it or is worryingly out of touch with reality.

I do use public transport and it is a miserable experience every day of the week.

Alvin Flummux wrote:I'd make it my mission to kill you all with your heavy-polluting, anti-environment wankery. It makes me genuinely angry to see such gooseberry fool being bandied about.

He's got a point though. Green taxes should be a good thing, but only so when they actually work. Most of the ever increasing costs to motorists designed to push them on to more environmentally friendly means of transport have very little effect, and are hugely inefficient as taxes go. Long term research into cheaper, better alternatives is required. I'd fully support a backtrack on many car based penalties, because the cost to the individual doesn't justify the minuscule benefit to the environment, or not currently so at any rate.

I am fully ready to buy an electric/hybrid or even Hydrogen car when I next replace mine in 2010- ish.
But at the moment there isn't much on the market, much less in my price bracket.

JNR wrote:
Gyurcsany wrote:There is not enough fuel on this Earth to fuel a wide-spread conversion of industrialised economies towards nuclear for more than a century, if that.

Can you prove that?

Somewhat. It was a slightly glib simplification of the issue. It is not necessarily that the fuel will run out (debatable), but that at some point the cost of using it as a fuel becomes prohibitive (a repeat of the 'peak oil' situation that will eventually be faced, if we are not already experiencing the first shocks).

Current estimates from most sources place known uranium reserves at roughly the 100 year mark (but this is give or take several decades, of course, as evidenced by this link - http://nuclearinfo.net/Nuclearpower/Web ... bleUranium - notice the comparison with tin reserves, which are running out as we speak thanks to almost two centuries of mining and extraction). Yet this is with nuclear as only a splinter fragment of current world electricity useage. If every country now industrialised were to, to coin a phrase, 'nuclearise' its grid, then those supplies would of course dwindle much faster than currently is the case.

Now, very little (compared to combustible energy sources) has been put into prospecting for uranium reserves, so these estimates are conservative when it comes to the amount of uranium to be found yet in the Earth's crust. There are thousands of years' worth of uranium in seawater for one thing. The problem is this - a uranium-based economy would necessarily result in the same problems, environmentally (I refer to mining, not just the emission issue) as our combustible-based economy, not to mention the problems with disposing waste. We can manage it now, but the sheer amount that widespread conversion would result in is boggling in its implications, especially over the thousands of years. And it is extremely expensive to extract the amounts of uranium we need for the uranium-based economy from the most bountiful sources, such as seawater. So we end up in a situation similar to the one we are in today, where like the heroes of the action motion pictures we may save the damsel but tear down buildings and explode vehicles in the process; we cause as many problems as we fix.

Breeder reactors and plutonium aside (they suffer from the same cost problems over a long time and when widespread) it is just madness to continually rely on these technologies. Fusion is, of course, the dream to aspire to, and in combination with the proven renewables (and those as-yet unproven) we should be able to guarantee the continuation of civilisation until the sun burns itself out. And that is, surely, the best case scenario.

Road Pricing 2.0 is two years away - Lets kill the Cabinet

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