Comment by mothballed

"The thing is that if you live in Hilversum and are able to import a car from the US, you don't mind the higher tax to begin with"

That can be fixed. Starting with removing business tax exemptions for such cars.

This is why they’re registered as business vehicles. Also the roads aren’t tolled, oddly.

No tax I've seen is anywhere remotely close to following "fourth power law" on axle weight[]. And especially so for gas taxes, as the gas/diesel cost tends to be closer to linear with weight.

Usually what happens is smaller cars subsidize everyone else due to paying a disproportionate tax vs axle weight^~(2-4 depending on fatigue pathway). Depending on tax structure possibly pedestrians/cyclists too but they are usually parasitic on tax basis.

[] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law

I think those Dodge Rams are on a different tax rate for commercial vehicles.

Why on earth you would want a pickup truck instead of a van is beyond me. This ain't Oklahoma.

> Road upkeep is from general taxation. Road tax was abolished in 1937

I was skeptical of this being true since fuel duty is notoriously high in the UK, so I did a quick fact check.

Based on the change in 1937 you are "technically" correct, in that none of the motoring taxes are ring fenced for road funds since 1937.

However the opposite is true of what you are implying... income from fuel duty alone is generally around 3 times larger than all road maintenance spending (a fairly steady +25bn/yr [0] Vs -8bn/yr [1] over the last decade).

In other words, although it's officially one big tax pot, motoring taxes pay for road network expenditure more than 3 times over.

This is why they are introducing the per mile EV tax, because fuel duty provided a proportional tax to road use, but EVs skip that and electricity can't be so easily taxed for road use specifically.

TLDR, UK road users pay for far more than the road network.

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/284323/united-kingdom-hm...

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/533171/annual-road-trans...

> Although EVs now have to pay 3p per mile from 2028, which is a big change.

This is interesting, how is this accomplished?

Over here there was some proposal some years ago to move to a per-mile taxation, with higher tax in congested areas. All managed by some kind of GPS device in each car. There was much opposition as people didn't want the government spying on them via this GPS device, so the plan was eventually dropped.

A simpler approach would be to just record the mileage during annual inspections, but hey why make it simple when you can have some public-private grift making zillions on selling these GPS devices and running the infrastructure for them..

I'm not sure the type of person who imports such a vehicle would have the appropriate amount of foresight to let such a law affect their behaviour.

That’s putting unnecessary burden on the victim.

If you want a silly huge car you should pay silly huge fees for it. You must compensate the public for your nuisance vehicle.

You could argue this for any car as moving such a heavy object at such speeds close to people is inherently high risk.

Do you wonder why the world is drifting toward populism?

Because I read comments like that and I don't.

A murder charge for a crime without intent? In the rich west? There just isn't the political will for that. A policy like that is about as serious as luxury space communism.

I don't think the idea is to have a market of roads to chose from. It is to make the existing car market more efficient by fixing the externality of other people paying for the damage you do to the roads by your choice of (heavy) vehicule.

That's weird because there's no public road near me for miles and I can get 90% of the way to "town" without them.

I've also connected my private roads to a couple other private roads so no one has a monopoly on my way to town.

As for the "barriers to entry" mentioned in that article, is absolutely wild. My road and most the ones in our grid network were made with little more than a dude and a tractor (I think you can get suitable one for $10k off craigslist). I initially made mine with an axe, a light truck, and a rope (to rip out small trees) and there's nothing stopping anyone adjacent from doing the same if I'd block the road.

Public transport (especially trains) is very expensive in the UK. If you already have a car it's cheaper to use car even if you're traveling alone. For two it will be more than 2x cheaper than a train. If trains will be affordable I'm sure more people would use them. As to the size - during relatively good pre-COVID times SUV become popular but not many Brits can afford large vehicles today and on average cars in the UK are much smaller than in the US, I would not say it's a big problem.

Road damage is exponential with weight, so heavy vehicles are still heavily subsidized in France even if the total revenue is correct.

There was an interesting court case where only giving tolls to 18 wheeler was problematic but the equivalent fee for cars would have literally worked out to under 1 cent.

The danger is not just related to speed, it’s about them being sp large that you can’t physically see the old lady or child walking right in front of it