Typical public service. When your only tool is a hammer everything looks like a nail. User pays is a good model, but monitoring every vehicle is unneccesary. Fuel usage is a good proxy for road usage, being a function of distance travelled and size of vehicle. Baking road usage charges into fuel price is simple to collect, requires no expensive infrastructure and no new bureaucracy to administer. The only problem is hybrids and electric cars bypass the tax to some extent, which can be easily handled by charging more road usage charge for hybrids (the greens will love that) or use another proxy for road usage altogether, like tyres or odometer reading. It can be done simply and cheaply. Or complicated, expensive and intrusive.
Posted on: Tue, 15 Jul 2014 02:21:37 +0000
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