A lot of European countries have vignette stickers (often only for buses/HGVs), which are needed to travel on highways. The sticker attaches to the inside of the windscreen. The only infrastructure/logistics needed is to sell the stickers to fuel stations, and a few signs when entering the country.
I suspect, requiring all cars to have a telematic device is the answer here. Insurance companies are already using these and the behaviour of individuals drastically improves when one is installed.
This has an advantage in enabling provision of a device at country borders etc.
Another option is to develop a cheap Automatic Number Plate Camera and create a network of cameras across our road systems.
Both approaches not only allow road pricing strategies, but also address speeding.
This may be a bit big brother for some but this is pretty much the way I see us heading.
Blame the drivers. If most drivers weren't showing utter disregard to traffic laws pretty much all the time, there wouldn't be a dire need for ALPRs to curb speeding.
And if speed limits were set to what people really drive you would see a huge drop off in speeding! People ignore things that are increasingly obviously stupid. Any time a large majority of drivers are ignoring the rules it's an engineering problem, not a driver problem.
I basically agree, the problem is that we tend to say, "we want to make this road safe by making it tolerant of faster driving" which basically translates to encouraging faster driving because drivers base their speed on what feels appropriate.
You don't need the transponder; multiple of our highways already read the plates. Then if you don't check for outstanding payments, they'll send you a letter charging it plus and administrative fee - often higher than the toll itself!
Then you just create a different problem, or in case of Denmark, contribute to an existing one. You're going to make the poor worse of. Taxing on kilometers driven is unfairly hard towards those who cannot afford to live close to their place of employment.
To the wealthy it won't matter much if you tax the purchase of the car or the kilometers driven. Those making below the average salary are normally excluded from living in the center of the cities, and is in some cases even forced outside the bus routes. Also Danish public transit is notoriously bad outside the four largest cities.
> Then you just create a different problem, or in case of Denmark, contribute to an existing one. You're going to make the poor worse of. Taxing on kilometers driven is unfairly hard towards those who cannot afford to live close to their place of employment.
So is there a use for car taxes at all? We could always just tax the rich directly, if we don't care about tying the tax amount to road usage.
I don't know how it in in Denmark, but wealthy people often live in nice houses in the suburbs and commute by car. Here in Berlin at least that is the case. The fuel taxes are offset by tax deductions for commuter miles though.
With the way house prices are going, Amsterdam is rapidly turning into a city for rich people. There's a lot of rent-controlled housing, but waiting lists are more than 8 years on average. It's mostly the outskirts that are affordable, but not the center or the good neighbourhoods surrounding the center.
Well that true in Denmark as well, but both the city centers and the suburbs are pretty expensive, so risk getting pushed past those, and then you start getting into areas where public transport is basically non-existing.
People do drive abroad you know. If I do most(or any percentage) of my miles abroad why would I pay tax on those miles where the car is registered? Meantime, I buy the fuel in those other countries, paying tax there.
No idea how to solve that for electric vehicles. Presumably still at the point of charging.
At the moment driving electric cars is so cheap because we buy electricity at domestic prices. It's as if we were buying utility oil(red diesel) for cars - then it would be stupidly cheap, no? There's a good reason it has been made illegal and you can't use heating oil for your car even though technically it would work just as well.
I suspect that eventually you will be able to charge your electric car only from an approved charger that bills you a higher-rate car tariff, just like you can only use fuel sold at a petrol station in your car.
As for the telematics - excuse me saying so, but the UK government can fuck off with suggesting even more surveillance, it's hard to fight off insurers installing telematics boxes as it is already.
I get the concern about surveillence. But I can see some amazing benefits of treating cars and the road as a single connected system. You could hold vehicles at the journey start point until space on the road opens up. Or adjust speed limits in real time depending on conditions. And maybe even remove traffic calming by modifying user speeds. The free-for-all we have now is hopelessly disfunctional and drivers suffer from that.
Absolutely, and I agree with this sci-fi idea of an interconnected system which has only safety of everyone as a goal and everyone is better off for it. If that's possible, I'm happy to have it implemented tomorrow.
But right now as it stands currently, telematics boxes are nothing else but a greedy attempt to get more cash out of drivers - they collect proprietary data, ran through secret algorithms, to secretly decide whether your insurance should go up or not. Try getting a letter from your insurer telling you that your insurance will go up due to your "driving style" and then ask if they can explain what they mean by that. They can't. "the computer said so" is an absolutely fantastic excuse for these companies to make more money and I'm extremely cynical about it, even if we ignore the entire surveillance aspect for a second. The whole idea needs a lot more regulation/openness to be acceptable.
If the car was registered in Sweden they'd be paying tax there. If the per-mile tax is similar and there are a similar number of Danes driving in Sweden and Swedes driving in Denmark it evens out.
That accounts for fossil fuel cars but not electric ones.
> bring in road pricing
A fine idea except it's logistically difficult to implement tolls everywhere.