Road pricing is more important than ever
It’s been done before…
My first ever post on Freewheeling was a cri de cœur for road pricing.
With hindsight, launching a campaign on a blog that - by definition - had zero readers at that point might have been a mistake.
Certainly, it doesn’t seem to have worked yet.
So, adopting the same approach as my daughter when she wants pudding, I’m going to adopt a new strategy of simply banging on about it constantly in the hope of annoying everyone until they do something about it.
The reason is that nothing - literally nothing - that happens in transport this year is more important.
(except that cat on the train at Euston, obviously)
The biggest ever price cut for cars
Last month, the DfT revealed that there are now half a million electric or hybrid cars on the road; with 14% of sales in the last quarter going on cars with plugs.
These cars are being driven by drivers who have no expectation that they should pay fuel duty or vehicle excise duty or ultra low emission charges.
This matters for two reasons:
1) They’ve just been gifted a big cut in their driving costs. Public transport becomes less affordable, so they’ll drive more
2) It becomes politically much, much tougher to introduce road pricing if you can’t take away an alternative tax to compensate
This matters for public transport because if (2) becomes true than (1) gets locked in forever.
Yesterday the Government published its Decarbonisation Plan. The only reference to something that could one day be road pricing was this enigmatic statement:
We will need to ensure that the tax system encourages the uptake of EVs and that revenue from motoring taxes keeps pace with this change, to ensure we can continue to fund the first-class public services and infrastructure that people and families across the UK expect.
But there was no indication as to how this would be achieved.
Who wants it?
Road pricing is like the elixir of life: it has so many magical properties. In one go:
1) On high-density corridors where public transport can compete, public transport gains a huge price advantage
2) On those same corridors, it gets a journey time advantage due to fewer cars on the road
These generate a virtuous circle of growth.
3) In places where public transport can’t compete (e.g. rural areas), road users get money off their travel - helping make the whole thing politically acceptable
4) It raises cash to invest in further public transport improvements
But it’s not going to happen if the main beneficiaries - the public transport industry - aren’t asking for it.
The opportunity is vast but it is time-critical. Remember, 14% of new cars are now electric or hybrid. Even if that 14% doesn’t change (and it will!) that’ll be a further 350k drivers taken out of fuel duty by the end of the year.
There really is no time to waste.
So I give you fair warning; I’ll be coming back to this topic time and time again.
How about, by the time of my next post on the subject, we set the target that the main trade bodies have agreed a national campaign for road pricing.
If not, why not?
