'Road tax' is coming... but not for cyclists

This could only be acceptable as a replacement for fuel duty - not an addition.

Although any new tax somehow always finds a way to charge a bit more.

cyclisto wrote:

A bit sad day for us who cycle. I will be 100% honest, I am not that afraid of cars hitting me, but of cars emmiting fumes that practically cannot be avoided by any commuter and are especially diesel ones, as confirmed by WHO, cause cancer.

Electric cars have to be financially supported. It is though absurd to support expensive cars like most electric cars are. A incentive system for small electric cars should be proposed but it is meaningless supporting a Tesla or a Taycan, given of course that their fuel burning alternatives are even more aggressively taxed.

It's disingenuous to financially support electric cars whilst doing nothing to promote e-bikes and e-scooters despite them being far better for inner city use and reducing traffic congestion. With current battery technology, electric cars are far too heavy which increases their pollution substantially. Until batteries have a far greater energy density, we're better off looking at shrinking the vehicles (two wheels good) which has multiple advantages (though not for the car manufacturers who have to justify their very expensive car building factories).

Good point.  Although following the logic of today where we're still subsidising the use of private ICE vehicles * it is harm-mitigation to subsidise electric vehicles at least as much...

I think the failure of the government to offer incentives for ebikes is kind of an admission that the built environment isn't as safe for them as it should be currently.  Or rather recognition that people don't cycle now so they won't cycle on an ebike either.  (I suspect for some emotional "but cycling!" reasons they're more likely to plump for scooters if they do.  To be fair those are also cheaper / handier / a literal easier fit with storage solutions and existing public transport for multi-modal commuting etc.)

* Yes, it's really not "cash cow" - because if you take in *all* the costs including not just building and maintaining infrastructure but also health costs etc. even though "I pay my tax and insurance" and we add tax to fuel, there's still a net cost to everyone for having this.

chrisonatrike wrote:

Good point.  Although following the logic of today where we're still subsidising the use of private ICE vehicles * it is harm-mitigation to subsidise electric vehicles at least as much...

* Yes, really, because if you take in *all* the costs including not just building and maintaining infrastructure but also health costs etc. even though "I pay my tax and insurance" and we add tax to fuel, there's still a net cost to everyone.

I'd rather my tax money didn't go to line the pockets of electric car manufacturers considering that our infrastructure will need more expenditure to cope with the considerable load from lots of cars being charged. With smaller vehicles, the chances are that the electric grid will cope, but cars require a lot more juice due to their excessive weight.

There's also the health benefits that come from people using e-bikes and e-scooters as even e-scooter riders will likely walk a distance to find an available one and are not stuck inside a steel, pollution trap. I don't think subsidising electric cars is a good idea at all - we need to re-think public transportation and how we want people moving around in the future.

Incidentally, I was reading Sabine Hossenfielder's inestigation into the feasibility of green/electric planes: https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2022/10/can-we-make-flying-green.html . She reasons that energy density is the critical factor with planes and batteries just don't cut it. It's a similar situation with cars - to get the desired performance, you have to add lots of batteries and their weight reduces the performance, so you have to add even more batteries to move the batteries around.

Of course e-bikes and plain bicycles themselves should be heavily promoted with the costs coming from taxing big cars, heavily on ICE and less on electric. Scooters with 8 inch wheel I am not very sure whether they should be on roads on safety issues.

EVs are heavy, but not all. I believe 80% of families who have a second car, can satisfy their transport needs with a Mitsubishi MIEV, about a ton heavy.

And yes I know that there is a debate about the life circle pollution of EVs with rare earths that cannot be recycled and blood lithium and bird killer wind turbines and so on, but I don't really see that pollution whereas I do actually breath shit every ICE car accelerates and smell like shit after even short rides in heavy traffic. So I support electric all the way, but cheap and small, not to invent a new status symbol...

cyclisto wrote:

Of course e-bikes and plain bicycles themselves should be heavily promoted with the costs coming from taxing big cars, heavily on ICE and less on electric. Scooters with 8 inch wheel I am not very sure whether they should be on roads on safety issues.

There is no "of course" about it at all. Only in some dystopian nightmare world of negative deindustrialisation and a return to the agrarian middle ages would such a thing be seen as beneficial.

Did you know that in 1765, just as Britain started to industrialise, life expectancy was less than 39 years old? People opposed to industralisation on "safety/think of the children", "pollution" grounds were then referred to as luddites, and for good reason.

Just because it's become fashionable in certain "green/socialist" circles to start worshipping at this particular altar doesn't make it correct, and certainly will not advance humanity or make it safer. Denying historical fact is a mistake humanity has repeated over and over again, but eschewing the data and pretending motorised vehicles are a destroyer, rather than a liberator, is a particularly odd distortion of reality.

I understand your point. But now people in developed countries die mostly from cancers and not having enough exercise/being overweight, not starvation and lack of basic medicine. We are not in 1765.

In their defence, Rakia is still in 1765. It's a wonder they can even use a website tbh.

I'd say they struggle.  They can't remember their username and have to keep making new ones.

ShutTheFrontDawes wrote:

In their defence, Rakia is still in 1765. It's a wonder they can even use a website tbh.

what a shock to read another nonsense PBU post. 😂 

I'm amazed Rakia hasn't gotten banned yet. 
 

You think people should be banned because they have a different opinion to you? this isn't The Guardian comment section..

It's about people who have been banned before coming back yet again under another username.

grOg wrote:

You think people should be banned because they have a different opinion to you? this isn't The Guardian comment section..

It's not about the different opinion, but about the bad faith trolling. If someone is just posting to garner a reaction and continually spouts lies and misinformation to push their anti-cyclist agenda and to start arguments, then I think it's reasonable to ban them. There's also the issue of them having been previously banned and they skirt around that by creating a new login - it would seem reasonable for them to be banned again when discovered.

(What is the Guranida's comment section like? I very rarely visit the comments)

It's also worth noting thatcar ownership didn't hit levels where the majority of "working" households had one until, what? the late 60s/early 70s? at which point the life expectancy was 72.12, vs today's 72.98. So life expectancy increases since the industrial revolution can't really attributed to the existence of cars.

There are other ways of getting people around, and for journeys that are short enough that they have no business being made by car (about 65% of them), we should be investing in other methods. We should also do things such as look at introducing the 4-day week (which has been demonstrated in multiple trials to have no negative affect on productivity), and make WFH a legal right for all job roles that support it. Finally, according to the last transport stats I read, the most common reason given for a car journey being made is "leisure", not "commuting", so it can hardly be argued that promoting active travel/public transport, and discouraging unnecessary cars use will lead to "deindustrialisation".

An interesting is how this all happened on the US West Coast in the 1920s / 1930s.

Rakia wrote:

People opposed to industralisation on "safety/think of the children", "pollution" grounds were then referred to as luddites, and for good reason.

I was under the impression that the Luddite movement was more about "don't take my job and push me into (greater) poverty".

Rakia wrote:

Did you know that in 1765, just as Britain started to industrialise, life expectancy was less than 39 years old? People opposed to industralisation on "safety/think of the children", "pollution" grounds were then referred to as luddites, and for good reason.

And did you know that was two decades before the British started to settle Australia, and therefore it's quite clear that British settlement in Australia has more than doubled life expectancy over the last 240 years?

This is idiotically weak, even for you. Just to at least slightly alleviate your ignorance, Luddites did not oppose industrialisation on the grounds of safety or pollution at all but because they objected to the new mechanised processes taking work away from skilled artisans.

I'm afraid I'm not going to respond to any more of your posts Rendel until you explain how you're going to get to a hospital without taking an ambulance (aka a van with a stretcher and medical equipment inside).

You're all too quick to dismiss the obvious health benefits conferred by technological advancements, which is the very definition of neo-luddism. The excuses given are secondary, whether it's "automation will cost us our jobs", or "they spew out pollution", or "think of the children". All these arguments are spurious.

And when you have a comments section full of baseless conspiracy theories such as "[electric car] subsidy is designed to funnel money to car manufacturers and has little to do with addressing our very real issues around transportation", then it's important that voices of reason are allowed to be heard.

Technical solutions are the way forward out of global warming, not reversing centuries of human progress. After all, no one here is talking about banning Zwift are you, despite the fact it burns electricity, requires extra manufacture of turbo trainers/bikes, and uses far more of the earth's resources than just going for a bike ride outside? You aren't switching off your phones and comuputers and abandoning the internet are you, despite it consuming so much power?

Aww, it's hard to admit when you're wrong, isn't it?

You appear to think that you have something of a zinger in this "what will you do if you need an ambulance?" trope. It shouldn't really need explaining, but as you're obviously having comprehension difficulties, one can actually be in favour of having ambulances without being in favour of people using private cars to drive half a mile to the supermarket. They're not the same thing, you see, and indeed if there were fewer private cars on the road then ambulances would be able to do their job much more efficiently.

You have claimed that increased life expectancy is directly attributable to the development of the automobile. Increased life expectancy is, in the main, down to the development of penicillin and other antibiotics, improvements in surgical hygiene and technique, and vaccinations. You're going to have to work that pro-car shoehorn pretty hard to try attributing any of those to the development of the automobile.

I believe there are no reasonable people fantasizing the extermination of all motor vehicles. Otherwise there would be a big industry to ride bicycles from the Far East where they are being produced.

But they can get less and they can be cleaner and still have attractive cities to live in. The Dutch seem happy people to me.

Amen.  The Netherlands is not a fantasy utopia either.  They have plenty of issues - their cycling infra is not perfect (just an order of magnitude better than everyone else's), they may have become a bit complacent, they're not particularly "green" (they certainly seem to love [re]-building stuff), they're still fans of the motor vehicle (they own LOTS of cars and it's a good place to drive in) and nor do they avoid long-distance travel.

What they have done* is tame the car a bit and move a significant fraction of short journeys to be by cycling instead.  (And presumably walking too - it's a safe place and a great place to be a pedestrian).  In addition they've facilitated making longer journeys by public transport rather than car.  That has had benefits both economically but also in terms of quality of life and "local places".

* While remaining a rich western democracy; hardly needs said except some people say some really odd things on this site!

Life expectancy was not improved by industrialisation; clean water and medical advances made a big difference to infant deaths and people dying of things like simple infections.

Would it be the case that life expectancy was so low because of the high infant mortality rate? I think that life expectancy would have been a good bit higher than 39 for those who survived infancy.

cyclisto wrote:

Of course e-bikes and plain bicycles themselves should be heavily promoted with the costs coming from taxing big cars, heavily on ICE and less on electric. Scooters with 8 inch wheel I am not very sure whether they should be on roads on safety issues.

EVs are heavy, but not all. I believe 80% of families who have a second car, can satisfy their transport needs with a Mitsubishi MIEV, about a ton heavy.

And yes I know that there is a debate about the life circle pollution of EVs with rare earths that cannot be recycled and blood lithium and bird killer wind turbines and so on, but I don't really see that pollution whereas I do actually breath shit every ICE car accelerates and smell like shit after even short rides in heavy traffic. So I support electric all the way, but cheap and small, not to invent a new status symbol...

I can certainly relate to the immediacy of ICE air pollution and I do prefer to cycle around EVs. I just think that there's a particular narrative being pushed by MSM (especially the BBC) that electric cars are the only answer when they only solve a couple of issues. When you consider the extra advantages of small two or three-wheeled personal electric vehicles, then it's insane that the problematic tech is being subsidised, but not the actual solution. It seems obvious to me that the subsidy is designed to funnel money to car manufacturers and has little to do with addressing our very real issues around transportation.

The only tangible benefit of EV's around cyclists is the lack of exhaust fumes; they are still heavy, fast motorised vehicles that pollute waterways with rubber particulate matter from their tyres and hurt cyclists just as much if they hit them..

grOg wrote:

The only tangible benefit of EV's around cyclists is the lack of exhaust fumes; they are still heavy, fast motorised vehicles that pollute waterways with rubber particulate matter from their tyres and hurt cyclists just as much if they hit them..

I agree, although they're also quieter which I think is an advantage. Too often noise pollution isn't mentioned.

They are when they're stationary, but above a certain speed (20-25mph?) most of the noise a car makes is tyre noise. If you're walking down a freely-moving main road, a Tesla going past you is just as loud as anything else.

Like the late great Ivor Cutler I think the negative effect of noise is underappreciated.  Road noise from motor vehicles is the theme music of our cities.

Notjustbikes has a good video on exactly this subject.