Near Miss of the Day 704: Two abreast group close passed by impatient driver who almost hits front rider

Just bought a new cassette and chain. The VAT on that purchase exceeds my annual VED.

The vat on the packet of crisps I bought is more than the ved I pay. I even get a letter posted to me to apply for the ved each year.

Bucks Cycle Cammer wrote:

Just bought a new cassette and chain. The VAT on that purchase exceeds my annual VED.

my VED is pretty cheap, but yours must be pcheaper still, or else you are paying more on casettes and chains than I am.

wycombewheeler wrote:

Bucks Cycle Cammer wrote:

Just bought a new cassette and chain. The VAT on that purchase exceeds my annual VED.

my VED is pretty cheap, but yours must be pcheaper still, or else you are paying more on casettes and chains than I am.

Pretty easily done I should think, there are lots of pre-2017 cars that incur £20 VED, with an Ultegra cassette costing around £80 and an Ultegra chain £35 and a 20% rate of VAT...

Ultegra 11-32 'only' £68 at Bikester. Germany's still the cheapest place to get a lot of components (if there's stock) despite Brexit.

Hope you never need to return anything you buy from them. Bikester's return process is abysmal. One of the worst I have ever experienced. I never ordered from them again after the way they treated me. 

Never had to return anything; and if I did, the credit card issuer is equally on the hook

Bucks Cycle Cammer wrote:

Ultegra 11-32 'only' £68 at Bikester. Germany's still the cheapest place to get a lot of components (if there's stock) despite Brexit.

Ah cheers - I confess I've dropped down to Tiagra cassettes which work absolutely fine with my 10-speed Ultegra Di2, the £40+ saving seems worth the extra 150-ish grams, I can always tip an inch of water out of my bidon before I set out and save the difference that way!

Don't have that luxury on 11sp. TBH though, main consideration isn't price right now, but stock. I'd have been happy to drop to 105, but not when the only option's 11-28

£20. Cost of (available) cassettes has risen though, yes.

yep, mine is £30

I finid it amazing how much drivists get worked up about 10p per day, as cost the cyclists are unfairly getting away with.

Compared to the thousands of pounds of depreciation and wear and tear.

Ah but they pay insurance. You only have to go to https://road.cc/content/forum/car-crashes-building-please-post-your-loca...

to see the £000s of damage that cyclists do up and down the country every day.

Haitchaitch wrote:

If, to accommodate the amount of cycling I do, I need to buy a new bike every 3 years with 20% VAT on it how is that not a variable taxation cost?

the high sugar snack I consume when cycling also have an extra tax so we are taxed on our fuel.

my first road bike still going strong at 38,000km according to my strava records.

But your original comment was that drivers pay for the roads cyclists ride on for free. What you have written does not equate to that.

It's true that drivers (of petrol and diesel cars) must pay VED to drive on the road. That payment goes into a pot of general taxation, to be spent on roads, and many other things besides. So yes, someone who drives pays a tax that someone who does not drive (or drives an EV) does not pay.

But by the same token, someone who drinks alcohol pays a tax that a tee-totaller does not pay, and a higher rate taxpayer pays a form of tax that a basic rate taxpayer doesn't. If you want to advance an argument based on relative entitlement to use the roads and other publicly funded services based on individual contribution to the general pot from which roads are funded, it's a lot more complicated than whether or not you pay VED.    

quiff wrote:

It's true that drivers owners (of petrol and diesel cars) must pay VED to drive on the road pollute.

...to be more accurate.

It's true that the charge is currently calculated based largely on environmental factors (though there's also an element based on the price of the vehicle), but use on the public road is a critical part. If you only use a vehicle on private land, I believe you can make a SORN declaration and pollute without VED - so in practical terms maybe the most accurate is "pollute on the public road". 

Is the logical continuation for the 'cyclists can fuck off, because road tax' presented by dickheads that:
A) VED converts to tax charged by milage (not averse to this if coupled with NHS premium for high polluters with the algorithm factoring the wear and tear of the vehicle.
B) roads and/or lanes are segregated by tax bracket. If you pay higher rate tax you can take any mode of transport you like on any road... if you don't reach the ceiling for basic you are only allowed on b roads between 9:30 and 15:30 on wednesdays.
C) Cyclists banned from roads. Motorists pay road tax which us calculated to include all road building and road repair costs.

Granted it's a ridiculous proposition but not as ridiculous as suggesting cyclists don't pay tax.

quiff wrote:

in practical terms maybe the most accurate is "pollute on the public road". 

Although you don't ever have to switch the engine on to be liable for VED.

It's true that owners (of petrol and diesel cars) must pay VED to drive on the road & pollute

Except they don't! The official Lancashire Constabulary statement, dated 19.1.22, is: the Police do not deal with untaxed vehicles as this is a matter for the DVLA. LC then 'passes the buck' to this website:

https://www.gov.uk/report-untaxed-vehicle

This is clearly just a DVLA bin- there is no means to show photographic proof that the vehicle was on the public road untaxed and all you can do is quote the registration number...and all that DVLA can do is check whether the vehicle is untaxed now. In the case I was referring to, the offence occurred on 5th January and the vehicle was untaxed until the 12th January. In other words, the logical course for crims is to only tax after someone tells you about the offence (I suspect the police tipped him off). I also suspect he was uninsured because the police refused to answer that question, but I can't get that information myself. Driving untaxed has been essentially decriminalised- which I didn't know, but the crims do!

Nonsense! The DVLA has the entire history of a vehicle's tax status. The police are not responsible for enforcing VED; they can act *on behalf of* DVLA if they see untaxed vehicles, or illegal number plates, but it is otherwise not a police matter. The rapid rise in DVLA-clamped vehicles locally demonstrates that your latter assertion is untrue - at least round here.

BTW - there's nothing to stop you including a link to a photo/video in your DVLA report.

Nonsense! The DVLA has the entire history of a vehicle's tax status

Piffle! What the DVLA doesn't have, and doesn't want, is the evidence that an untaxed vehicle was on the public road. The 'shop-a-VED-dodger' web page is clearly designed for vehicles kept on a street with a postcode which are untaxed for ages. In this case, the public road offence was on 5th January and daily checks showed it remained untaxed until 12th. The DVLA page is, as I said, just a bin that nobody ever looks at when it comes to moving vehicle offences. The information that the police are officially uninterested in untaxed vehicles was news to me although I knew that, being Lancashire, they would be unofficially uninterested.

wtjs wrote:

Piffle! What the DVLA doesn't have, and doesn't want, is the evidence that an untaxed vehicle was on the public road. 

You're right. I once had a chat with the DVLA about this, they told me reports from members of the public could only be for vehicles habitually stored on a public street. They might consider towing them. But for vehicles in motion, they rely soley on the ANPR enforcement cameras.

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/cars/news/car-tax-evasion-hits-a-record-high-seven-years-after-paper-discs-were-axed-one-in-50-vehicles-have-no-ved-costing-the-uk-£119m-a-year/ar-AARiuVP

I once had a chat with the DVLA about this, they told me reports from members of the public could only be for vehicles habitually stored on a public street

Unfortunately, The Filth don't appear to know this. They advised me to use the DVLA page in response to the specific case of a moving vehicle offence- actually, of course, even Lancashire Constabulary employs some officers who can read, and were just following the 'refer complainants to somebody, anybody, else at every opportunity' force guidelines

I think we (or rather, you and quiff) may be using two different senses of the word 'must' - 'is required to' vs 'is compelled to'.

Surely PAYE isn't a fixed cost. It's variable dependent on how much I earn. If access to the road network was based on the contribution to its upkeep then higher rate tax payers should be given greater access, perhaps they could have their own lanes. 

Most of the "variable" costs you refer (VED and petrol) should be seen as environmental taxes - ie they are not paid by EVs. If they were wear and tear fees as you suggest then EVs should be paying something. This contribution has very little to do with paying for the road network since I can avoid it by buying an EV.

In the long run (ie when electric cars dominate) we know road pricing will come in and your variable cost equation will be far more transparent. Whether it will be practical at that stage to include cyclists remains to be seen. 

IanMK wrote:

Surely PAYE isn't a fixed cost. It's variable dependent on how much I earn.

And even then, if I've calculated correctly, taking advantage of all the available allowances you could earn over £17k without paying a single penny.  You could earn £57k if you max out your pension contribution, and even more if you donate to charity or have other expenses as well.

In other words, it's just as stupid a point as his other contributions.

Garage at Large wrote:

In layman's terms, you can think of a two-tier structure for road pricing consisting of a fixed and a variable cost.

In layman's terms, you're an ignorant moron. Yep here are two variable costs involved in road pricing - how much Council tax you pay and how much other tax you pay. If I pay more income tax than you, buy more things and live in a nicer house then I pay more for the roads than you do.

In short, next time you're driving along and see someone on an S-Works, please assume they've paid for the road you're freeloading on, and get out of the way of your rightful lord and master, you insignificant pleb.

Garage at Large wrote:

There is a fixed cost, which everyone has to pay through general taxation, and which isn't optional. That is to say that it doesn't matter if you ride a bike or not, you would pay the same amount. Therefore, for a cyclist, the added fixed cost of riding a bike on the road vs not riding a bike is zero.

Then there is a variable cost, which is applied depending on how much / how far you use the road. For most road users, there are various levies, VED, petrol, tolls etc. But for us lucky cyclists, there are no tolls, no wear and tear fees, no other variable costs at all - again, variable costs are zero.

So, in total, adding up the fixed cost of zero and the variable cost of zero, you're left with a grand total cost of £0. Hope that helps.

Pretty sure I have to pay VAT on all my bike-related purchases. I guess you could argue I could opt not to buy sports nutrition, and so avoid VAT on fuel. I pay the same VED as a Porsche Taycan, so we can safely ignore that one. And tolls are entirely optional.

As for claiming there's no wear and tear to worry about... 

Bucks Cycle Cammer wrote:

Pretty sure I have to pay VAT on all my bike-related purchases. I guess you could argue I could opt not to buy sports nutrition, and so avoid VAT on fuel.

VAT is chargable on both coffee and cake

Aside from my general taxation contributing to the roads my bike attracted 20% VAT.

happy to be doing my bit 👍