How will they implement 3p per mile charges for driving EV’s ?

plumb1_2

They’ll be a big increase in by passing the meter. And electrical fires.

Mildly_Miffed

MouldyOldDough said:

What do you think will happen to the consumer cost of petrol – from 2030 onwards ?

Will it increase due to taxation in a bid to get 100% of drivers on to EV’s or will it reduce (in real terms) - due to a glut pf unused fuel - or will it be totally unchanged ?

A very good question...

Ignoring the tax element, there's still going to be the requirement for some fractions of crude oil, while others will go down sharply.

It's nowhere near as easy as "Here's a barrel of crude. Let's turn it all into petrol today, and we'll do diesel from another barrel tomorrow, then bitumen the day after." They CAN change the proportions coming out, and different crudes have different proportions, but...

Also, remember that about 30% of marine traffic is moving oil around, another 10% gas and coal... so as demand for fossil fuels falls, so the demand for fuel oil for that traffic will also fall.

MattMattMattUK

Mildly_Miffed said:

MattMattMattUK said:

Mildly_Miffed said:

MattMattMattUK said:

If the government were being rational it would drop this and cover the cost from general taxation, raising income tax to cover once fuel duty dwindles out, so instead I expect an overly complicated system that costs billions to administer and is easy for the honest to avoid.

https://obr.uk/forecasts-in-depth/tax-by-tax-spend-by-spend/fuel-duties/
Fuel duty raises £25bn/year, 2% of all government revenue, £850/household on average.
...and falling.

So keep cranking up fuel duty whupilst it still exists and fund the rest from general taxation...

And yet it's not been "cranked up".

It's been frozen at 57.95p/litre since 2009, with a 5p cut between 2022 and next September.
If it'd been increased with inflation alone, it'd now be 93.3p/litre.

Exactly, but hardly surprising due to decades of fiscal incompetence for successive governments. 

We have the most complicated tax system of any nation in the world and now proposals to make it even more complicated. 

Herzlos

MouldyOldDough said:

What do you think will happen to the consumer cost of petrol – from 2030 onwards ?

Will it increase due to taxation in a bid to get 100% of drivers on to EV’s or will it reduce (in real terms) - due to a glut pf unused fuel - or will it be totally unchanged ?

A large part of why petrol is so cheap is scale; about 46,000,000 litres of petrol are sold every day in the UK. Petrol stations only make about 3p/litre profit.

So as more people to electric and less people buy petrol, it's only going to get more expensive as the scale drops. It'll cost more to transport and refine, petrol stations will need to bump up the price for it to be worth selling, and so on. 

And that's before you factor in changes in oil drilling - we've been harvesting the easy oil first so over time as the easy oil is consumed then we need to go to the difficult (and expensive) oil. 

Herzlos

I'm actually slightly concerned about the unintended consequences of a ppm approach; is it going to result in people taking lots of stupid rat runs in order to save a couple of pennies in tax?

Currently with a consumption based tax, you're incentivised to drive efficiently, so bypasses and ringroads may be cheaper, but if it's by mile you're incentivised to take the shortest possible route. 

The saving will be negligable but that doesn't mean people won't try it. People will pay £100's more a month for a new car to save £10/month on tax. 

Herzlos

Mildly_Miffed said:

MattMattMattUK said:

If the government were being rational it would drop this and cover the cost from general taxation, raising income tax to cover once fuel duty dwindles out, so instead I expect an overly complicated system that costs billions to administer and is easy for the honest to avoid.

https://obr.uk/forecasts-in-depth/tax-by-tax-spend-by-spend/fuel-duties/
Fuel duty raises £25bn/year, 2% of all government revenue, £850/household on average.
...and falling.

The only proper way to do any per-mile pricing is through a comprehensive ANPR network, and that simply doesn't exist, and won't do without a LOT of investment.
2,300 miles of motorway
5,300 miles of trunk A-road (nationally managed)
24,300 miles of non-trunk A-road (local authority managed)
19,000 miles of B-road
195,000 miles of C- and unclassified road.

ANPR is already fairly comprehensive on the major roads, so it's "just" a back-end project. Start to price just on those, though, and you move traffic off the primary network onto the secondary, which is the exact opposite of what you want to do for better traffic flow.

I expect the results of the consultation will result in some awkward conversations between No.11 and the Dept of Transport, and the current plan will not come to pass.

You'd need to have it on all roads / junctions, or people will just drive on roads that aren't covered. It'll increase congestion, emissions and accidents as people drive along B/C roads instead of an equivalent motorway.

There'd also be a huge amount of data processing and storage to associate each scan with a car and find the previous scan and calculate the distance. 

You'd be easier and be less privacy invading with a GPS system that just reports back total mileage on a daily/weekly/monthy basis. 

WellKnownSid

Herzlos said:

Mildly_Miffed said:

MattMattMattUK said:

If the government were being rational it would drop this and cover the cost from general taxation, raising income tax to cover once fuel duty dwindles out, so instead I expect an overly complicated system that costs billions to administer and is easy for the honest to avoid.

https://obr.uk/forecasts-in-depth/tax-by-tax-spend-by-spend/fuel-duties/
Fuel duty raises £25bn/year, 2% of all government revenue, £850/household on average.
...and falling.

The only proper way to do any per-mile pricing is through a comprehensive ANPR network, and that simply doesn't exist, and won't do without a LOT of investment.
2,300 miles of motorway
5,300 miles of trunk A-road (nationally managed)
24,300 miles of non-trunk A-road (local authority managed)
19,000 miles of B-road
195,000 miles of C- and unclassified road.

ANPR is already fairly comprehensive on the major roads, so it's "just" a back-end project. Start to price just on those, though, and you move traffic off the primary network onto the secondary, which is the exact opposite of what you want to do for better traffic flow.

I expect the results of the consultation will result in some awkward conversations between No.11 and the Dept of Transport, and the current plan will not come to pass.

There'd also be a huge amount of data processing and storage to associate each scan with a car and find the previous scan and calculate the distance. 

I don’t think that’s true. In terms of raw storage there are only 844 billion journeys in the UK every year across every form of transport. Allowing one byte for a timestamp and an unsigned integer for a distance to the nearest mm that would be the order of a few terabytes.

If journeys were being tallied for the 44 million vehicles on UK roads that’s something that is almost at laptop levels of storage and processing rather than “huge”.

That of course won’t stop Capita tendering to build a dedicated £400m supercomputer with which to handle all of this data 😅

Herzlos

You can prune it down a lot if you're linking them together in a journey sequence, or dropping redundant points in the chain (i.e. in a straight road you'd only need to record the first and last and not every junction). 

But the data would be produced by camera, which you'll need 1 per lane per direction. That'd at minimum need a timestamp of a few bytes (assuming you're storing them sequentially), 7 bytes for the plate number, a few bytes for a camera id, and some checksums. Assuming you also need to keep the image for verification purposes, that's a few KB. 

All motor vehicles covered 332bn miles, with something like 2 junctions per mile, is 664bn camera recordings. At 25 bytes/recording which is very low, that's still 'only' 17TB in raw data. 

But then you need the logic to identify which cars were on which journeys, what the journey lengths were, and tie tie in to billing in a way that's safe and reliable given you've now to complete location data for all cars in the country. 

Compare that to 44 million cars using a GPS system and reporting just the mileage back every week. 7 bytes for the plate number, 4 bytes for the mileage, 1 checksum, time 52 for a year. That's 26GB of data (virtually nothing) and no privacy concerns about having the location data of all cars in the system. 

Of course, if you roll it into the MOT then you've reduced it to virtually nothing. 

Herzlos

WellKnownSid said:

That of course won’t stop Capita tendering to build a dedicated £400m supercomputer with which to handle all of this data 😅

And it costing £1.2bn by the time it's finished 4 years late and only works on Tuesdays

WellKnownSid

Mildly_Miffed said:

MattMattMattUK said:

If the government were being rational it would drop this and cover the cost from general taxation, raising income tax to cover once fuel duty dwindles out, so instead I expect an overly complicated system that costs billions to administer and is easy for the honest to avoid.

The only proper way to do any per-mile pricing is through a comprehensive ANPR network, and that simply doesn't exist, and won't do without a LOT of investment.
2,300 miles of motorway
5,300 miles of trunk A-road (nationally managed)
24,300 miles of non-trunk A-road (local authority managed)
19,000 miles of B-road
195,000 miles of C- and unclassified road.

I asked ChatGPT based upon achieving a 95% detection rate.  The vast majority of traffic uses A-roads to get from A to B - with 148.7bn vehicle miles every year.

Road type	Length (miles)	Approx. cameras per mile	Cameras
Motorway	2,300	1 per 5 miles	~460
Trunk A-roads	5,300	1 per 8 miles	~662
Non-trunk A-roads	24,300	1 per 10 miles	~2,430
B-roads	19,000	1 per 20 miles	~950
C- & Unclassified	195,000	1 per 40 miles	~4,875
— Total ≈	246,500	—	~9,377 cameras

The London ULEZ by comparison uses 3,700 in order to prevent the 'rat run effect'.

Interesting statistic, it is reckoned that China had installed 200 million surveillance cameras by 2018.  Where there's a will...