Motorists may be taxed on distance driven rather than paying excise on fuel [Ireland]

Irish Times ^ | 08/06/2018 | Fiach Kelly, Deputy Political Editor

[Red Badger]

How much could they drive in Ireland? They are on an island!..............

[alternatives?]

Will motorcycles be charged the same rate?

Will the GPS be on the tag?

[Olog-hai]

The traffic jams in Dublin and Cork are excruciating.

[Red Badger]

Well, with all those drunk Irishmen, it’s no wonder!....................

[Olog-hai]

Here they are claiming that they want fewer people driving, and yet they cut back the bus services five years ago. They’re also making many of the inner-city streets narrower. (O’Connell Street was cut back from eight lanes to four in the 1990s, but a lot of two-lane one-way streets they’ve been cutting down to a single lane of late and sometimes giving over a traffic lane to bikes; also, they’ve closed off streets for street-running “light rail” and are looking to “pedestrianize” other busy city streets.)

[Red Badger]

I take it they don’t have subways................

[Red Badger]

The Spanish American War excise tax...............

[Wuli]

Paying by miles driven requires either a more personally invasive government and less human Liberty than paying fuel taxes, or an unfair tax that would hit every driver with the same amount, regardless of how many miles they drove, based on some “expert” idea of the average miles a year folks had driven the year before. Without such an unffair use of an average miles, it requires mechanisms for the government to be able to “know” the miles driven for each vehicle.

It would be safer to human Liberty to just increase the fuel tax as fuel efficiency increases. If the tax increase is not greater than the increase in fuel efficiency, a motorist’s annual fuel tax paid will not increase either - on average.

The equal problem is the use of the fuel taxes, which no longer gets restricted to the roads used by the motorists that pay the fuel taxes. “Mass transit” and all kinds of other things take their cut of the fuel taxes, and then the politicians yell that their accounts for bulding and fixing the roads are in deficit. If the use of the fuel tax funds were restricted to the roads and the states did a superior job of priortizing how the funds are used, there would be less concern about the fuel tax rates alone. (yes, I’m speaking from a U.S. stand point)

[I am Richard Brandon]

Congratulations! You win today’s Star Prize.

[Red Badger]

It took 108 years!....................

[BitWielder1]

Road wear is largely dependent on vehicle weight.

That's another reason why a mileage tax would be unfair.
Taxing the fuel, which we already do, makes more sense since heavier vehicles typically use more.
And it does not use any new, expensive and intrusive technology.

I suspect the commies not only want to know how far we go, they want to keep track of *where* we go.

[DannyTN]

That’s going to raise some ire!

[Olog-hai]

No, they don’t. There have been plans for subways dating back about a half-century or more, but they never get built. Interestingly enough, the last plan for a “metro” was deep-sixed by the current prime minister, Leo Varadkar, back when he was serving as Minister for Transport.

[Red Badger]

I thought liberals loved mass transit.....................

[elbook]

position tracking devices required for every car ?

[Olog-hai]

They love controlling it.