Cyclox member Andy Chivers looks at the issue of road pricing from the viewpoint of a cyclist.

Currently vehicle licensing and fuel duty raise £35bn annually but this will shrink as electric vehicles arrive.

Even worse, as well-off people buy electric cars or hybrids, these taxes will fall mainly on poorer people and small traders whose overheads are already tight.

This exacerbates an already unequal society with all the negative consequences so well described in the book The Spirit Level.

Road pricing is the obvious response - pay per mile driven, discouraging the use of certain roads at certain times. London has had its Congestion Charge for many years and other cities are doing the same.

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Our local response is the Zero Emission Zone, effectively a road pricing scheme for the city centre. But these schemes are also unfair since people who can afford it can travel through the zones anyway.

Oxford Mail:

Local schemes are primarily designed to reduce air pollution and congestion, not to tackle climate change or replace lost tax take, so it is important to know what the aim of a scheme is and be clear about the conflicting pressures and unintended consequences of any initiative.

We don’t want to make poor people poorer or small businesses less secure - the energy price increases and the hike in National Insurance are bad enough already.

We don’t want car drivers to drive more - something which an electric car encourages with almost free mileage costs.

We do want to reduce carbon dioxide production and improve air quality. We want to encourage people to be more active in their day-to-day life. We want healthy towns and suburbs. Electric vehicles are part of our response to averting climate change, but it is a fantasy to imagine that we can all be driving our own e-car - there is a need for more use of public transport and cycling and walking.

Oxfordshire County Council plans to introduce Connecting Oxford which will encourage commuters to use buses instead of cars, principally from Witney and Abingdon to get to the major employers in Headington, reducing CO2 emissions, congestion, and air pollution in one go.

The workplace parking levy will subsidise the bus service and the reduced congestion will allow the buses to travel faster.

Putting all these issues together, we need a tax on journeys which doesn’t penalise the poorer section of society, encourages a shift to public transport and active travel, frees up congested roads and raises enough revenue to replace the loss of fuel tax.

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Crucially also, it needs to be easily understood and transparent so that people planning a journey can make informed choices. Simply being billed at the end of a year for the miles driven will not help change behaviour.

Taxi meters show the cost clocking up and something like that linked to a satnav is probably quite simple to fit in a car, though agreeing the costing and incentives would be very controversial and of course the device would have to be tamper proof and always in the car.

What would be the effect if every car journey incurred a fixed baseline charge of £1?

Short journeys would be less attractive and encourage people to use public transport or walk or cycle. But this would disadvantage poorer drivers and essential workers so an exemption is needed.

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In the end we know that changing human behaviour needs reinforcing in different ways, so frequent high quality cheap bus services and friendly routes for walking and cycling need to accompany the start of road pricing and constraints to journeys through town.

Oxford Mail:

We need to be debating at a national level the challenge of replacing fuel tax with road pricing.

Cyclox says its ‘mission’ is to get more people cycling, more often and more safely.

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