Re: murderous motorist

On Jun 13, 4:07 pm, Matt B <"matt.bourke"@nospam.london.com> wrote:


Cars are cheap. The taxes associated with them are the problem. A £500
car could cost £180 per year VED, and upwards of £1000 per year fuel tax
- assuming 12,000 miles per year.


And yet even with those taxes car use is hugely subsidised, and non
car users meet a large part of this bill. This is because the car
user pays non of the 'external' costs associated with car use, such as
those arising from road deaths and injuries (costing the economy
around £18 Billion per year, a cost which itself makes a substantial
dent in the £24 Billion or so raised in fuel duty), pollution and even
congestion itself.

A House of Lords report from a couple of years ago looking at the
harmonisation of fuel duty across Europe noted that the total external
cost of driving a car on London street is around £1.90 km or £3.08
mile. Given a fuel cost of £3.80 gallon of which 72% is tax (including
VAT) or £2.74, at 30 MPG the driver is paying only 9p mile or only 3%
of the true total 'external' cost.

The overall costs of motoring in Britain are average for Europe. The
British don't pay all those motorway tolls which are paid by French
and Italian drivers, or the higher fuel taxes of countries such as
Holland and Norway, or the vehicle purchase taxes of places such as
Denmark (180% of the list price, so a new car with a list price of
say, £10,000 costs you a total of £28,000 to drive away...). The
reality is that currently motoring in the UK is the cheapest it has
been for over 25 years as a percentage of average income.

In September 2005 the AA Motoring trust did a survey of fuel prices
across Europe. This found that the UK the average supermarket price of
unleaded was 92.4 p or 94.8p at all garages. In comparison Belgian
petrol was 100.95p, Finnish petrol 102p German petrol 93.8p Dutch
petrol 101.2p and Norwegian petrol 108.16p, so it is clear that even
in terms of tax on petrol the UK is far from being the most expensive.
Plenty of other countries were found to have prices little different
to those found in the UK. For example, In Italy petrol was 91.64p,
France 90.8p and Denmark 92.59p.

It was also the case that many of the countries listed such as the
those in Eastern Europe have a very different economic base. So for
example, petrol in Poland was 83.24p per litre but taken as a ratio of
the average wage there this was very expensive indeed compared to the
price of petrol to the average British buyer.



.

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