Project BRUCE/future of road tolling discussion

Yes, lots of Irish people still only ever look at the UK, which has some of the lowest motoring taxes in Europe (and, it has to be said, some of the biggest whingers about road taxes in Europe... the way they go on about the pittance they pay is pretty annoying). We are not a “high tax” country when it comes to cars: we’re about mid-table. (Insurance, on the other hand...)

But while tolls here on average are low, they are not evenly distributed. Take three journeys, all ending at the Red Cow interchange: the toll charges for a car that used M8, M7 to travel from Cork (235 km) come to €3.70, which is expensive by European standards. However, a car using M7 from Limerick (186 km) pays a European-average total of €1.90, but one taking M9, M7 from Waterford (148 km) will costs nothing at all in tolls.

The posted story is definitely something TII is looking at - it’s been on their radar for about three years now. One of the most likely first options is to move the M50 to a Road-Use Pricing (RUP) model rather than a single-point toll. This basically involves setting up multiple “soft” tolling points (camera-based) along each segment of the motorway, and then charging the driver based on how much of the road they actually used. Anyone using the current Liffey bridge will end up paying a lot less, but there will be a lot of complaint from the majority of people using M50 who do not cross the toll-point and so have been getting a free ride up to now.

Also under consideration are discounts for off-peak use and/or travelling with at least one passenger on board. The latter idea (HOV discount) has worked well in the USA, but has never been tried in Europe.

maybe some countries literally have no motor tax and are happy get tax off fuel.

Going slighty off topic but every country has a different tax mix, and Ireland uses VRT (and a high VAT rate too) as a sortof stealth tax to enable lower PRSI and income taxes which get people voted in at election time.

If a politican said they would raise income taxes - which is the fairest tax of all as the richer you are the more you pay, but lower VRT and VAT, there'd be a mutiny, and probably the most aggressive negativity from parties representing lower income people who would benefit the most from taxing income rather than expenditure.

A very lazy post which doesn’t at all reflect the reality of the situation as proven by figures supplied by other posters.

I find it’s this kind of posts which dominate social media and lead to a completely false narrative being popularised.

Un-tolled motorways with tolled side routes would be madness: people would end up diverting onto the motorway even for journeys that would be better taken on surrounding roads, just to avoid a toll. I think the problem with your argument is that in reality, “we”, or rather the people who manage all this stuff, actually don’t want people to use motorways: they want people to use the most efficient means of transport for their journey - that can be a motorway, but it can also be a local road, or for that matter a train, bus or bike. Road User Charging is a kind of “nudge” to encourage drivers to avoid travel habits that cause traffic congestion.

And speaking of bad habits, your usage pattern on M50 is actually the worst in terms of creating congestion: traffic joining and leaving in quick succession is the most disruptive to the overall flow on the road, so if lots of one-hop drivers were discouraged from using the motorway, the traffic would actually flow much better.

Road User Charging would discourage this by charging, say, €0.50 for the first segment used, then €0.10 per segment after. (by “segment” I mean the stretch of road between two junctions). That way, it only makes sense to use the road if you’ll be travelling on it for a fair amount of its length. This would shift the operation of M50 back to what it was originally supposed to be - a bypass of Dublin city centre - rather than just a handy short-cut for commuters who are actually going in or out of the city.

As for getting cars out of city streets, well: Congestion Charging is another kind of Road User Charge, but now instead of paying to use a length of road, you are paying to enter a particular area. I’m not a fan of Congestion Charging in cities unless there’s also a method to give exemptions or heavy discounts to residents.

I didn’t insult you or indeed say anything about you. I criticised your post, not you.

Actually yes, there is a thing called road tax and Irelands implementation of it is called Motor Tax. In the UK it's called Vehicle Excise Duty and there are similar schemes around the world with different names but similar function.

Anyone claiming that Irish motorists do not pay road tax is not telling the truth.

Not quite. The “I pay road tax” complainers are under the impression that “road tax” is a tax that pays for the roads and their maintenance. This is not true. Motor Tax is a tax on motor vehicles and it goes directly into government revenues. There is no correlation between the amount of motor tax collected and the amount of money spent on roads.

For a long time the roads budget has exceeded the amount of revenues from motor tax. In 2021, €907 million was collected from motor tax, but the 2022 budget (funded by those receipts) had €1370 million allocated to roads.

I can also walk and cycle down the road without paying any “road tax”.

Lads, I think most of us know what “road tax” is for. Can we drop the “ACTUALLY it’s called motor tax not road tax and even though you have to pay it to take your car on the road it doesn’t directly fund road maintenance” song and dance which goes on every time it’s brought up?

I would be interested in the possibility of a per-km charge for all roads in the state. As in, at the NCT (or another inspection for this purpose) your mileage would be checked and your road tax would then be based on the number of km driven since the last check. The driver would be able to decide how often they want inspections if they don’t get annual NCTs. I wonder if that could be made work.

It’s going to be interesting to see what replaces fuel excise, which as noted above was in many ways a pretty good usage-based tax for road users.

Your post was too subtle for my half-attentive reading :) Yeah, I agree with your point, sorry for the confusion!

My preferred replacement for motor tax would be a weight-based annual charge - unlike CO2 emissions, it’s easy to check, and hard to cheat. Yes, EVs are penalised by this as they’re usually about 30% heavier than an equivalent ICE car, but then EV owners don’t pay fuel duty, so it balances out (for what it’s worth, I drive an EV).

Per kilometre pricing is something that I think should be limited to high-speed limited-access roads (i.e., motorways and those N-roads that are are motorways in all but name) but not 2+2s. Even then, it should only be considered where there is traffic congestion; putting a toll on the rural parts of M9 or M18 would just subject local villages to traffic pollution while the motorway goes unused.

Indeed. It’s not called road tax and saying that road and motor tax are the same thing doesn’t make it true.

The trouble is, when people scream "ROAD TAX" as a justification for trying to run you off the road, it becomes something of a sensitive point (particularly when you do pay motor tax and lots of other tax). This is what makes me knee-jerk respond to any mention of "road tax" in the predictable unhelpful way!

On the "per-km" charge, I agree with your mindset but I'm not sure whether what you're suggesting (per-km) will work. There's a few problems I can think of:

1. We want the tax to shape good behaviour, not just increase state funds. To that end some people simply need the vehicle more than others. Blue badge holders are obvious, but actually women do lots more "socially responsible" type trips, like dropping elderly relatives places, dropping kids places. So per-km charges sort of disproportionally affect women doing what might be "socially responsible" driving while benefitting businessmen doing a lazy work-and-back commutes. I've no idea how to resolve that issue at all. How do we tax lazy entitled people more efficiently?
2. Some people have very limited alternative transport options, particularly in the countryside. No amount of carrot or stick can give them alternatives to clocking up the km's day-to-day. At least in this instance, you could possibly make the "per-km" something of a "postcode" type tax with urban dwellers paying higher per-km charges. But what about urban dwellers who are working in countryside, for instance providing services or teaching in schools etc?

The only really fair way I can think of is the likes of congestion charges, where you get charged upon entry to or transit through an urban area with good public transport and P&R.

And maybe also a rule like the Japanese have, where you must declare exactly where you intend to park your car? This would go a long way to decluttering streets at the same time as creating a database of "where cars originate" and targeting those areas for improved sustainable transport. The census does this a bit already, and you can see for instance that in Cork, on one side of the Blackrock greenway lots of people walk and cycle to work/school, whereas on the other side almost nobody walks/cycles. It's already clear that one side needs more targeted schemes to get people out of cars.

I don't disagree. You're only making my point more clearly I think! It's difficult to define good behaviour as far as transport is concerned once emissions and congestion are taken off the table. Right now "less emissions" is good behaviour. And obviously "not killing and injuring vulnerable road users" is a given. But per-km charges doesn't really get at enforcing good behaviour. It's just a blanket penalty. And maybe that's actually OK if you just need to fill government pockets.

For what it's worth and to answer your question directly, the reason someone driving to their place of work is less socially responsible than someone driving their children to school is because single-occupancy multi-seat vehicles are a poor use of constrained resources (fuel, wear on the road, space on the road, storage space, etc). Again, in a sparsely populated area that's not a big deal but in an urban area it's wasteful and we know that we should aspire to better. Of course it would also be great to get the school runs out of cars, and the short distance school runs particularly, but it happens that they're marginally less wasteful than single-occupancy cars doing short distance commutes, and their end purpose (education of schoolchildren) CAN be more socially responsible than some jobs. I work for large wealthy corporations, for instance, and I would say someone bringing their kids to school by car is probably more socially responsible than me driving myself to work over the same distance.

Size and weight is sufficient, I think, if you’re just replacing the flat annual motor tax, but weight tends to follow footprint fairly closely, so I’d say weight alone would be just as useful.

The idea of “socially responsible” trips is something that is really difficult to determine, but my gut feeling is that these journeys would tend to be a lot shorter than typical commutes, and more importantly they would tend to happen outside of peak hours. I don’t believe they’d matter much to congestion relief, which is the main objective of Road User Charging.

But if congestion reduction is the goal, we do need to talk about school runs. You only have to drive any morning when schools are off to see the huge impact school-drops have on city traffic levels. Whatever about primary-school kids, I find it hard to believe that secondary-school children couldn’t manage to use a bus if one were provided.. especially in cities.

(Occupancy discounts would also encourage parents to drop their kids to school by car, as this would make their own journey into the city centre seem cheaper; As an extreme example, I know of a situation in another country where occupancy discounts encouraged a husband and wife who were going to different locations in a city take one kid in each car in order to save tolls on a stretch of road between their homes and the city centre)

As I said above, I don’t like the idea of per-kilometre charging on the general road network, and I do thing any forthcoming charging proposal will be on motorway-style roads (The proposal that I heard of a couple of years ago was to bring in per km charges on the whole length of M50). Limiting it to congested motorways would also remove the problem of penalising rural dwellers who require a car to get around.

Also, I would oppose the idea of needing a car parking space to own a car, as this penalises people who live in urban areas and must rely on on-street parking (or people in apartments who have only communal parking spaces). And besides, urban dwellers are not the primary cause of urban traffic, which mostly originates in suburbs and exurbs.

I lived in a city centre for nine years and almost never had to resort to parking illegally. Parking problems happened during the day when people came in to town...

Really, the answer is for more residents-only parking provision in cities. If you want people to live in cities, you need to allow them to have the same right to property as they would have elsewhere Most people living in cities won't actually need a car, but for those who do, there needs to be a place for them. And if you walk through the residential parts of the “model cities” like Amsterdam, you see lots of cars parked up.

I have been in this situation myself: I lived in the city centre, but my job meant I had to travel to a rural location regularly. What should I do? Move out of my home just because someone says “cars shouldn’t be in cities”? Most of the time I worked at home, so contributing nothing to traffic, except for those trips that I had to take every week, for which no viable public-transport alternative existed.

It was fine, and as I said, I never needed to park illegally; but one day, the city council decided to put your idea into practice and refused to renew my resident parking permit because I lived in an apartment (specifically an apartment: had I lived in a terraced house I could have continued to park on-street), which left me with a livelihood that needed a car, a car that I couldn’t legally park anymore, nowhere else to live at short notice, and an eight month fight to get things sorted out. (Now I think of it, they still didn’t refund about €200 of clamping fees though...)

The mistake was to plan apartments with inadequate parking provision, or not enforce the planning (In the case of my home at this time, the developers claimed in the planning that there was one space per two units, communally used; then they sold the spaces exclusively with certain apartments...)

Interesting idea. The only feasible (like for like) replacement for fuel excise has to be based on distance travelled. If car odometers were really tamper-proof, this would be a great solution, but the temptation to fake it would be enormous. Maybe if other countries decided to go the same way, the car industry could come up with some solution?

European car buyers pay considerably less money for new cars than we do and get a better specification. They also have the option to import cars from anywhere in the EU that we don't. They also have a bouyant second hand market and ours has been trashed!

The tolling point is between Jn 6 and 7, North of the bridges so ten junctions, including the biggest at the Red Cow are untolled and the majority of them are on the South side. So thousands of vehicles every day use the M50 and pay nothing. How is that efficient? I hate tolls as I regard them as yet another tax but I'll bet the operators would have point to point tolling if they thought they could put it in tomorrow.

I know about the bridge BUT it is already proposed that the M50 and other motorways be tolled per section and the bridge will become irrelevant as a tolling point.