http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/sydney-nsw/pay-as-you-drive-on-roads-scrap-rego-and-fuel-tax/story-e6freuzi-1226071264175
Snippets:
THE man who brought Manchester its congestion tax said Sydney needs a road pricing system - starting with green hybrids and electric cars which avoid a fuel tax.
Jack Opiola, who has had Barack Obama's ear as a pioneer for GPS road tolling, said registration and fuel tax should be scrapped and motorists charged depending on how much they drive and when.
Mr Opiola, who will address government and private roads industry groups at the Roads Australia conference in Sydney today, said the revenue could be invested back into roads instead of being lost in government coffers.
"Everybody pays their fair share. And we are starting (in Portland, Oregon) with vehicles that are not,"
"It would make people conscious of their trips, and in that way it is a good substitute for the gas tax, you could vary the price by time of day or by zones for the city where there can be a higher charge in the peak periods,"
- Daily Telegraph, 8th June 2011.
I sincerely hope that Mr Opiola who has suggested scrapping the Rego and Fuel Taxes is ignored and goes back to America having changed nothing. Whilst the idea of turning motoring into a completely user pays system sounds like a good idea, I wonder if Mr Opiola has actually thought about the implications of specifically whom the tax is going to hurt and who the burden of such a tax falls on.
I would further suggest that Mr Opiola being an American also has little grasp of either the culture or infrastructure of Sydney and that his idea is grounded in ignorance.
Sydney and its environs sit in a great basin bounded on three sides by mountains and on the fourth by the ocean. It stretches roughly 80km north to south and another 80km east to west. However, the provision of the types of infrastructure throughout that broad square is vastly different across the map.
In the eastern suburbs and towards the City of Sydney in the first 100 postcodes (2000-2100) there is a concentration of the provision of public transport. There are far more buses, train lines and ferries within these postcodes than in the rest of Sydney. Also because these suburbs are closer together, the distance which people would need to travel by car to get to where they are going would also be less.
The further you go to the west, north, south, north-west and south-west of Sydney, the provision of buses, train lines and ferries is either restricted to corridors ribbons or else is entirely non-existent.
Coincidentally there is a distinct correlation of household incomes to the provision of more buses, train lines and ferries. People who live further to the west, north, south, north-west and south-west of Sydney, do so because their wages are less and because the distances they need to travel to get to where they are going is also more.
If a tax is imposed directly on the distance that people drive, it is unashamedly borne by the poorer people of Sydney, who because of the hideous incompetence of governments stretching back more than 50 years, have been forced by virtue of the lack of provision of services, to drive further in the first place.
And what does Mr Opiola suggest that the revenue raised from a pay-as-you-drive tax be spent on? Not more public transport which would encourage people to drive less but more roads! Rather than addressing the problem, this jacked up nincompoop actively suggests to perpetuate the problem.
I can understand where he is coming from. Being an American, which is the land of "free enterprise" and where the provision of public transport quite frankly languishes in the 1890s, he has never lived in a situation which encourages anythigng else other than the use of the motor car.
All one needs to do is look at the example of Paris in which one is never more than 500m from a Metro station, or the French national rail corporation SNCF (Société Nationale des Chemins de fer Français) to see how fast and efficient train services can be run. SNCF run regional trains called the TGV which stands for Train à Grande Vitesse or Train of High-Speed and they are. TGVs in some parts of France peak at speeds of 500km/h and average speeds of 275km/h. Such a speed means that you could go from Sydney to Melbourne in a little over three and a half hours, which is even faster than current air travel. But does Mr Opiola suggest that this is where the revenue from a pay-as-you-drive tax be spent on? Not a bar of it.
The worst thing is that this self-appointed guru, keeps on touting his rubbish all over the world. Governments will tend to want to be seen to be doing the "right thing" over the next 20-40 years as climate change becomes more of an issue, yet Mr Opiola's solution to a 21st Century problem is stuck in the 1980s.
I never thought I'd defend Rego fees but here I go. Rego fees as a roughly flat tax across the population of motorists, represent an "access fee" to use the system. They are already charged a usage fee via the taxes contained in the price of petrol. The current system already addresses the issues which Mr Opiola has identified and in a better way because it charges motorists for the access of the road system even if they don't actively use it.
Bet you never thought of that Mr Opiola.
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