Really worried about the possibility of “pay per mile”

[Yorkiepud2614]

I’ve been seeing more and more about this new proposal “pay per mile” that would replace car duty (I think). Which the average household bill somewhere around £450 - £600. Lots of reports that it may come in this October.
Living in the Highlands this would completely cripple us. Do people really think the new government will bring this change in?

You don't need driverless cars for pay per mile, they have nothing to do with each other.

Well, I think PPM is a good idea and essential, and I also think a lot of the COVID lockdown stuff was stupid and hysterical. I think there should have been no limits on outdoor time, for a start.

There was no limit on outdoor time unless you were misled by the hour a day of exercise which was just an opinion of Gove

Well I work in a Scottish hospital. Majority of our nurses and doctors drive at least 20 miles each way. It's a rural area so half hour commute. It's not unusual to do an 80mile round trip.

They might just about suck it up but we've no chance of keeping the HCAs. And they are bloody hard to get as it is.

Fine if you live in a city or work regular hours. You tell me where I can get a bus at 4.30am. It would take me three hours on public transport if I wanted to be in at 9.

I don't think people living in cities where it probably takes 50 minutes to go five miles understand that in the same time we are commuting 40 miles.

They shouldn't have expressed an opinion that was so bloody stupid.

Starting to sound like a stuck record on this one, but....

Every model of PPM that I have seen being discussed for the UK specifically accommodates rural people, whether by reduced rates for rural residents, reduced rates on rural roads, or free miles for rural residents.

The government would need to define rural first

They can't even define a woman without arguments and we have been here since forever

And disabled people who can’t access public transport (or the bloody pavement half the time!).

And parents with sick children or sen children our "local" assessment place is 30 miles away our a&e is further I'm fortunate that his feet people are local however his school is not so if I have to take him from school for an appointment and return him that's a lot of miles

Bear in mind that for every disabled person who can't use public transport there's another who can't drive a car. Getting people who possibly can use public transport out of their cars and into public transport (hence making its provision more cost effective and wide-spread) and encouraging local services rather than out of town car-dependent mega services is hugely beneficial for the segment of the population who can't use a car at any price.

It isn’t either/or- plenty of disabled people can’t access public transport AND can’t drive so rely on being driven by a carer.

If you can’t drive because of disability then you should have good access to affordable and reliable public transport.

If you can’t use public transport because of disability you shouldn’t be penalised for relying on your car and thus driving more miles.

But outside of the very biggest cities you're not going to be able to get a critical mass of people into public transport to make it viable, "affordable and reliable" without motivating a lot of non-disabled car users out of their cars. Huge public transport subsidies will help on some routes, but on others you need a stick as well as carrot. We can't just increase buses in suburbs and small towns to go once every five minutes in every possible direction to compete on convenience with a private car.

Of course in some genuinely rural areas frequent public transport will never be economically viable, and you need a policy that allows for that. But getting better public transport in the majority benefits huge swathes of poor and disabled people, and that means discouraging car use.

“that means discouraging car use”

for those who can actually make a different choice.

Disabled people who are reliant on cars should not be penalised by unreasonable costs- we are already struggling enough.

I don't live rurally, I live in a town, however my office is based 55 miles away. To get there on public transport would take me 3 hours 45 minutes there and another 3 hours 45 minutes back. I'd have to leave at 4.50 in the morning to get there for 8:30/8:45 There is no way I would be able to do that.

It isn't just rural drivers who need a car. Although in Mumsnet fantasy land, we're expected to move closer to the office or find a job locally. Because in real life it's so easy to just get a job or up sticks and move your whole life.

Surely you already spend loads on petrol in that case? Your “vehicle powering” costs should go down a lot once you eventually switch to an electric vehicle. This has to be balanced against road pricing costs. If driving gets cheaper and cheaper due to EVs AND we have no road pricing, there will be no incentive to people not to drive and drive and drive ever-greater amounts, and we will end up in utter gridlock as the roads fall to pieces.

In any case, the reality is that “Hard cases make bad law.” Road pricing is a wealth generating policy and will foster economic growth and make everyone better off in the long term, and make most people better off in the short term too. It isn’t realistic to say “We can’t have this policy because there might be the very occasional person who lives 55 miles from their office and has no way of moving or changing jobs (which is pretty niche, honestly).”

If we had adopted that logic 50 years ago, we would never have succeeded in getting drink-driving banned. (“If we have a ban on drink-driving, it will harm rural pubs! What about the very occasional person who is unable to drive and is married to an alcoholic, what will they do??” Etc.)

Evs are shockingly expensive to insure they want over a thousand a year full no claims no driving issues not a single accident in the last fifteen years driveway/garage good area low milage etc etc for a petrol? £195 a year it's the insurance companies that are impeding the EV market

If driving gets cheaper and cheaper due to EVs AND we have no road pricing, there will be no incentive to people not to drive and drive and drive ever-greater amounts, and we will end up in utter gridlock as the roads fall to pieces
I think we'll end up with rationing where everyone has a quota of miles that they are allowed to drive, it would need to depend on the weight of the car so really it would be a quota of how much road damage you're allowed to do every year. Those of us who like to walk or cycle will be able to make a living by selling our quota to other people!

The problem isn't too many cars, it's too many people. Going for a drive used to be pleasurable, nowadays it is often a living nightmare.

Unless you have a severe dislike of seeing pedestrians on the pavement etc., then of course the reasons why driving isn’t pleasant any more in the UK are going to be connected to “too many cars.”

Car centered societies work OK in thinly populated places like the US and Oz, which have been unsentimental about concreting over loads of land to create big sprawly car-centered cities full of big roads and tons of parking. (The US had pretty European-style cities if you go back to 1900 photographs; they bulldozed them, in most cases, and rebuilt them around cars).

The UK experimented with this model re places like Milton Keynes. There is nothing to stop the UK doing what the States did and bulldozing its cities (all the nice buildings and charming neighborhoods) and replacing them with big spacious Milton Keynes-like cities that allow cars to circulate efficiently. Given how everyone in the UK takes the piss out of Milton Keynes, I don’t see it happening. And given how densely populated the UK is, perhaps that would always have been an unrealistic ambition - such a vision would involve huge loss of natural countryside in a country where we already have far less countryside per person than the Americans and Australians.

Yet if you want to allow efficient travel in cities where space per person is ilimited, you are going to have to restrict cars and push more space-efficient means of transport. Someone mentioned rationing upthread. Literally the point of PPM is that you DON’T have to have government rationing - the price mechanism itself serves to allocate road space, rather than governments trying to assign people a limited amount of driving time/miles. That’s why most center-Right think tanks as well as left-leaning ones tend to be strongly PPM. Even the Conservative government was pro PPM until they decided to ignore the economists and turn the whole issue into a culture war.

Population increase has had an effect but driving habits have changed, too. It used to be rare for families to have more than one car but it's commonplace now. Out-of-town shopping centres have also promoted car usage.

I’m worried about this prospect. I work for Prison service , I live 30 miles away from work and my work is remote.
The nearest station is about 5 miles away , and buses only run at certain times. How can I realistically use public transport?
I start at 7am. I can finish at 9pm and this includes Christmas Day, bank holidays , weekends etc..

I cannot move nearer to work , my kids are settled in school and I could afford to mover there anyway.

I’d honestly think millions of people would be in dire straits and wouldn’t people like me , and people who work for the NHS for instance just leave those jobs?

What about people on low to medium incomes who work 20-40 miles away from home?

I honestly wouldn’t be able to afford to pay per mile on the points I’ve seen on here, on top of the fuel I already pay for.

I drive a 2011 petrol car also.

It's not just carrot and stick in rural areas. If there are no buses, then there are no buses. You can't start penalising people for using cars when there's no viable alternative. You can only use the "stick" when you provide viable alternatives.

Over 10 million people in the UK live in "rural" areas as defined by the government. That's a sixth of the population potentially with no or limited public transport options.

Even those living in some urban areas have poor public transport options when they have to travel between cities, especially in the North of England. Laughably, the LAST train that my son can get from the city where he works to the city near to where we live (only 90 miles away) is a ridiculously early 6pm. If he leaves work early, he can get home, but if he gets delayed, he's stuck there. There are no direct trains between the two cities, so he has to change at an intermediate city where the last train is just after 7pm! That's the LAST train of the day, a stupidly early 7pm from one major Northern city to another Northern city. Leaving his work city later than the 6pm ish train means he doesn't get to the intermediate station early enough to guarantee the connection. This is the reality of crap public transport outside the major cities like London!

It's easy for people to glibly say "move to places with better public transport", but those places are already full due to population increase and their public services are creaking. Does a place like London really want millions more people moving there just because they have a good public transport system? It makes no sense!

But I can't afford a new car, I don't have money swimming about to go and buy an EV. I have no where to charge it either, I live in a flat with an allocated parking space, which has no where to put a charging point in, it's not possible to run a cable from my flat as it would need to go from my bedroom, over the garden, over a public path over a road.

For many people EVs are just not affordable.

If you don't have an electric car and aren't going to get one any time soon, then you're already paying per mile, so that's fine, isn't it.

Not if any new proposed "per mile" charging is on ALL cars, even those petrol cars which are already effectively paying per mile due to taxes on petrol. If road pricing is applied to all cars, then petrol/diesel vehicles will end up being double-taxed. Or is the proposal only to charge "per mile" for electric vehicles via road charging etc??