I’m laughing my head off at the idea that “RRs are heavily taxed anyway!” By which standards and in comparison to which countries?
This does not cover RRs per se, but the UK is remarkable for how little it taxes huge cars.
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2024/mar/01/uk-tax-polluting-suv-green-thinktank-environment
https://twitter.com/transenv_UK/status/1763486578960208236 See this Twitter thread for more details.
Notice the use of phrases like “tax haven for polluting SUVs” and “The UK is dire when looking at large, luxury, high-polluting cars.”
It wouldn’t matter so much, perhaps, if the UK was like America - an unsentimental and thinly populated country that was prepared to bulldoze its cities in the post-war period and rebuild them around cars (huge numbers of increasingly enormous cars). They ripped up old, pretty city centers and replaced with enormous roads and huge parking lots, and huge sprawling suburbs with great big roads and massive driveways to accommodate multiple big cars per household, causing cities to sprawl to gigantic all-American sizes.
In the UK, people “won’t” do this, and insist on girdling their cities tightly with green belts to prevent sprawl, and want to maintain old pretty buildings and townscapes full of charming narrow streets lined with Victorian terraces etc.
The result is the modern day UK - way too many increasingly massive cars all jam-packed, somehow, into cities that are simply not able to contain them comfortably, and resulting in far too much car grinding away over far too little road space. Hence, potholes, congestion, lost productivity, knackered pavements, and neighbors having turf wars over parking.
One thing the UK could do now, at the very least, is start squeezing the drivers of massive cars. But politicians are too cowardly, and most Brits would rather whine about the situation in their cities than risk doing something about it.