| I live in a small non wealthy town in the UK, it's five miles across and everything is accessible without cars. My neighbor has five to seven cars on their driveway. To let others out they start them all and play musical cars. Two of them drive to jobs less than two miles away. They use them for practically every trip over 200 metres. Their extended family visit every weekend, in separate cars and all live within five miles. My other neighbors have three cars for two people, including a pickup truck. Again, they drive literally everywhere. Even walking distance. Many of the young people here drive terrible modded cars up and down all day for no actual purpose than vanity. If you tried to have to have a conversation with these people about their car use, they would claim it's their right and that they "pay for it". Yet what they pay is < 10% of the damage they cause. Obviously, if you are remote, or have a disability or need to carry a heavy load you should probably use a car. But many people think it's literally their God given right to drive a dangerous metal box, badly, burning irreplaceable oil, spraying pollution, noise pollution and brake dust literally straight into your home. Every single car journal under 10 miles should be excessively taxed, with extreme taxes for trips under three miles. You should literally be forced to think twice, then twice again. All of these people are literally saying: "Fuck other people's health, their sanity, their happiness, their time, their environment, the environment as a whole. Me drive metal box" The entitlement of drivers is literally staggering. |
If you tax three mile trips extremely enough, you turn a 4 mile roundtrip into around 15 miles of driving in a lot of cases. Need to go A to B to A which are 2 miles apart? Drive A to C (3.5 miles) to B (4 miles) to C (4 miles) to A (3.5 miles). Does that policy make sense in light of the obvious workaround?
Tax the fuel and you align the incentives much more closely and much more difficult to workaround in ways that work against your intention.