[avianlyric]

TfL has built most of its fare collection systems in-house, indeed it licenses its fare collect technologies to other cities like New York. Also it’s not within TfLs or London Mayors gift to provide free transit, TfL is almost unique in that its costs are almost entirely covered by farebox collections, and they receive little to zero government subsidy.

If London made transit free, they have to find an additional £7 billion a year to cover the operating costs (most of which is mundane stuff like keeping the trains working). Total London council tax (which is the only form of tax the London mayor can control), raises about £37 billion a year. So making transit in the city free would involve increasing council tax by an additional ~20%, and council tax is a notoriously regressive tax that disproportionately impacts the poor more than anyone else.

Additionally TfL is already extremely efficient, it was audited by the previous government in an attempt to find further ammunition to discredit the London Mayor, but it seems they couldn’t find any inefficiencies worth publishing. So there isn’t much wiggle room to reduce TfL operating costs.

Regardless of how you slice it, there isn’t a practical way to provide free transit in London, and certainly removing the cost of the bureaucracy for means testing isn’t going to move the needle on the simple economic facts.

[kiba]

Tax cars further. They take up way more space than the average pedestrian and required more infrastructure to support and maintain.

[bigstrat2003]

Let's say that happens, which is not at all a given. What are you going to do when car usage goes down because people are tired of being taxed excessively for them? "Just tax this thing I don't like" is not a viable strategy to fund the things you do like.

[kiba]

Less car usage means less money spent on car related infrastructure and better flow of existing traffic which leads to further economic growth as space freed up can be repurposed for something else which lead to increased tax revenue.

[avianlyric]

Even that won’t get close. Existing London car taxes only raise around £0.2 billion annually. Not a chance in hell you can raise that by 3500% without either public unrest, or such a dramatic change in behaviour that tax collection amounts drop, instead of raise (although I would personally love a car free London).

[rahimnathwani]

Are you counting fuel duties here, or only road tax?

[avianlyric]

There isn’t road tax in the UK, only vehicle tax which is based on the about a vehicle pollutes. Additionally all of that tax across the UK goes to the central government, and none of it goes to the London Mayor. There have been attempts to have vehicle taxes collected on London based vehicles be allocated to the Mayor, but it’s always been soundly rejected by central government.

Fuel duty is also collected by central government, and none of it goes to the London mayor either.

The only taxes collected and managed by London are the Congestion charge and the ULEZ charge. Everything else is beyond the reach of the London mayor.

[rahimnathwani]

I'm from the UK, and lived there for the first 35 years of my life. During that time, 'road tax' was a common way to refer to 'vehicle excise duty'. Doesn't anyone call it that any more?

Back to the point, though... Even though the Mayor of London doesn't have control over most tax revenue collected from drivers in London, this whole discussion is about what could be, so suggesting that the congestion and ULEZ charges are the only possible sources of revenue places an unnecessary limit on options.

[avianlyric]

Most of the people refer to VED as “road tax”, it’s usually followed by some sort of condescending comment about how non-drivers should “get off the roads”, and often used as an excuse for engaging in deliberate acts of violence. I’ve personally had people explain to me how being hospitalised for a week, and being given a permanent spinal injury by driver deliberately hitting me while cycling to work, is an acceptable cost to society, and that because I don’t pay “road tax” means I have no right to demand safer cycling conditions on the roads. So I make a point of not calling it “road tax”, because it’s a misleading name. A better name would be a “car pollution tax”, or just a “pollution tax”.

With regards to VED collected in London. Only about £0.5 billion is collected annually from London. Fuel duty does seem to be broken down by region, so it’s hard know how much is collected in London. But across the UK £24 billion of fuel duty is collected annually, so it could be possible to fund a significant chunk of London’s transit by increasing fuel duty by 30-40% across the entire UK. But such an increase would likely also cause riots or similar. Additionally if you were to increase fuel duty like this, you would presumably need to provide free transit across the entire of the UK, which would require a significantly higher fuel duty increase. Of course that tax increase plus free transit, would result in a huge modal shift away from cars, and thus drive down the collected revenue.

In all, there doesn’t seem to be a viable way to provide free transit to all. At least not without significant tax increases across the board, and maybe that’s a viable approach. But there certainly isn’t an easy and obvious no-brainer way to get rid of the “bureaucracy” and use the savings for free transit, as was originally suggested.

[fragmede]

They could also be be referring to London's congestion charge, that drivers pay for driving in inner London.

[ascorbic]

Neither of those are London car taxes. I think the number refers to the congestion charge. ULEZ raises a similar amount though.

[moritonal]

That would be Mayoral career suicide at this point. Most voters are car owners.

[paganel]

Take the 7 billion from the existing 37 billion and get rid of some existing stuff which is non-housing related.

[avianlyric]

What exactly would you get rid of?

* Bin collections?

* Social care for the young and elderly?

* Street sweeping?

* General road, pavement and cycle infrastructure maintenance?

* Sports centres, libraries, schools?

Councils are already stretched thin. Last year was the largest increase in council taxes the UK has seen in decades, and councils are going bust left right and centre as pretty much all central funding was removed over the last 14 years. Do you honestly think that reducing every London councils budget by ~19% to provide free transit is going to result in a good outcome?

[paganel]

> Bin collections?

Slightly increase the price/tax for that for single-family homes.

> Street sweeping?

Yes, at a limit, I'd choose not having clean streets over people not being able to afford using them, even by riding a bus.

> General road, pavement and cycle infrastructure maintenance?

I'd get rid of cycle infrastructure if it's more than a token percentage of said road-focused expenditures, because it's mostly the middle class that is using bicycles and, as such, money spent that way goes directly for the only benefit of said middle-classes. But, yes, I'd personally settle for roads with more holes if that means public transportation that doesn't cost 2000+ pounds per year, you can bet on that.

> Sports centres, libraries, schools?

Yes, I'd get rid of sports centers, libraries are, I guess, just a token expenditure.

> Social care for the young and elderly?

I guess this is where, in fact, most of the money goes, and this is where Britain is, to put it mildly, fucked up, because (going by your word) that expenditure mostly falls on the local administration. It shouldn't be that way, it should fall on the central government, but I guess that's a bigger political subject to tackle.

As a point of reference, I grew up in Eastern-Europe back in the '90s back when our roads were full of holes and social care had started to accumulate holes bigger than the Bermuda Triangle, but, amidst that destituteness, public transport (both inside the cities and connecting them) was still very affordable. In fact, if it hadn't been for that I wouldn't be writing this comment right here, it is because of those small prices that I could still afford to go to uni (yes, you could tell me that "we have procedures in places for just those cases!", but that's just layers of bureaucracy over layers of bureaucracy that just don't work when you need them the most, it's way easier to not need that bureaucracy in the first place).

[jen20]

Like what, exactly? Be specific.