Hacker News Reader

Comment by notauser | Hacker News Reader

Taxing vehicle use is a great idea, but vehicle ownership also has negative externalities which means it is appropriate to tax buying or owning a car including:

- Polution created by making a car.

- Cost of parking, especially in cities:

  - parking takes up space, making it harder to walk between things
  - street parking is untidy / ugly
  - street parking obstructs traffic, bike lanes and bus lanes
  - the need for large parking lots drives up the cost of building, which is passed on to drivers and non-drivers alike

Even in suburban areas having the streets full of parked cars has negative effects like reducing the space available for children to play.

View on HN

This is actually a significant problem in the UK. You could create a much better environment for pedestrians and cyclists if city streets weren't clogged with parked cars all the time.

Danish streets do seem to be much clearer, even in areas that have similar road conditions and population density to UK cities.

I think the UK suffers from lack of 'cost for parking on public roads'. One proposal is to bring in a Location Specific Public Highways Parking Permit with discounts for residents without off-road parking as needed. Commuters could also purchase these permits at inflated prices.

Some cities in the UK already have that with "residents parking" - you prove to the local authority that you live in the area and you get to park in dedicated parking spaces that aren't available to non-residents.

And in Edinburgh when I lived there you had to pay for the permit, IF you could even get one because all the permits were taken up by the people who lived there already. Edinburgh has a lot of tenement housing (long rows of flats built before the car existed as a consumer good) so there isn't 1 space per domicile. It is common to drive around for 10 - 15 mins looking for a space.

Yeah - I was talking about Edinburgh where I lived in the centre for 30+ years. In some areas where there are only buildings on one side of the road the density of residents parking is actually fine - though I appreciate that most areas aren't like this.

They have these in Bath, where I live, but the issue is that they 'zone' an area and then shift the problem out of that zone into neighboring zones. Also residents parking usually only applies a restriction Mon-Sat 8:00-18:00.

I think we need to be more radical and apply zones across the whole of the city and apply restrictions 24/7. Discounts for a zone would apply if resident, no off road parking, and city car (no diesel/small).

Commuters would only be allowed permits if city car. Nottingham also brought in Workplace parking permits.

Cities have the infrastructure in place (good public transport combined with park and ride) to encourage people to leave their cars at the edge of cities. Residents within cities should not be driving to work within the city. Neither should parents be dropping kids off by car.

Naturally there are always people that need cars. Even Copenhagen cannot get below 9% car usage despite 62% of people cycling.

> Pollution created by making a car

And yet, the tax is not specifically on the pollution. You could argue that this might be difficult to do in practice, but in any case such a pollution tax ought to also apply to other products like computers and TV's, which it doesn't.

The problem with a flat tax, is that it doesn't discourage anything other than buying a nice car. In general, an expensive car is not worse for the environment (including parking etc), than a cheap car. A large, bulky car might be that, but that's not what we're taxing here.

> - Polution created by making a car.

No different from making any other object - you might as well tax e.g. TVs if that's the rationale.

> - Cost of parking, especially in cities:

Agreed, but better solved by disallowing street parking and taxing land ownership. Again, tax the parts that introduce the negative externalities as directly as possible, otherwise you create perverse incentives.

Agreed RE parking, but RE taxing TV - well, I'd say sure, tax it too. The more I think of it, the more it seems to me that a general CO₂ emission tax would help solve so many problems in the current world...

Most people who think about it and are not politicians seem to think that a carbon tax or a cap and trade system would be a very good tool to prevent global warming from getting even worse.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com