Using X costs you Y Using XX costs you YYY Using XXX costs you YYYYYY
This way water, electricity would still be cheap for most and would incentivise to stop overusing it.
You could still get a cheap flight once a year, but you won't be able to fly every weekend.
And instead of one company or person using XXX, you will have a three small companies using X or one person having three cars in his garage that just happen to each be registered under a different person.
Exponential taxes are a hell of a lot of an incentive to avoid them and you see how far people go to just avoid linear ones. Also, managing the company tax depending on how much the consumer used so far is going to be bureaucracy hell. It's a nice idea, but I highly doubt it will be possible to implement, especially when far easier and straight-forward measures already fail to get through legislation.
If AWS can charge their clients by milliseconds then I'm pretty sure an airline can add a zero to a 10th ticket booked on the same passenger's name.
The number of products/services taxed progressively wouldn't have to be huge to make a difference. You don't need to progressively tax an electric toothbrush just energy consumption, but all products should be taxed based on their production externalities.
This still maintains the incentives, but removes, on average, the financial hit.
Ideally the poor part of the population should be able to use the roads in the same proportion as the wealthy part of the population. Putting taxes on road usage (which what fuel taxes actually represent) will hit the poor part of the population way harder than the wealthy (or even the middle-class) part of said population.
> You could still get a cheap flight once a year, but you won't be able to fly every weekend.
That used to be one of the few remaining "pleasures of life" for a big part of the lower and lower-middle-classes from Western Europe. It was actually cheaper to fly with your lads from Luton Airport to somewhere in Eastern Europe on Friday afternoon and come back late on Sunday, all this while having lots of fun (from said lads' perspective). Taking this away from them will mean them having to hit the very expensive pubs/bars of Manchester or Oslo and not having the same amounts of fun because the money for purchasing said fun (i.e. alcohol) will just not be there. Unhappy lads may mean an unhappy populace ready to throw stones at the powers that be.
As such, the upcoming football matches from the next few months in the European big leagues will be a very good litmus test, it will be the first time in one year and a half when we'll have lots of young people together ready to scream at things (the opposing teams' players or the said powers that be). We've already had one game suspended this weekend in Montpellier (Southern France) because of fans throwing bottles at the opposing team's players.
Yeah unless you want to give everyone the same income or have some other way of not needing money to travel anymore, that's just not going to be the case. Also today, the wealthy could do road trips much more often than the poor could. That much won't change, I think the best we can hope for is either a slight improvement or not make it worse, for example by taxing heavy use more significantly like GP proposes. I consider myself wealthy but if using 3x the average adds 5x the tax, it's not as if I have unlimited money just like the vast majority of people.