Following much twittering back and forth, Times reporter Kaya Burgess got the following article online. The screen-grab is there as proof the retraction was made, just in case the cyclesafe stuff ever goes behind a paywall.

The Times joins other organisations which have now recognised that “road tax” is 75 years beyond its sell-by date. Previously, the AA, Which?Car and the Plain English Campaign have stated their desire for accuracy when it comes to describing what is VED, vehicle excise duty or, as the Post Office calls it, ‘car tax’.

It’s good to hear that Fiat is enlisting Olympic cyclists to front a ‘share the road’ campaign, as I reported on BikeBiz.com. Members of the British Cycling team will be working with Fiat to highlight the importance of cyclists and motorists sharing a finite resource: the roads of Britain. And Fiat has confirmed it no longer refer to ‘road tax’ in adverts, joining the AA and other organisations: the correct term is ‘car tax’ or ‘vehicle tax’ or Vehicle Excise Duty. VED is a tax on vehicle emissions, not a payment for use of roads.

Fiat is the Official Vehicle Supplier for British Cycling and is to run a campaign called “Let’s clear the air” to coincide with the launch of its revised Punto.

Geraint Thomas is one of British Cycling’s star riders who will be taking part in a campaign “to improve relations between cyclists and motorists on the road.”

Thomas said this would help show that “we’re not guys in Lycra who don’t pay taxes,” a reference to the abusive term “you don’t pay road tax” some drivers shout at cyclists.

One of the reasons the myth of “road tax” lingers is that car companies use the term in their advertising. Including, er, Fiat.

But not any more.

The “Let’s clear the air” campaign will avoid “road tax” references, as you’d expect with clued-up road cyclists on the payroll. Hopefully Fiat will start a trend and other car companies will steer clear of mentioning a tax killed in 1937, a tax used to intimidate cyclists.

Tom Johnston , press relations manager, told iPayRoadTax.com:

“We will only be referencing ‘No Vehicle tax’ when referring to the TwinAir engine (95g/km CO2), and when doing so we will never refer to cyclists in a negative way. Throughout the campaign we will continue to support relations between cyclists and motorists and we are very pleased to be working alongside British Cycling to reinforce this.”

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Incidentally, in yesterday’s Metro newspaper, Thomas said: “Most cyclists own cars too, so we all need to try and get along.”

Last year, Ian Austin MP asked a parliamentary question about the numbers of cyclists who own cars. Minister for Local Transport Norman Baker revealed that, according to the National Travel Survey, 83 percent of cyclists own cars, which is a percentage point higher than the number of non-cyclists who own cars.

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Does the fact some motorists don’t know what pays for roads bother you? Wear the iPayRoadTax jersey and tell the world!

Such a view would be disturbing if it was a junior minister in the foreign office. What makes it shocking is that the MP who holds this view is the Minister for Roads. At a meeting in parliament yesterday I asked the minister if he would retract a statement from last year when he had claimed “the motorist…predominantly pays for our roads.”

I assumed Mike Penning, MP for Hemel Hempstead, would retract his earlier statement. It was but a tiny part of a much longer speech on his love for motorsport. My story would have been ‘Minister backtracks on roads funding mistake and states official DfT line.’

Instead, he stuck to his guns. I taped the exchange. Listen below. It’s just under four minutes long. (The person saying “hypothecation” to the minister is Lord Hoffman, the former Law Lord).

I asked the minister, what pays for roads. He answered:

“Tax. Fuel duty and VED…Yes, it’s hypothecation but a percentage of it does come back in. I stand by it then, I stand by it now. The fact that someone pays for something doesn’t give them rights, it just means they contributed to it…I want to protect cyclists as much as possible but at the same time I also passionately believe the motorist in this country does pay for an awful lot of the service on the road.”

Before he shut down my questioning, I would have liked to ask the minister if his officials in the Department for Transport have ever briefed him on the funding of roads? The UK Government has a long-standing policy on the heresy of taxation ring-fencing. The dedication of the revenue of a specific tax for a specific expenditure purpose is rare. The main UK example of hypothecation is the TV licence fee, a ring-fencing of funds for the BBC.

Taxes and Charges on Road Users, a 2009 report by the Transport Select Committee, said hypothecation is “the establishment of a direct link between specific taxes or charges and specific expenditure. For example, taxes levied on alcohol might be earmarked for spending on hospitals. In the UK there is no such link for taxes.”

The report said:

“the Government opposes the idea of hypothecation of tax revenues. It argues that decisions about revenue raising and spending should be kept separate for two main reasons: if all income were to be hypothecated, it would create severe difficulties for those services that could not readily raise revenues, such as schools, hospitals, police and defence; and inefficiencies would result. For example, if a large sum was raised from road users, hypothecation would dictate that it was all spent on roads (or possibly other transport modes, such as buses), even if the public priority was for more investment in, say, education.”

Penning came into yesterday’s meeting – staged by the All Party Parliamentary Cycling Group, and chaired by Julian Huppert, the MP for Cambridge – ahead of one of his DfT aides and claimed he hadn’t seen the list of questions that meeting attendees had been asked to submit in advance.

Penning’s quick and erroneous defence of his statement of March 2011 should therefore be seen as his personal views, and would not be backed up by officials in the Department for Transport.

The official policy of the Policy and External Communications Directorate of the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency, an executive agency of the Department for Transport, is this:

“There has been no direct relationship between vehicle tax and road expenditure since 1937.”

The money paid by motorists does not go back directly to motorists. If it did, all hell would break loose. Interest groups of all creeds and colours would start demanding “their” tax contributions should only go to fund “their” projects. Society does not work that way; can not work that way.

There are no taxation opt-outs: married couples without kids cannot strike out the amount of tax that pays for schools; pacifists cannot strike out the amount of tax that goes on defence spending. And motorists can’t successfully demand that the money they give to the Government is given straight back to them in the shape of smoother, less congested roads.

Roads are a shared national resource, paid for by all taxpayers, not just motorists. The public highway is, by definition, for the benefit of the public, not a sub-set of the public.

In other words, to motorists it needs to be stressed: “You own a car, not the road.”

One of the first Tory MPs to realise that motorists will assert assumed rights to a road network they think they have paid for was Winston Churchill.

In 1926, he wanted to scrap the Road Fund, a pot of cash contributed by motorists and used to repair – not build – a few stretches of road in the 1920s.

To a deputation of rural interests, Churchill said his proposed abolition of the Road Fund was not anti-motorist:

“Let me say clearly, I have an expensive motor car, and use it a great deal, and I have nothing personal in my argument – I am speaking from a detached point of view.”

Churchill’s opposition to the Road Fund was largely financial – taxation ring-fencing was heretical then just as it is heretical today – but not exclusively so. Fearing motorists would lay claim to roads by dint of paying for a small portion of their repair, he wrote:

“It will be only a step from this for [motorists] to claim in a few years the moral ownership of the roads their contributions have created.”

In a note to Churchill by the man who had pushed Lloyd George to make the ring-fencing pledge to motorists in the first place, Austen Chamberlain wrote:

“I certainly never imagined such a statement could be construed by any sensible man as binding on Governments or Parliament with no regard to time or circumstances.”

In 1927, the Treasury noted that the main supporters of the Road Fund were private motoring organisations who wanted road improvements not for the good of the country but to drive faster: “it is clearly absurd that the State should be asked to provide large and ever-increasing sums for what are virtually pleasure racing tracks.”

The Road Fund was drained of cash in 1927 and finally abolished in 1937.

Belief in the continued existence of ‘road tax’ and the Road Fund was heavily engrained at the highest levels. Conservative MP Colonel JTC Moore Brabazon, Parliamentary Secretary at the Ministry of Transport in 1923-7, and even Minister for Transport in 1940-1, said in a 1932 speech in the House of Commons, that money that went to the Road Fund was

“motorists’ money. It is not Imperial taxation. It is money that comes from the motorists, to be spent on one definite thing, namely the roads.”

In this view – a view shared by Penning – Moore Brabazon was wrong. All tax payers pay for roads, just as all tax payers pay for hospitals and all tax payers pay for schools. Fuel duty and vehicle excise duty is paid into the consolidated fund – the national coffers – and is not, and can not, be used to pay for roads directly. Saying “motorists pay for roads” is the same as saying that “smokers pay for roads”. Indirectly, both do. And that’s the point: motorists do not pay directly for roads.

Motorists are taxed on buying and using their vehicles. VED is not a tax on roads, it’s now a tax on emissions: cars which spew the most CO2 pay the most Vehicle Excise Duty. Cars which spew less CO2, pay less VED. Cars in VED band A pay zero duty.

Tax-payers – some of whom own cars, some of whom don’t – pay for roads. Roads are paid for out of general and local taxation.

It’s important for ministers to get their facts right on this issue. Why? Because it’s an issue that causes danger for one class of road user: cyclists. Some motorists believe cyclists “don’t pay road tax” and have lesser rights to be on roads. This can lead to animosity towards cyclists, and even violence. And it’s doubly important for the Minister for Roads to get this right: he’s no longer a lone MP, he’s a minister of the crown and should recite official DfT policy.

Mike Penning is not a nuanced, shades-of-grey politician. A former soldier and fireman, he’s blunt and bruising. He’s also in a position of power and ought to be on top of his brief. On what and who pays for roads, he’s wrong. This is worrying.

My response was that shy bairns get nowt, and the minister should be held to account when he gets something factually wrong. Mike Penning may think his statement that motorists pay for roads is a non-issue but it’s not. The intimidation of cyclists for “not paying road tax” is a common occurrence. Penning is Minister for Roads (and road safety) not Minister for Cars.

Click to listen to the whole meeting: it’s 42 minutes long and includes questions asked by CTC and British Cycling on the DfTs ‘trial’ of longer lorries.

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Does the fact the Minister for Roads doesn’t seem terribly au fait with what actually pays for roads bother you? Wear the iPayRoadTax jersey and tell the world!

On the same day that car comparison website Carbuzz.co.uk published an article about the ‘road tax’ myth, helmetcam cyclist Magnatom posted a video where a woman motorist, who had been sat in bumper-to-bumper congestion, is seen to tell the cyclist “Go and pay some road tax, you’re holding everyone up.” She also added an expletive.

Carbuzz is a price comparison website which aggregates newspaper and magazine reviews of cars to formulate an overall score. On Thursday it published an article – ‘What drivers can do to be more cyclist aware’ – that has been retweeted 1200+ times and has had 668 Facebook likes. On Friday it followed up with ‘Road tax doesn’t exist’.

Carbuzz founder James Hinds wrote:

“Road tax doesn’t exist, it was abolished in 1937. What we have today is a tax on vehicles, not a tax that pays for roads. The term ‘road tax’ is therefore well past its sell-by date and is misleading at best, a mistaken belief in entitlement at worst.

“Here at carbuzz we’re committed to trying to make car research easier and less confusing. So we want to encourage fellow car sites and enthusiasts to stop referring to road tax and instead call it either car tax or its official name, VED (Vehicle Excise Duty).

“Cyclists sometimes get abused by motorists who yell that they should “get off the road” as they “don’t pay road tax.”

“Unfortunately there is plenty of video evidence of angry motorists verbally and physically abusing cyclists for this supposed non-payment even though 2 million motorists don’t pay VED either.

“From now on at carbuzz we’ll only be referring to car tax. We’ve already changed our stats pages for each car, so it now refers to ‘Tax per year’, to avoid all confusion.”

Carbuzz asked iPayRoadTax.com to proof read the copy and used one of our Winston Churchill graphics. It’s good to see a car site stick up for cyclists, and get it right on ‘road tax’.

The iPayRoadTax campaign aims to get motoring and other organisations to stop referring to Vehicle Excise Duty as ‘road tax’. Successes include AA, WHich?Car, and the Plain English Campaign.

A few months ago a debate was conducted on Twitter with Matthew Sinclair, chief exec of the TaxPayers’ Alliance. He said ‘road tax’ was in general use so he was happy to keep using the term. However, in the TPA’s latest report – ‘Excessive taxes on motorists in each council area in the UK’ – there’s no mention of ‘road tax’. The organisation sticks to vehicle excise duty. Not that the report was correct: it still asserted that motoring taxes ought to be spent on roads, a position easily rebutted.

When the tabloid press ran the TPA’s story, ‘motoring taxes’ morphed into ‘road tax’. The Sun, for instance, ran the headline ‘Treasury’s £18bn roads rip-off. £31.5bn earnings from fuel & road tax. £13.4bn spent on roads & environment.’

The tabloid press will be the hardest nut to crack but if AA and car websites can be convinced to use the correct terminology, one day – one day – perhaps the red-tops will get it right too?

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Does the wilful misuse of the term ‘road tax’ bother you? Wear the iPayRoadTax jersey and tell the world!

The video below is funny in a Stephen Merchant sort of way but what’s not funny is the dangerous overtaking by a Mercedes Vito captured by a cyclist’s helmetcam.

Calling Lycra “Lytex” and spouting forth on non-payment of “road tax”, the Mercedes driver committed a number of motoring offences in quick succession.

First, the Merc was driven too close to the cyclist. Rule 163 of the Highway Code states that motorists should “give motorcyclists, cyclists and horse riders at least as much room as you  would when overtaking a car.”

In the video, an overtaking car gives plenty of room, the following Mercedes Vito does not. The helmetcam wearing cyclist must have remonstrated at this point because the Merc driver later stops to challenge the cyclist. The motorist parked in a potentially dangerous place, causing following cars to slow down to overtake, and opened his door on the cyclist, and was aggressive from the get-go: “What’s your f*cking problem?”

The driver – a painter and decorator going from his garb and the ladder on his car – said:

“I’m in the right, I’m on the road. I’ll tell you what, you f*cking ought to learn how to ride. It’s our roads, you don’t pay no f*cking tax.”

The Merc driver complained about “Lytex boys”. Lytex? A hitherto unknown fabric made from Lycra and Latex, perhaps? The cyclist – redvee2002 – explains “This isn’t Lytex, it’s Lycra.”

This was rebuffed by the excitable motorist as was the cyclist’s attempt to explain the extinction of “road tax” in 1937.

On the video’s comments, xliijoe said:

“Interesting how it is ok for him to put your life at unnecessary risk, because you don’t pay (a fictional) tax. I mean, even if he was right about the tax and even if you were positioning yourself poorly on the road, it would not justify putting your life at risk.

“Imagine if you threatened him with a weapon too, for being an idiot and not paying some tax. Most people would see that as wrong – it seems that if your weapon weighs a ton, it’s morally ok to threaten people with it.”

This latest video adds to a growing library of helmetcam footage showing motorists verbally and physically abusing cyclists for “not paying road tax.”

Road rage motorists do not attack disabled drivers, electric car owners, war pensioners, or farmers for non-payment of VED.

It’s probably futile to point out such facts to apoplectic “road tax” motorists. The iPayRoadTax campaign doesn’t try to reach out to the ranters but instead tries to convince organisations to get their facts straight. The AA, the Campaign for Plain English, and Which Car Magazine now use car tax instead of ‘road tax’. The Post Office has long used this term so is clearly understandable to all.

Motorists pay for their cars, not for use of the road. VED is a tax on emissions, not a road fee. Roads are paid for by general and local taxation, not by motorists directly.

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Does the wilful misuse of the term ‘road tax’ bother you? Wear the iPayRoadTax jersey and tell the world!

BEFORE:

NOW:

Many organisations – including the Post Office and the DVLA – now refer to Vehicle Excise Duty as ‘car tax’ and not ‘road tax’ (and this despite the fact motorbikes, vans and trucks also pay ‘car tax’).

VED is a tax on the vehicle, not a pot for collecting monies to be spent on road building or road maintenance. The distinction between ‘road tax’ and VED is very important, much more important than most people think. It’s possible that lives have been lost because of the use of an antique phrase. Some motorists believe ‘road tax’ pays for roads so cyclists, as freeloaders at best, tax-dodgers at worst, shouldn’t really be on “their” roads at all. This sometimes leads to ugly and dangerous aggression against cyclists, with some motorists taking the ownership of the roads fallacy a little too literally.

Which is odd, really, considering other “tax dodgers” include members of the Royal family, disabled drivers, and owners of electric cars.

It’s but a short step from “ownership” of the roads to “protection” of said ownership. Many cyclists have been nudged by cars; steered at by bus drivers. Much of the aggression is no doubt fuelled by gridlock-induced frustration but at least some of it is fuelled by the belief that cyclists have less rights to be on roads paid for by motorists. In fact, roads are paid for by general and local taxation, not ‘road tax’.

The AA joins a growing list of magazines and organisations which have now relegated the use of ‘road tax’ to where it belongs: history. The Plain English campaign, Which?Car magazine, the DVLA, the Post Office and others all now use the term ‘car tax’.

The iPayRoadTax campaign produces cycle jerseys featuring approved-by-DVLA fake tax roundels. Edmund King, president of the AA, is a keen cyclist and last year said the iPayRoadTax jersey was “ironic, iconic and probably iconoclastic.”

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Does the wilful misuse of the term ‘road tax’ bother you? Wear the iPayRoadTax jersey and tell the world!

The Institute of Advanced Motorists is normally pretty good on facts. It’s not the Association of British Drivers, which often pays just a fleeting visit to truthfulness. IAM even has a cycling section. But last month IAM got road funding wrong and today the organisation with 100,000 members has issued a press release with more mistakes. Of course, there’s the all too typical mistake about ‘road tax’ – a duty 74 years dead – but check out the comment from one of the motorists quoted. Apparently, the Institute of Advanced Motorists is happy to repeat that speed limits seem to be minimums, not maximums.

“Drivers are unable to keep up with speed limits.”

The number in the red roundels isn’t a target. it’s a Thou Shalt Not Pass.

Now, the IAM might claim that it’s the motorist making the mistakes, not itself, but this is a press release, it’s not a news story.

PRESS RELEASE: Potholes give councils a bumpy ride

A third of drivers have had their cars damaged by a pothole, according to the latest poll from road safety charity the IAM.

A further 16 per cent have been involved in, or have seen an accident caused by a road user hitting a pothole. Of the 2600 respondents, 88 per cent voted pothole repair the top priority for local council maintenance.

Only 14 per cent of people think that their council’s current performance maintaining local roads is good or very good, with more than half rating it as bad or very bad. When asked what areas of road maintenance were being done well, 50 per cent responded ‘none’, and half also think that the roads in their area are getting worse.

Overall, Welsh respondents are the happiest with council road maintenance, with 27 per cent rating performance as good. Respondents from the South East are the least happy with local road maintenance, with only ten per cent rating it as good, although Londoners were an exception to this – 18 per cent rated their council as good. Many comments suggested that local government spending cuts are the cause of these problems – respondents weren’t just negative about the authorities themselves.

Keeping foliage and grass cut back to preserve visibility, and annual surface dressing of worn out roads, were the second and third most important maintenance factors, at 64 and 58 per cent respectively.

IAM director of policy and research Neil Greig said: “The public is unhappy with the state of their roads, although many realise that spending cuts are the real problem. Eighty per cent of those polled thought that local councils should work more closely together to increase efficiency, and with no loosening of the public purse strings in sight it will take partnerships to ensure the backlog in road maintenance does not continue to stack up.”

Surrey motorist David Kellie, 63, said: “Who needs ‘sleeping Policemen’? The roads are in such a poor state of repair that most drivers are unable to keep up with speed limits. Those on two wheels are in constant danger of being thrown off whether it be a motorbike or cycle. We are fed up of hearing about cuts as the motorist is charged more at the pumps and through road tax. Where does the money go?”

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iPayRoadTax.com is an ironically-named campaign supporting the road rights of cyclists. The message that cyclists have equal rights on the roads is carried on iPayRoadTax t-shirts and jerseys.

Cyclists don’t pay for roads, goes the belief (a mistaken one) so shouldn’t be on roads. Should there be a choice between hitting a tree or hitting a cyclist, some drivers may instinctively opt for hitting the cyclist. That’s certainly what happened in the Tour de France.

iPayRoadTax.com is specific to the UK. Our roads are paid for by income tax and council tax, not ‘road tax’, a tax that was abolished in 1937. The tax we have now is Vehicle Excise Duty, a tax on emissions, not payment for use of the road. In America, roads are mostly paid for by property tax, with a tiny and declining bit from fuel tax.

The ESPN anchor, host of ‘Around the horn,’ twittered that he found it funny to watch two cyclists nearly die. The messages were a follow-up to what was said on his TV show:

“We don’t want bikes on the road with us when we’re going to work…”

Yesterday on Bicycling.com, BikeSnobNYC said: “Whether it’s your commute, your training ride, or the Tour de France, too many people in America think if you get hit by a car on your bike then you got what’s coming to you.”

Also yesterday, the Boulder Report’s Joe Lindsey, wrote: “What really galls me, and most people, is the insinuation that hitting people on bikes with a car, in any circumstance, is funny. That’s tantamount to saying it’s OK.”

A day later and a letter to the Houston News by a reader calling himself Blake Brown shows that some motorists clearly have road ownership issues, and this leads them to view cyclists as lesser road users, road users who are “freeloading” and who should therefore not be surprised if they get slammed into should there be a choice between a large obstacle up ahead and a squishy one.

“This is to all the bicycle riders out there who think they have the right to ride on any road – you really do not, except at your own risk.

“I have had people who ride tell me that they pay tax dollars, too, for that road, therefore they should be able to use it. That is wrong. What you (and I) and everybody else pay for is a driving surface – for automobiles.”

He then goes on to articulate what many cyclists have long assumed…

“If it is a choice between hitting a car or hitting a cyclist, the cyclist is gonna be hurting – for several reasons. First, they should not have been using a road with no shoulder; second, the auto may contain a family, and it is better to harm one person than a family; and lastly, to be frank, hitting a cyclist will do way less harm to my truck, and that is a good thing. I don’t have the money for a new truck, but I can limp by with a few dings – you might not.”

In Brown’s world – a worldview shared by way too many motorists, on both sides of the Atlantic – cyclists should not be on roads, period/fullstop.

“Keep to dedicated bicycle paths – that is what they were intended for – not roads,” he wrote.

The disregard for the road rights of cyclists – or perhaps the ignorance we have any at all – can be witnessed daily, sometimes at close quarters. Some motorists think nothing of squeezing in front of cyclists at build-outs, hence the need for (rare) signs such as the one above. Others, on country lanes, will barrel towards you at full speed as though you’re not there, not flesh and blood: get out of the way, or get hit.

What are motorists thinking when they do this? Are they not thinking at all? Or do they genuinely believe cyclists are lesser beings? If so, at least part of this mindset is possibly due to the entitlement complex, the belief that motorists, and only motorists, pay for roads.

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iPayRoadTax.com is an ironically-named campaign supporting the road rights of cyclists. The message that cyclists have equal rights on the roads is carried on iPayRoadTax t-shirts and jerseys.

A press release on motoring taxation (“Motoring Tax is Highway Robbery Says IAM”) sent out today by the Institute of Advanced Motorists is getting car blogs and auto-centric news websites all in a tizzy. Many of them are talking about “road tax”, something that was abolished in 1937. Interestingly, neither the IAM press release nor the report it’s based on, mention “road tax”, although the report isn’t terribly au fait with the way the UK Government works.

“The government spends only about one-third (£12,752 million) of its total tax revenue from road users (£43,885 million) on roads and local public transport.” IAM, July 11th 2011

The money the Government raises from motorists is not ring-fenced for motoring-related expenditure. Revenue ring-fencing is something vehemently opposed by Governments down the ages, and for very good reasons.

The argument that money raised from motorists ought to be spent on motorists is a weak one and motoring organisations do themselves no favours by wheeling out such an argument. In fact, they have been doing so from the earliest days of motoring but it doesn’t wash with Governments.

Motoring organisations would be better off arguing about the many benefits of mass car ownership; the we-pay-squillions-so-ought-to-get-squillions-back case is easily swatted away, behind the scenes, by Treasury mandarins.

If the money paid by motorists did go back to motorists, all hell would break loose. Interest groups of all creeds and colours would start demanding “their” tax contributions should only go to fund “their” projects. But society does not work that way; can not work that way.

There are no taxation opt-outs: married couples without kids cannot ask that the fraction of tax they pay for schools should instead go to child-free projects; pacifists cannot specify that the tax they pay goes on overseas aid rather than defence spending. And motorists can’t successfully demand that the money they give to the Government is given straight back to them in the shape of smoother, less congested roads.

Smoother, less congested roads would be wonderful for all road users, not just motorists, and such infrastructure – a shared national resource – is paid for by all taxpayers, not just motorists. The public highway is, by definition, for the benefit of the public, not a sub-set of the public.

“Investigative” TV programmes have often fallen into the “motorists are getting ripped off” trap. Last year, ITV’s Tonight programme wondered aloud why the duties paid by motorists aren’t all spent on roads:

The Tonight reporter said he could reveal that £47bn was raised in taxes but only a fraction of this was “spent on roads”. This ‘exclusive’ was attributed to the Road Users’ Alliance, and portrayed as though the statistic was new and shocking. In fact, the RUA has been using the same basic ‘only a fraction spent on roads’ stat since the alliance was founded in 2002.

And it’s the same sort of statistic wheeled out by the RAC and IAM and any number of other motoring organisations.

“The Government raises almost £50 billion from motorists, and returns less than one fifth of this in spending which directly benefits the road user,” is the standard ring-fencing refrain from the RUA.

What the RUA and all the other organisations fail to stress – an error repeated by the ITV programme and countless car blogs – is that the money generated by motorists is NOT a fund to repair roads and build new ones; it’s money that goes straight into the national pot, the Treasury’s Consolidated Fund, the public purse.

Airline passengers pay taxes when they fly from British airports but nobody suggests all this money should go to building more runways. Drinkers and smokers pay big-time for their tipples and their filter tips but the billions raised by duties on booze and ciggies are not spent on bigger and better pubs, or swankier tobacco emporiums.

When he was Chancellor, in 1925, Winston Churchill railed against ‘Road Fund’ ring-fencing:

“Entertainments may be taxed; public houses may be taxed; racehorses may be taxed…and the yield devoted to the general revenue. But motorists are to be privileged for all time to have the whole yield of the tax on motors devoted to roads. Obviously this is all nonsense…Such contentions are absurd, and constitute…an outrage upon the sovereignty of Parliament and upon common sense.”

The ring-fencing had been started by Lloyd George in 1909, with ‘road tax’ and fuel duties pumped into a hypothecated Road Fund. Lloyd George’s 1909 budget is quoted in the IAM report, although it’s not mentioned that his ‘road fund’ lasted only 17 years. For a just a blink of an eye, motorists paid into a ring-fenced fund which helped pay for some road crust improvements and a handful of road realignments.

But such ring-fencing was always controversial; to the Treasury anathama. Churchill wanted to quash the Road Fund. He – and the Treasury – plotted against it. Churchill famously made ‘raids on the Road Fund’ in the mid-1920s, all but killing it off. By 1937, the Road Fund – which had been fatally wounded ten years previously – was finally abolished. Amazingly, the concept of a Road Fund, paid for by ‘road tax’ (still, wrongly, believed to be a payment for the upkeep of roads) has lingered on in the folk memory of motorists.

Many motorists – perhaps even the majority? – still believe that ‘road tax’ exists, and demand that the duties paid by motorists should be ploughed into fixing potholes, widening dual carriageways and adding to the UK’s motorway network. In reality, everybody pays for Britain’s roads via general taxation. Paying fuel taxes and Vehicle Excise Duty (VED) confers on motorists no right to the use of Britain’s roads. Motorists are allowed to use roads ‘under licence’, not as ‘a right’.

Motorists do not pay for use of the roads, motorists are taxed on buying and using their vehicles. VED is not a tax on roads, it’s now a tax on emissions: cars which spew the most CO2 pay the most Vehicle Excise Duty. Cars which spew less CO2, pay less VED. Cars in VED band A pay zero duty.

Motorists are not the only users of public roads. Pedestrians, cyclists, and horse-riders also use public roads. So do farm tractors but, even though they’re heavy and so damage roads, they do not pay Vehicle Excise Duty. They have to display tax discs, but these are issued free of charge. Motorists have been filmed attacking cyclists for “not paying road tax” yet there are no known cases of motorists attacking farmers for the same perceived ‘crime’. And nor do motorists attack band A cars, disabled drivers, the Royal family, or other “road tax dodgers” out there, of which there are millions.

UK motorways and trunk roads are paid for with cash supplied by the Highways Agency via the Department of Transport via the public purse via all UK tax payers; all other roads – that is, 87 percent of all the roads in the UK – are paid for by local authorities. Local authorities get some grant aid from national Government, but most of the cash for local roads is raised locally, via council tax. Non-motorists pay the same for roads as motorists.

Externalities
What IAM doesn’t didn’t mention in its press release, and what organisations like the RUA don’t factor into their equations, is the many external costs of motoring. In effect, Britain’s motorists are subsidised to drive.

IAM said: “Since 2002, the government has spent more on rail infrastructure than road infrastructure, although rail is used for only seven per cent of all passenger travel. In 2008 the government spent £4,807 million on road infrastructure compared to £5,567 million on rail infrastructure.”

To motoring organisations, spending on roads is “investment”; spending on railways is “subsidy”.

The 2009 Transport Select Committee report, Taxes and Charges on Road Users, calculated the total taxes and charges on UK road users as £48 billion per annum. The report quoted the typical annual expenditure on roads as about £8-9 billion.

In the same report, the Department for Transport estimated that the average marginal external cost of driving a car an additional kilometre is 15.5 pence allowing for the congestion (estimated at 13.1 pence per kilometre), infrastructure, accidents, local air quality, noise and greenhouse gases. This compares to 3.6 pence per kilometre paid in fuel duty and VAT.

However there are other costs to society as a result of our existing car-dependent transport patterns. In 2009 a Cabinet Office Strategy Unit report on urban transport attempted to quantify the costs of our existing urban transport patterns. Working with the Department for Transport, the Department for Communities and Local Government, the Department of Health and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), they arrived at the costs shown here:

The figures are based on the best available evidence sources, adjusted to 2009 prices. Where there is uncertainty or disagreement, they have stated the likely range as shown in lighter shading in the bars. The conclusions changed policy makers’ understanding of the situation. Previously, congestion had been thought to represent the majority of transport’s external costs to society. Now the combined costs of accidents, air quality, physical inactivity, greenhouse gas emissions and noise at £27-38 billion per annum represent 71-78 per cent of the total.

The total cost for the English urban areas is estimated at £38-49 billion. Given that the Cabinet Office’s report states that this covers 81 per cent of the population, scaling up the appropriate impacts gives an estimate of £43-£56 billion for the whole of the UK.

It is important to note that the report makes no attempt to quantify the external costs of negative social impacts, despite referring to reduced social cohesion and interaction as a result of traffic. Yet research in Norway estimated that the cost of community severance (the ‘barrier effect’ due to transport infrastructure such as busy roads) is greater than the estimated cost of noise and almost equal to the cost of air pollution.

The Cabinet Office report also excludes the impacts of noise pollution on health, productivity and the ecosystem and does not attempt to quantify ‘quality of life’ impacts of the built environment. However it acknowledges that all these areas could represent significant additional costs, mentioning for instance an additional £4-5 billion for noise impacts on health and productivity alone.

Alternatively, estimates of the marginal costs of road transport provided in a report commissioned by the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions result in a higher total cost figure of £71-95 billion (in 2006 prices). This excludes the costs of physical inactivity and other as yet un-monetised costs such as severance effects and loss of tranquillity. According to the Campaign to Protect Rural England and Natural England, the monetary values for landscape and loss of countryside have not been calculated.

The Campaign for Better Transport extrapolates from the Government research on marginal external costs to reach a total cost of externalities of £70 billion–£95 billion per annum at prices for 2006.

The Sustainable Development Commission, a non-departmental public body (2000-2011) responsible for advising the UK Governments, concluded:

“So it would appear that the overall costs imposed on society by motoring outweigh the revenues obtained from motorists, probably very substantially.”

And the externalities of driving costs don’t include noise pollution (£3.1bn); air pollution (£19.7bn – not including CO2); water pollution (between £1bn and £16bn); or obesity (£2bn).

But there are other, hidden subsidies, too. Donald Shoup, Professor of Urban Planning at UCLA in the US, estimates that providing free off-street car parking in the US cost a whopping $386bn in 2002 (in the same year, the US government spent $349bn on defence). As UK town planners operate to similar rules to their US counterparts – in that any major development has to have a set number of parking places, most of them unfilled but there ‘just in case’ – UK drivers get similar parking subsidies. No doubt it’s in the magnitude of many billions of pounds.

Fair’s fair. If cyclists were ever asked to contribute cash to get a “seat at the table”, to have a say in transport infrastructure decisions, any payment they made for the provision of excellent cycle facilities ought to be offset by the cost savings made by cyclists for the benefit of the economy. Going on just some of the externalities, we could be due for a rebate of somewhere in the region of £50bn. Such a rebate isn’t far-fetched. In Norway, the Norwegian Public Roads Administration pay for employees to cycle to work instead of driving. In Copenhagen the city calculates that for every kilometre a citizen on a bicycle rides, society earns 1.22 kroner [25 US cents]. For every kilometre a citizen drives in a car, society pays out .69 kroner 89 [13 US cents].”

And the above subsidies to British motorists don’t include cash from the 2009/10 ‘scrappage scheme’. 360,000 UK car buyers were gifted with £400m of tax payers’ money. And the UK Government also subsidises the purchase of electric cars to the tune of £5000 per car buyer. Stimulus for a new industry? Er, so there’s a cash hand-out for electric bikes, then? Nope, just cars. The Nissan electric car plant in Sunderland also received fat start-up grants.

All of the externality figures can now be revised upwards. In short, motorists are not cash cows, they’re cash sinks. Of course, the externality equation doesn’t factor in the many societal and financial benefits of motoring (I have a car, it’s dead useful for many journeys) but costs are costs and if motorists had to pay the full costs of motoring, they’d be paying an awful lot more than they do now.

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iPayRoadTax.com is an ironically-named campaign supporting the road rights of cyclists. The message that cyclists have equal rights on the roads is carried on iPayRoadTax t-shirts and jerseys.

Such a nannying response from the ASA is odd. The organisation claims it makes sure marketing is “legal, decent, honest and truthful.”

There’s nothing truthful in enforcing non-mandatory helmet wearing for cyclists featured in advertising. Motorists smash their heads open, too. Why doesn’t the ASA ask advertisers to always picture drivers wearing motoring helmets? Because the ASA isn’t genuinely bothered about honesty or truthfulness.

Two blogs discovered this when they complained to the ASA about car adverts which featured claims about ‘road tax’, a charge 74 years dead.

The lofidelitybicycleclub and the Peoples Cycling Front of South Gloucestershire were given short shrift by the ASA. Both were sent boilerplate answers.

“We have assessed the ad and your complaint but consider that there are insufficient grounds for ASA intervention on this occasion…As long as the content of an ad does not breach our Code, it is really up to the advertisers what they want to put in them. In this case, although we acknowledge that the correct term is “Vehicle Excise Duty”, more commonly used phrases such as “Road Tax” are often used by advertisers to convey a message in a way that will be understood by the widest audience.

“We also note that this ad makes no direct or implied comments about cyclists or their right to use public roads. I further note that you have made reference to a previous scheduling restriction we required for an ad which showed potentially unsafe cycling practices which could result in harm to children. In that case, we were concerned about the potentially harmful effect of glamorising cycling without a helmet to children. We do not have similarly pressing concerns in relation to this particular ad. We consider that this ad is unlikely to mislead consumers to their detriment or promote a view that only motorists pay for road building and maintenance. For these reasons we will not be taking any further action on this occasion.”

But the ASA implied that it may change its corporate mind on the subject when the person handing down the (lack of) adjudication said: “however we will continue to monitor the public response to this ad.”

This is also odd because, on a page about homeopathy websites, the ASA said: “We don’t play a numbers game – we can act on just one complaint.”

Indeed, the bicycle helmet adjudication came after just one complaint. But the ASA boilerplate bot seems happy to allow the ASA to be among those organisations who think it’s truthful to use the phrase ‘road tax’.

Yes, Vehicle Excise Duty is a mouthful but ‘car tax’ or ‘vehicle tax’ isn’t. VED is not a tax to use roads, it’s a tax on motorised vehicles. And it’s not as though the ASA doesn’t know this. In an adjudication regarding the DVLA in 2007, the ASA used the phrase “car tax” throughout.

What has happened since? Did the boilerplate bot not get the memo?

If ASA really believed in honesty in advertising it would issue a simple guideline for car advertisers: listen, guys, you can keep the fantasies about zero congestion, speeding and occultism, but don’t call it ‘road tax’, cos it doesn’t exist.