I, personally, am not too bothered to be honest with you. Yes, it's expensive, and a lot cheaper in other countries, but I'm sure it all balances out somehow, and to me it's the fairest way of taxing - the more you use a car and the more powerful it is, the more you end up paying.
It balances out how? Granted, the government do not control the basic prices of crude oil, but they do control the amount of tax we pay. Considering that road funding is made through VED, I cannot see any way at all of justifying the overall percentage of revenue they make from each litre of fuel.
I would go as far as saying that cat tax should be abolished and we were taxed purely through tax on petrol. It seems to make sense to me.
In principle, I do agree with taxation through fuel rather than car tax, but I'm sure that such a move will just be abused and generally increase costs for the average user. However, there is no excuse at all for not being more flexible with how we are able to pay VED. A constant issue raised is that you can only pay for tax for periods of 6 or 12 months. Why shouldn't you be able to pay for it month by month? Since you are able to refund unused months on a licence disk anyway, why can't you just buy it this way in the first place?
Why is getting hold of it sometimes so difficult and frought with red tape? I bought a new car last year without any tax. Could I use a post office or online? No I couldn't - because the previous owner was registered disabled. As I am not, I couldn't just buy a new tax disk as the taxation class needed to be changed - even though I was trying to change the class in the government's favour. This can only be done by a DVLA office. And there aren't that many of these. I was in Plymouth which despite being the biggest city in Devon&Cornwall, has no DVLA office. The nearest offices are in Truro and Exeter, both about 50 miles away. So I drive up to Exeter and quite reasonably expect a supposedly modern government department to offer a full range of payment options. They do not. Payment can only be made by cash, cheque, or *credit* card. Debit cards are not accepted at the DVLA, even though they are at the post office (where you can buy a tax disk), and for that matter, most tinpot corner shops. At the time I was waiting for a new PIN for my card, and could not just take money from a cash machine, and being a saturday, I couldn't even withdraw it from a bank.
Asking if there is any way to validate the taxation change at the office so I can buy at a post office, I'm informed no, and have to drive back to Plymouth to pick up cash from my house, to drive back to Exeter to purchase the disk.
In total I've driven 150 miles and expended almost 5 hours of my day on this - but hang on, all I'm trying to do is tax my fucking car. And meanwhile I'm driving around paying ridiculous levels of fuel tax on all this driving furthemore I'm driving an untaxed vehicle which is an offence for which I could be fined without exception - despite the fact that this particular DVLA office is located miles out of town on an industrial estate with no public transport access. If I didn't break the law by driving without tax, how was I supposed to get there? Walk?.
There is no justification whatsoever for making things so difficult. In 2006, exchanging a sum of money for a piece of paper to stick in your car should be simplicity itself - I should be able to do it at Tescos.
The problem is when you get out of the big cities public transport is a compelte joke-
Teeside / Middlesbrough - not excatly the biggest city but pretty big. To get a bus to work would take me 4 changes and take about an hour - car is 13 minutes on a good day. Its actuly quicker to walk!
Indeed, my present teaching practice takes me to a little village just outside of Kingsbridge. Said village is about 20 miles from Plymouth, and by car takes 50 minutes on one of the most inconvenient roads imagineable, I swear it's only classified as an A-road because there is no other way of getting there. Public transport involves a bus journey of over 2 hours (involving a long spell twiddling your thumbs in Kingsbridge whilst waiting for a connecting bus to take you the last few miles). At either end of the journey I'd also have to walk a fair distance. In order to travel there by public transport I'd need to leave my house at 6AM in order to get there for 8:30 - aswell as the ridiculous situation of it taking so long to travel such a short distance, there are times when I need to be there for 8AM - and that's impossible except by car. Moving to public transport is a pipe dream.
Congestion costs the UK economy around £20bn each year, and a electronic road pricing scheme would reduce this by charging people for what they actually use - just hope it happens sooner rather than later.
And most congestion is caused by government, be it local or national! Plymouth City Council are presently obsessed with installing mini roundabouts at intersections with minor junctions which frequently cause a main road to stop, have judicioulsy installed bus stops at the narrowest parts of roads where two cars can't pass, and have turned dual carriageways deemed necessary in the 70's and 80's to deal with the traffic on the roads *then* into single lane roads accompanied by underused bus/cycles lanes with unecessary 40MPH speed limits. And that's before I even get started on the spiralling number of traffic calming schemes being introduced - seemingly any non-major route which happens to be free flowing is a candidate for the installation of speed bumps. And I see this every where, in countless cities and towns. Transport policy IMO has more to answer for in terms of increasing congestion than the increasing number of cars does. Certainly where I live (with only a couple of exceptions) driving around would be easier and less congested if the roads were put back the way they were 20 years ago.