What if cyclists paid 'road tax'?; “Get on the rubbish cycle path!”; LNER upgrades bike storage, but is it good enough?; Tour of Britain host regions announced; Cav misses out; Don't try this at home, bike maintenance edition + more on the live blog

Sounds like the train I got the other night. One bloke sat in the middle. I did get him to move down one by saying, would you mind moving as I don't want to hit you with my wheel. Apart from that empty seat on a busy train there was nowhere to go to be fair, until the next station when everyone got off. Instead of moving to one of the dozen now empty seats, he just put his headphones on and stretched out 👎

That's a valid point and one the reasons why I didn't include the weight of the rider in my calculations. Except in aviation, all taxation is based on the vechicle, not the number of passengers. You could argue that a car with 5 passengers should pay more tax because it's heavier, but then it could also pay less as it lowers the weight per person (thus penalising under utilised vechicles). Cycling is unique in that the rider is the engine, operator and passenger all at the same time. That all said the £5250 is a good "shock" figure to slap down the next luddite who think cyclists should pay road tax.

Cycling is also unique in that the weight of the vehicle is less than the weight of the driver.

Even a Honda CB125 is 130kg, which is more than the vast majority of bikers.

wycombewheeler wrote:

Cycling is also unique in that the weight of the vehicle is less than the weight of the driver.

wycombewheeler wrote:

Cycling is also unique in that the weight of the vehicle is less than the weight of the driver.

hawkinspeter wrote:

wycombewheeler wrote:

Cycling is also unique in that the weight of the vehicle is less than the weight of the driver.

The average skateboard weighs around 11 pounds or 5 kilograms

a typical squirrel weighs 1-1.5lbs.

Does your reduced size skateboard weigh les than 1/8 a normal skateboard?

wycombewheeler wrote:

The average skateboard weighs around 11 pounds or 5 kilograms

a typical squirrel weighs 1-1.5lbs.

Does your reduced size skateboard weigh les than 1/8 a normal skateboard?

It's titanium, obviously.

wycombewheeler wrote:

The average skateboard weighs around 11 pounds or 5 kilograms

a typical squirrel weighs 1-1.5lbs.

Does your reduced size skateboard weigh les than 1/8 a normal skateboard?

Yes it does

Some seem completely baffled to find that a cyclist can own a car, it is quite odd but then in some ways the same happens with those who are just cyclists towards car owning cyclists.

Something is going to have to change though, with the shift to EVs and less revenue. There is talk of road charging per mile etc. Whatever they do though it would be nice if they actually maintained the roads and engaged brains when designing new roads around new developments, rather than bodge repairs and think about cycling as an afterthought. I went for a gravel bike with tougher wheels and wider tyres mainly because the roads around here are so bad. 

D minus

Must do better

I didn't forget to include the weight of the cyclist themselves, I deliberatly chose not to include it as all taxation (except for aviation) is done on the vehicle, not the number of passengers. Although, cycling is a bit odd in that the cyclist is both the engine, operator and passenger all at the same time.

If you start including the weight of passengers potentially a car with 5 people should be paying less per person than a car with 1 person, VED then becomes of Personal Mobility Excise Duty rather than a Vehicle Excise Duty.

I think that deserves as least a "C"

Clem's D minus wasn't aimed at you, but at the local 'controversialist's' dubious critique of your work.

SPELLED "KERB" IN THE UK.

curse those American spell check settings in Excel!

Garage at Large wrote:

What if cyclists paid road tax (according to their weight)? The person (Matthew), forgot that you have to include the cyclist in the weight of the bike + person combined.

If we're including the weight of the person, then presumably we'll also have to tax pedestrians, who will have to pay nearly as much as cyclists.

mdavidford wrote:

Garage at Large wrote:

What if cyclists paid road tax (according to their weight)? The person (Matthew), forgot that you have to include the cyclist in the weight of the bike + person combined.

If we're including the weight of the person, then presumably we'll also have to tax pedestrians, who will have to pay nearly as much as cyclists.

Anyone wearing high heels will have to pay the most on the pressure argument.
I think even the most mentally deficient understands that wear on the roads is not proportional to tyre pressure, so this argument is clearly nonsense

I did actually do 2 versions, 1 including the weight of the rider (70kg), but then you could argue the weight of the car should also go up by 5*70kg as well. Results are below. Discounted as you said you'd have to start weighing pedestrains as well.

Road wear is proportional to the tyre load to the fourth power. If anything, the spreadsheet is overestimating what the cyclist should pay.

Bike + rider: 90 kg
Smart car plus driver: 800 kg

(800/90)^4 = 6242. If a driver of a Smart car paid £180, the cyclist should pay just under 3p. If the cyclist paid £10, the Smart car driver should pay £62,420.

I'll even include a link that has nothing to do with cycling so you can't claim it's biased.

https://www.insidescience.org/news/how-much-damage-do-heavy-trucks-do-ou...

andystow wrote:

(800/90)^4 = 6242. If a driver of a Smart car paid £180, the cyclist should pay just under 3p. If the cyclist paid £10, the Smart car driver should pay £62,420.

I would very happily accede to the demands that cyclists pay tax and stump up my tenner a year if that was the deal!

I assume you're interested - and if so the answers are just a Google away.  However being as you've a complex mind and knowing you're right you won't be impressed.

I suspect if we made our roads out of concrete - like many runways - they would indeed last longer.  Especially our cycle paths.  I've no idea how the cost / time would pan out, nor whether tarmac replaced more frequently is held to be less energetic / environmentally damaging than concrete replaced less.  Concrete certainly fairs better against the various lubricants and fluids used in cars - and aircraft.

I've not tested citrus degreaser on it though. Or any of the latest round of "energy drinks".  So it's still possible that cyclists could be the downfall of the built environment.

chrisonatrike wrote:

I've not tested citrus degreaser on it though. Or any of the latest round of "energy drinks".  So it's still possible that cyclists could be the downfall of the built environment.

speak for yourself, I might have to cut back on the number of bikes I have.

Garage at Large wrote:

Not quite, firstly a car has four wheels vs a bike's two wheels, and secondly a car has a much wider and higher contact area of its tyres, which cause far less abrasion per mass of vehicle to the road surface. It's about the amount of pressure being exerted on the ground, which is inversely proportional to the contact area.

I'll give you the factor of two, so the driver now only pays 3121 times as much.

Garage at Large wrote:

If you cycle down the road with diamond-edged spikes on the bottom of your bike, you'll create far more damage to the road than even an articulated lorry. A jumbo jet taking off at Heathrow airport would have a mass of 439,985 kg. How come the runway surface doesn't need mending every time there is a takeoff?

What a funny assumption, that since airport runways sort of look like roads to you, they must be constructed like them. An airport runway serving large jets is 17-20 inches (half a metre!) of solid reinforced concrete thick! If motorways were built like runways the cost would be [even more] astronomical.

An asphalt motorway is more like 6" (15 cm) of asphalt over various base layers of gravel and sand, which add up to a comparable thickness to a runway, but aren't nearly as strong. A jumbo jet would indeed cause a lot of damage to it, else the clever engineers could save a lot of money building runways that way.

Edit: see the design section in this article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_strip

"The road will need a thicker-than-normal surface and a solid concrete base."

Garage at Large wrote:

So while these simplistic calculations might impress simple minds, they are completely incorrect.

Your pressure method is far more simplistic, backed by schoolboy maths instead of research. The damage is not material directly under the tyre being compressed. The entire road is deflected for quite a distance around. You can easily do the experiment by standing on the edge of a roadway as an HGV rolls past a metre away and feel the vertical movement through your shoes. Now see what you feel as the heaviest cyclist you know rolls past you. You seem to see a lot of them.

Due to this deflection, there's a speed component to the rate of damage, too, with faster vehicles causing proportionally more damage. So I'm taking that factor of two I gave you back.

Yes but if cars were full of helium and roads were made of marshmallows and bikes had diamond-edged spikes on their wheels and weighed 25 tonnes they would have to pay more tax than cars. Have you factored that into your simplistic calculations? Have you? And how come skyscapers sit on the ground but don't sink into it, simpleton? That definitely proves some made-up old bollocks I'm desperately trying to defend without any intelligence or the most basic scientific or practical knowledge, doesn't it?

Ah, so that's why when I ride off into a gateway for a wazz I sink up to my ears and when a car drops off the side of the road in winter it definitely never destroys the verge and never sprays copious amounts of mud onto the road. Always wondered about that... NOT!

It must be why they can't afford to build cycle paths, because to cope with the load it must need a far deeper concrete base than the bit of compacted gravel that their budgets can usually afford.

This was purely an excersise in demonstrating the futily of "Road Tax" for cyclists

Garage at Large wrote:

So while these simplistic calculations might impress simple minds, they are completely incorrect.

You're talking to yourself again.

Either you're being deliberately provocative and making stuff up for laughs or you are really, REALLY STUPID.

Or both.

I could ride up and down the main road by our estate endlessly for the rest of my life and never do even a fraction of the damage done to the surface by the motorised traffic over the last few years.

That's on a straight road. On bends the sidewaysforces create additional wear. Then consider the damage done to utility trenches and patching, the incredibly rapid expansion of these and potholes in bad weather, the broken or sunken drain/inspection covers, smashed kerbs and a hundred other things that add up to "road wear".

On top of that there is the frequent damage to roadside walls, bridges, hedges, signs and other infrastructure, such as the stone bridge repair on a normally busy back road that required a week-long road closure last month or the pulverised chevron sign I saw on a bend earlier this week.

That's before we get to all the buildings damaged by vehicles, as shown in the long and ongoing topic in the road.cc forum, with 778 posts to date.

Then there are the 23,529 KSI and 115,584 casualties of all severities (316 people every single day) in 2020. [DfT]

And we haven't even started on the initial cost of putting this stuff in place - the planning, the materials, logistics and labour required for bollards and raised kerbing, speed humps, refuges, crossings, traffic lights, new access roads, even roundabouts, flyovers and bypasses. Why should cyclists pay a specific additional fee above and beyond our general taxes for those when we don't have need for them? Why do we subsidise car use so heavily?