Even that won’t get close. Existing London car taxes only raise around £0.2 billion annually. Not a chance in hell you can raise that by 3500% without either public unrest, or such a dramatic change in
behaviour that tax collection amounts drop, instead of raise (although I would personally love a car free London).
There isn’t road tax in the UK, only vehicle tax which is based on the about a vehicle pollutes. Additionally all of that tax across the UK goes to the central government, and none of it goes to the London Mayor. There have been attempts to have vehicle taxes collected on London based vehicles be allocated to the Mayor, but it’s always been soundly rejected by central government.
Fuel duty is also collected by central government, and none of it goes to the London mayor either.
The only taxes collected and managed by London are the Congestion charge and the ULEZ charge. Everything else is beyond the reach of the London mayor.
I'm from the UK, and lived there for the first 35 years of my life. During that time, 'road tax' was a common way to refer to 'vehicle excise duty'. Doesn't anyone call it that any more?
Back to the point, though... Even though the Mayor of London doesn't have control over most tax revenue collected from drivers in London, this whole discussion is about what could be, so suggesting that the congestion and ULEZ charges are the only possible sources of revenue places an unnecessary limit on options.
Most of the people refer to VED as “road tax”, it’s usually followed by some sort of condescending comment about how non-drivers should “get off the roads”, and often used as an excuse for engaging in deliberate acts of violence. I’ve personally had people explain to me how being hospitalised for a week, and being given a permanent spinal injury by driver deliberately hitting me while cycling to work, is an acceptable cost to society, and that because I don’t pay “road tax” means I have no right to demand safer cycling conditions on the roads. So I make a point of not calling it “road tax”, because it’s a misleading name. A better name would be a “car pollution tax”, or just a “pollution tax”.
With regards to VED collected in London. Only about £0.5 billion is collected annually from London. Fuel duty does seem to be broken down by region, so it’s hard know how much is collected in London. But across the UK £24 billion of fuel duty is collected annually, so it could be possible to fund a significant chunk of London’s transit by increasing fuel duty by 30-40% across the entire UK. But such an increase would likely also cause riots or similar. Additionally if you were to increase fuel duty like this, you would presumably need to provide free transit across the entire of the UK, which would require a significantly higher fuel duty increase. Of course that tax increase plus free transit, would result in a huge modal shift away from cars, and thus drive down the collected revenue.
In all, there doesn’t seem to be a viable way to provide free transit to all. At least not without significant tax increases across the board, and maybe that’s a viable approach. But there certainly isn’t an easy and obvious no-brainer way to get rid of the “bureaucracy” and use the savings for free transit, as was originally suggested.
I agree with the overall point (the last paragraph).
Beyond the math, tube capacity at peak times is an extremely scarce resource, and should be allocated to the most valuable uses: those willing to pay, and under-16s who need it to travel to school. The "Older Person's Freedom Pass" cannot be used before 9am, which seems reasonable to me. I wonder why there's no restriction for the evening rush hour.
