At Last. Reclaim that Illegal Road Tax.

Yes. We're sick to death of the endless phone calls reminding us we can claim for mis-sold PPI we bought years ago*.

Yes. We're sick of the texts telling us we can claim for that accident that wasn't our fault.

Yes. We're sick of being promised a new kitten if we watch the internet for long enough.

But most of all we're sick of the WAR ON THE MOTORIST!

So thank goodness it's now possible to use a new website to reclaim overpaid taxes, entirely legitimately. All Road Tax ever paid since since 1937 can be reclaimed here:

http://roadtaxexpertuk.wordpress.com/2014/09/15/welcome-to-road-tax-expert-uk/

and Road Tax Expert will help you through a full refund of any Road Tax paid since 1937.

You could be eligible for up to 77 years of repayments!!! That's probably thousands and thousands of pounds.**

*We didn't.

**non-hypothicated tax payers are ineligible. Apparently.

Not our van: WU10JCY

Someone points us at this video as says "That you?"

No. Pink shirts and white dungarees don't suit us. Or him. We are just more aware of the fact.

Also: that van still has two wing mirrors. This video may have been made in Bristol, but whoever it is, they live in the suburbs.

update: "The initial pass was on Stockwood Lane and the chat was by the junction of Lacey Road and Stockwood Lane"

The RAC: missing the elephant on the room

The RAC. The fourth emergency service. Or is that the AA? Either way, they come out for us, and will park on zig-zags by a pedestrian crossing -below on Muller Road- to handle our breakdowns. But expensive. RAC roadside assistance for two drivers with at home support, recovery and euro-breakdown comes to £283.50. That's a lot. If you are one of those wimps who don't drive a group G road-tax car, it's way more than your road tax. So you need to make a choice, don't you: Tax and MoT or breakdown cover? One you need, one you may be able to get away without, providing the DVLA don't catch you.

Fortunately, the RAC have seen a solution: abolish road tax.

The RAC has put up a paper on Road Charging, that encourages replacing road tax and fuel tax with pay to use fees.  We initially thought that the BBC had accidentally used the phrase "road tax" to cover vehicle excise duty, and completely ignore the fact that group A vehicles pay nothing, so if you drive a small hybrid car you pay no VED and discounted fuel duty due to its increased economy. But no the RAC, they don't represent the little people. They represent us: the big cars, the white vans, the V8 range rovers coming in to london from oxfordshire. So the RAC used the term "road tax" in their key points, and the BBC radio and web site naively believed the report was somehow independent, rather than a plan to free up money for RAC breakdown cover. 

Now, what about the actual report? We like the idea of abolishing fuel duty and road tax, but we think the idea of making people pay-per-mile-driven misses the elephant in the room: pedestrians and cyclists. How can we make them pay-per-mile walked or cycled -and without that, how can they be made to bear a realistic proportion of the congestion they cause? Every pedestrian who uses a zebra crossing or pelican crossing may hold up traffic, and should be charged at least for the lost time of every driver. Similarly, a bicycle pootling along at 15 mph shouldn't just be billed for using the road, they should pay a congestion charges of the row of cars behind which have been forced to also drive at 15 mph.

We don't understand why the article missed this -it's so obvious. They even showed the problem at work in bristol. Go to page 47, look at the photo on the top. That's the zebra crossing on St Michael's Hill, looking down to town. And there are some happy students gaily prancing over the crossing -probably holding up the photography team.

We don't currently have the photo from that exact same location, though we have one from slightly further back on some winter day when drivers were forced to swerve round road closed signs.


Slightly further down the hill, almost aligned with the zebra crossing, you can see the view of the city that the RAC use in their paper. Yet despite the photo, the RAC miss the elephant in the room, or more precisely, pedestrians in the road. In our way. In the way of the road-taxy payers, or, in the future, road-use-tax payers.

Unless a pay-to-use road system also bills all pedestrians and cyclists for the congestion and pollution they cause, even indirectly, it will be anti-motorist.

There's only one thing about the RAC using photo of our St Michaels Hill in their otherwise missing-the-point article that cheers us up. Every person walking over the zebra crossing from left to right in these photos has had to come from Southwell Street. And what's so special about that? It's the one where the hospital blocked off the pavement to force the pedestrians into the road. But even there, do the pedestrians get billed for holding up BRI hospital cars? We doubt it.

Persecution

This is just plain wrong.

A ticket, but no parking restrictions. Not even parked on the pavement.

So why is the owner of L740OYA being persecuted?

We suspect, because the owner is a cyclist. Why?

Well, cyclists don't need tax and insurance. This car certainly doesn't have tax, which implies it doesn't have insurance either (you need this to get a Vehicle Excise Duty disk). You also need an MOT, again something most cyclists don't bother with.

As we all know, cyclists don't care about the law, which is probably why the driver of this car chose to park it so blatantly near Redland Police Station with a nine month out-of-date disk.

Oregon's proposed bicycle tax

The US state of Oregon has no sales tax; no VAT. It has federal income tax (your $ to the Iraq war), and state income tax (your $ to fund other things but not healthcare). All highway tax comes from cars and their use. Car registration is something resembling background noise, $27/year, compared to the couple-of-hundredish pounds in the UK depending on your pollution levels. Fuel is free, if you drive a european car that does over 35 miles per US gallon (about 4 litres). Well, effectively free: $1.60 in 2000, which was about 25 pence a litre; now it is $3/gallon. And the reason fuel is so cheap? Not much tax. This doesn't help funding for road maintenance, which is a shame, because with their very wide roads, they have a lot of maintenance.

Here is Hood River, Oregon, looking north towards the volcano Mount Adams.

There's no bike lanes here, but there is a 25 mph speed limit. Lots of the vehicles have wasted the benefits of the effectively-given-away petrol, "gas", by driving woefully fuel inefficient V6+ engine'd pickups, many of which only do 12-16 mpg. Which means their cost/mile is a lot worse than it could be, and, with big distances between places, cost/commute is high.

Now, what could this state be worrying about? Could it be concerned that the primary water supply during the rain-free summer months? After all -water for agriculture, the very profitable pacific salmon fishing industry, and for the residents- comes from meltwater from those mountains.

If the precipitation between November-March in those mountains falls as rain, not snow, it won't stay in the hills, it will go out to sea. No water, no agriculture, and, without the hydroelectric power, no electricity. Google have a datacentre about 20 miles to the east of Hood River, hydro powered; Microsoft and Yahoo! are upstream in Yakima, not far from the Hanford Reservation where the Manhattan Project used electricity from those same dams to run the centrifuges of the planet's first nuclear weapons factory. Downstream the big Intel Hillsboro foundries build the CPUs found in most PCs. Again, they are based here for electricity. The state's businesses: logging, agriculture, fishing and high tech all depend on that water. Which means that you'd hope the local state would be copying California and trying to be leading the way in fighting global warming, cutting back on energy wastage, trying to encourage the growing cycle users and cycle industry to move Oregon forward.

That would be a mistaken assumption. This is a state where you can end up harassed just for being in the way of cars. Not for stopping them get past -just for forcing them to swerve into the (empty) oncoming lane to get past. Because it is not only an affront to the car drivers to force them to use the steering wheel, it is a sign that bicycles are starting to win the battle between bikes and cars, even in car-centric countries.

Increasing popularity of bicycles would hurt state revenue from gas tax. They already have a problem: more people have started driving fuel efficient EU and japanese cars, which is not only driving the US car manufacturers into bankruptcy, it is impacting state income. This is why they are thinking of taxing cars per mile, ignoring fuel economy.

"gas tax revenue is down $4.8 million a year compared with 2006.

That drop, caused by lower fuel consumption and a slowing economy, has prompted Oregon to consider a new way to pay for road repairs: Democratic Gov. Theodore R. Kulongoski's upcoming budget calls for a highway tax based on mileage, not gasoline purchases.

A state task force will look at equipping every new vehicle in Oregon with a Global Positioning System to record every mile driven and where. Motorists would pay at the gas pump based on how much they drove, no matter how fuel-frugal their vehicle"

Such a mileage tax would remove the unfair advantage that low-fuel consumption cars have over US vehicles, stop the drivers of the V8 Dodge pickups paying more than drivers of VW Polos (which VW are planning to introduce to the US this year), and stop electric cars dodging paying gas tax entirely. These people are all fuel-tax-dodgers and should be banned from the roads?

What about bicycles? They take up space? They get in the way. They wear down the tarmac. This is why four of the state senators are proposing a paying the same $26/year for a bike as you do for a car. Own more than one bike -pay more -even if it is a mountain bike you never take on-road. Only motorised quad-bikes will be exempt, as they don't get in the way of cars. This will force the bicycles to pay their way, and help discourage more people from using un-american forms of transport.


This is very fair and deserves support. Because once you pay for the right to use those roads, explicitly, you can use them -which means when you encounter conflict issues with a car/pickup, you have someone to call.

We need something like this in the UK, so that the Association of British Drivers will have to stop complaining about unpaying bicycles being in the way. Although we think it should go further -cars, bikes and pedestrians should have different coloured registration plates (yes, pedestrians need to be registered too), showing whether they were a net contributor to the country, or a net expense. It's not enough to measure tax paid, you have to look at how much suppor the government has had to put into keeping your bank afloat, how overcommitted you are on a mortage. All these details need to be added up before the government can decide if you benefit the country enough to get the right of way at junctions.

Also: we need mountains like the ones in the pictures. They are all volcanoes -Mt Adams, Mt Hood and Crater Lake- so could be installed in undervalued country to create new ski resorts and better scenery in England.

[news on this from Crap Cycling in Waltham Forest, though perhaps they support cycling or believe these global warming lies, judging by the way they are critical of the idea]