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D’Artagnan Consulting managing partner Jack Opiola.

D’Artagnan Consulting managing partner Jack Opiola.

THE steady improvement in fuel efficiency of Australia’s vehicle fleet and the imminent rise of electric vehicles will force governments to switch from fuel tax to road-user charging as a means of paying for new roads and maintenance, according to a traffic expert from the United States.

However, D’Artagnan Consulting managing partner Jack Opiola says if they wait too long, the switch may prove politically unpopular, making it difficult to introduce what is seen by some as a fairer system of paying for the roads.

D’Artagnan specialises in traffic management, electronic road pricing and intelligent transport systems. Mr Opiola will be speaking at the National Electronic Tolling Forum in Brisbane on May 25 and 26.

Switching to road-user charging, where drivers are taxed according to how many kilometres they drive, already promises to be difficult to sell as it would involve switching from a “silent” tax to a monthly, quarterly or annual tax based on your mileage, Mr Opiola said.

“Politicians love silent taxes because people don’t complain about silent taxes,” he said from his base in Reston, Virginia.

People don’t notice the fuel excise because it is built into the price of fuel and is paid every time a driver fills up at a service station, he added.

A switch to distance-based road taxing has been urged by both the Productivity Commission and Infrastructure Australia.

Mr Opiola, who is a regular visitor to Australia, estimated that we pay an average of $600 a year in fuel excise, although he thinks people believe it is much more.

“They will say that can’t be correct. They spend a lot more on coffee, sandwiches and beers than they do on the gas tax.”

While drivers might be pleasantly surprised at how little their total fuel excise bill actually is, Mr Opiola said that bill will continue to fall as hybrids and electric vehicles become more common.

“The brave new world of electric vehicles and advanced hybrids is coming. We’ve got predictions here that I think are pretty conservative, saying that by 2040, 35 per cent of the fleet would be electric.

“One of my favourite lines when I am talking to politicians is to ask what if 35 per cent of your population converts to EVs and then you try to impose a distance charge.

“You’re going to have a pretty big opposition. So, if you are going to do it, you better think about doing it now.”

Switching the driver of a petrol-powered car from fuel excise tax to a road-user charge is one challenge, Mr Opiola said, but switching the driver of an electric car, who pays no fuel excise, to a road user charge is going to be much more difficult.

User pays: D’Artagnan Consulting managing partner Jack Opiola believes a road-user charging system would be a difficult sell in Australia.

User pays: D’Artagnan Consulting managing partner Jack Opiola believes a road-user charging system would be a difficult sell in Australia.

On the plus side for governments is the fact that road-user charging will not be that hard to introduce according to Mr Opiola, thanks to the increasing connectedness of vehicles. There will be no need to build tolling gantries on every freeway, arterial and suburban road, he said.

Governments will be able to give drivers a choice of how to establish what road-user charge they should pay.

“We are offering the wonderful market feature of user choice,” he said. “You can pick your own poison.

“I can either read your odometer or, if you pick telematics, I can have your mileage automatically sent to me, from your vehicle.”

He said people who are concerned about privacy issues can periodically bring their vehicles in and have the odometers read. Or people can self-report and then every year or two the authorities can sync up by reading the odometer and comparing it to what has previously been reported.

Mr Opiola said it would be relatively easy to guard against odometer tampering tricks that used to be prevalent in the used car trade.

“Like everything in the digital revolution, including digital odometers, they can be reset and, in some cases, more easily than finding your cable and attaching your electric drill to it and running the drill in reverse.”

Mr Opiola pointed out that tampering with the odometer is illegal in most countries, but he said governments would probably back up that law when introducing road-user charges.

“At the same time as the idea of charging by distance comes about, you have to think about parallel laws that are going to come into effect that are first going to change the way the odometer reads distance and records distance and then protects it in the engine control unit (ECU).

“So there is probably going to be a required log in ECUs in future because, if we are charging by distance and somebody goes in and resets the odometer, there will still be a record of it in the ECU.”

Mr Opiola said charging drivers by the distance they cover will be fairer than the current fuel excise system. He said that people buying large cars such as Holden Commodores or Ford Falcons are paying more in excise than people driving small cars.

“Think of the inequity. Your neighbour, who still has a V8 Holden, is paying close to $1200 a year in road taxes and you, in your Prius, are paying $400 a year in road taxes.

“Is that fair when roads are supposed to be a common good that everybody pays for?

“So if I change the equation, and I change it to distance, both you and your neighbour do about 15,000 a year. Isn’t that a truer indicator of how much road space you gave consumed?”

Mr Opiola added that, if governments wanted to incorporate environmental considerations into the road-user tax, they could calculate the tax by incorporating an efficiency factor as well as distance driven.

He said Australia already has the Green Vehicle Guide rating system for vehicles.

“What if the multiplier was the green star rating, or the inverse of the green star rating? If you have a one-star car you could pay four times what a four-star vehicle pays per mile.”

Mr Opiola will be returning to Australia to speak at the intelligent transport systems World Congress in Melbourne in October. Around 7000 delegates are expected to attend.

By Ian Porter

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