With the State of Victoria's announcement of road user charging (RUC) for electric (EV) and plug-in hybrid vehicles (PHEV) there have been quite some claims from various circles about how allegedly damaging RUC could be for sales of such vehicles. 

According to The Guardian:

A coalition of car manufacturers, industry groups, infrastructure companies and environmentalists have branded the Victorian government’s proposed electric vehicle tax the “worst electric vehicle policy in the world”.

The more recent announcement about incentives to purchase EVs should help ameliorate this concern, but it remains a moot point as to whether RUC actually disincentivises purchases of EVs.

The incentives package is as follows:

• Subsidies for 20,000 EVs to be purchased, of up to A$3,000 per vehicle for vehicles priced under A$69,000;
• A$19m to be spent on EV charging infrastructure across regional Victoria;
• A$20m for a zero-emissions bus trial;
• A$10m to purchase 400 new ZEVs for the State's own fleet;
• A$5m for a Commercial Sector ZEV Innovation Fund; and
• A$298k for a study on "EV-readiness" in new buildings.

Should Australian states introduce a EV tax - a road user charge based on distance for electric vehicles?

Over the past couple of weeks a coalition of the Australian electric vehicle industry and the leftwing/progressive think tank The Australia Institute have been waging a campaign (actual campaign) against the introduction of road user charging (RUC) for electric vehicles in South Australia, Victoria and New South Wales.  It went so far as The Australia Institute hosting a nearly one hour long webinar (see bottom of the page if you have the time to spend on it) that made a whole series of points which ranged from a whole set of ideas for promoting electric vehicle sales in Australia to opposing RUC not only for electric vehicles. It goes so far as justifying road funding being completely disconnected from how road vehicles are charged, but then arguing for road user charging and including some red herrings, so I thought it would be worth responding to.

Bear in mind that there have been some clear blunders in the design and communication of the “EV tax” announcements to date, but I’ll come to those later.

Behyad Jafari, as CEO, has led the criticism from the Australian Electric Vehicles Council of the proposals for charging electric vehicles by distance.  His claims need to be refuted and the Electric Vehicles Council ought to be engaged to take a far more constructive approach to improving conditions for electric vehicle owners and the road transport sector more generally.  Not only because failing to do so will harm efforts by States to establish RUC, but because if the States fail to do this now, it will come at a much higher price at a later date, for Australia and for electric vehicle owners.

• There are insufficient incentives to encourage sales of EVs in Australia:  This may be true. Certainly the Luxury Car Tax shouldn’t apply to them, and there are multiple policy initiatives that could be taken to incentivise sales of lower emission vehicles. The purpose of this blog is not to discuss these, but arguments around the absence of sufficient measures to encourage electric vehicle sales should not be an argument against charging such vehicles for the use of the roads.

• RUC for EVs would be a significant disincentive to sales: On the face of it, charging EVs for road use should have an impact on sales, but it is more likely to have an impact on usage. The only state to discuss a rate for EV tax so far is Victoria, at A$0.025 per kilometre.  Given average distance driven by a vehicle in Victoria per annum is around 12,000km that is around A$300 a year to pay to use the roads. It’s difficult to see how this will discourage purchasing electric vehicles except at the bare margins.  Indeed, the idea that someone should buy a car because it costs nothing to use the roads, is negative, because the car still takes up road space (which is scarce in cities and on busy roads) and still benefits from the capital tied up in the network. Bear in mind that most Australians don’t buy new cars (there are roughly three times as many used car as new car sales in Australia each year), indicating those that do tend to be on higher incomes, so are unlikely to see a small per kilometre charge as being a significant disincentive to buying an electric vehicle.

• Fuel excise isn’t hypothecated so a loss in revenue doesn’t affect road funding:  This is true, but the analogy to tobacco tax (that if revenue drops governments don’t go looking for new revenue) is a poor one. For heavy vehicles at least, fuel excise is not charged on off-public road use, and there has never been an explicit policy to treat fuel excise as a disincentive to using the roads (unlike tobacco tax which exists, in part, to reduce demand for smoking). If fuel duty erodes, it will affect the capacity of the Commonwealth to fund multiple activities, but there would be merit in it being hypothecated for road spending, at least in part, at the same rate for heavy vehicles and light vehicles. Heavy Vehicle Road Reform proposals have included the concept of hypothecation, in part because a shift towards more direct user charging would establish a relationship between road users and the provision of roads. It is true that, for now and for some years, there is unlikely to be serious erosion of fuel duty revenue in Australia from electric vehicles, but that erosion will become an issue.  

• Reform of charging for road use should start with heavy vehicles:  There is a lot of merit in this, but this is already happening. There has been a small-scale trial of RUC for heavy vehicles in Australia already, and work underway on developing a larger trial of distance, mass and location based heavy vehicle RUC, alongside supply side reforms. Richard Denniss from the Australia Institute claims in The Guardian that “undercharging of heavy vehicles” has seen a loss in mode share for freight from rail, which is highly debatable.  Railways since the 1980s have moved away from a model of handling wagon loads of goods to small stations (which are not economic to handle or competitive in price and time with road transport), to focusing on bulk goods and line-haul containerised freight.  The same has happened in New Zealand over that period which has had RUC for heavy vehicles since 1978.  The claim that heavy vehicles in Australia only pay 12.5% of land transport taxes is simply wrong, because it ignores what is spent on registration fees, which for heavy vehicles can reach over $10,000 a year. Undercharging may be true in the current year, based on the NTC’s Cost Allocation Model, although the road freight peak bodies note that for several years the amount charged by the fuel-excise based RUC was higher than the model stated should be recovered from heavy vehicles. In other words, the populist belief that trucks are always underpaying is not true. However, the system does need reform, and Heavy Vehicle Road Reform could result in this and this does not reduce the arguments for RUC for light vehicles including electric vehicles.  

So, should electric vehicles get to use the roads for free?  

The argument suggested by some that “we don’t charge people to use public parks” implying that roads are the same doesn’t bear close scrutiny.  Roads are not public parks, as their scarce capacity is much more readily reached in cities and unlike public parks (except at very rare extremes), roads beyond a set capacity becomes congested and their utility is significantly diminished. Congested roads also increase fuel consumption for all vehicles, increasing emissions for non-zero emissions vehicles, but also increasing energy costs for electric vehicles. I doubt the Australia Institute would argue against congestion pricing, but in the absence of congestion pricing, allowing a category of private vehicles to use city roads for free will exacerbate congestion, discourage use of public transport. There IS a legitimate question as to whether electric vehicles pay a discounted rate or even for free when numbers of electric vehicles are extremely low, but that is different from claiming that they shouldn’t pay for road use at all, or that a small per kilometre charge is devastating.

You couldn't be blamed for looking at the media coverage of the proposal to introduce distance based road user charging (RUC) on electric vehicles in three Australian states and think it was a crazy idea.  There is far more attention been paid to the utterances of the Electric Vehicle Council and a number of motoring related publications, compared to what has been said by Ministers or the relevant Departments.

There is a pretty clear reason for that.

Neither the Ministers nor the departments responsible for leading the communications on the proposals have done enough to follow the number one lesson in advancing road pricing, road user charging or indeed any proposal to introduce direct user charging on existing roads - dominate the narrative.

This lesson was learned in a different, but related endeavour in this field. London Congestion Charging.  Sure, Australia isn't London, and charging EVs for all road use is not the same as congestion charging in a small inner city area.  It's MUCH harder.

Only 55% of households in London have a car (or access to someone else's car).  In Australia it is 91%.  Yes the number of EVs is very small, but charging for all road distance 24/7 is quite different from charging to use a small area of roads at specific times. Moreover, Ken Livingstone got elected on a manifesto that included congestion charging, none of the State Governments proposed RUC for EVs. That doesn't mean everything a government does needs to be in a manifesto, but it certainly makes it easier, and even though <1% of car trips in London enter the congestion charging zone, it was still a proposal that barely got majority support.  

Charging EVs in Australia is much more difficult if you don't take the lesson from London Congestion Charging - lead the narrative. At the moment the narrative is being led by a lobby that regards the proposal as an attack on its constituency and by populist fear of the unknown, and that's because, with the exception of Victoria, the proposals have been too vague and the purpose poorly construed. That's because the introduction of RUC for EVs is a long-term strategic move to avoid the "sinking ship" of fuel excise revenues over time and for the states to get revenue from EVs that would otherwise be collected by the Commonwealth (if EVs were petrol or diesel powered vehicles). 

Yet unsurprisingly, the lesson time and time again from the experience of US states that have introduced RUC (Oregon, Utah) and those that have trialled it (Hawaii, California, Washington State) is that the public simply doesn't care about government revenues. Most people see incomes tax, GST, local authority rates, stamp duty occasionally and other taxes as just being there and given most aspects of government tend to work from time to time (and government is often reported as having wasted money or mismanaged it), there is a great deal of cynicism about higher taxes or new taxes. Right from the start, the idea that electric vehicles should pay a "tax" is the wrong idea.

A "tax" is just a way of penalising an activity that collects money for government.  It isn't seen as a "user charge" or "fee" for a service given.  As fuel excise is exactly that, and none of the money is hypothecated, it is even more difficult to sell the idea of an EV tax based on distance. So it SHOULD be called a user charge, and although critics would call it a tax, the reason to call it a user charge is to differentiate it, and to show it is a start of a wider reform, designed to benefit road users.

A road user charge could be defined as changing that relationship between road users and road providers, and as a first step towards including hybrid vehicles as well, so that over time decisions on spending on roads within states are more controlled by states (and territories).

The narrative should not be about a revenue problem, but about moving away from a model whereby there is no transparency in money going from road users to the roads, to one that has a closer relationship.  This is already the narrative around supply-side reforms for heavy vehicles in Heavy Vehicle Road Reform at the Commonwealth level. These reforms have widespread support in the heavy vehicle user sector, and there would be considerable advantages in bringing this together with electric and hybrid light vehicles as well, so that rate setting, use of revenues and planning for investment are linked with user preferences.

Moreover, don't let opponents and the less well informed lead the narrative. If you don't fill the gaps in information, they will, and you will lose the argument.  This already looks like what has started to happen in South Australia.

Following on from the announcement by the Treasurer of South Australia that the state wished to introduce legislation to charge EVs for road use by distance, two other states have announced intentions to pursue a similar policy,

New South Wales Treasurer Dominic Perrottet announced last week that the state is to consider introducing RUC for electric vehicles, although it was not included in his budget last week.  This had been flagged as being of interest in the state's Federal Financial Relations Review published earlier this year.

Now the Victorian Treasurer Tim Pallas announced on Saturday, in advance of the state budget, that he intended to introduce RUC on EVs. The specifics include a A$0.025 a km charge on zero-emission vehicles (electric and hydrogen) and A$0.02 a km on plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, with the intention that it should be in place in mid-2021. It will raise A$30m over four years, which is much more promising than South Australia which looks like raising less than A$1m per year.  As reported by The Age, the state intends to spend A$45m on electric vehicle charging infrastructure during that period, but the revenue is not to be hypothecated for that purpose (fortunately, because ultimately it would become far too much for that purpose), but rather indicatively to pay for a "share of road maintenance costs".  

All three proposals are very similar, although South Australia's proposal has already generated opposition from the Labor Opposition, it is a Labor Government in Victoria implementing a similar policy.  The Australian Trucking Association is strongly in favour of RUC for electric vehicles, but the loudest opposition has come from the Electric Vehicle Council. 

I'll get to that opposition in another post, but what all of this news represents is a giant leap forward in advancing RUC in Australia. It make sense for all three states to adopt RUC on electric vehicles in a similar timescale, given their proximity to one another (a similar point might be made about Queensland).  Of course there is a serious strategic move by all three states in advancing this policy:

1. Take charge of the narrative around RUC for electric vehicles: Being slow on this policy will mean policy design, technology and interoperability across state boundaries will be led by the first movers. All three states clearly want to be ahead, rather than have to be reactive.  There will inevitably have to be some common standards and policies to cross-border distance travelled.
2. Build a new stream of revenue:  None of the states get revenue from fuel duty, which is collected by the Commonwealth and is not hypothecated (although the rate of fuel duty (after refunds) paid by heavy vehicles reflects historic spending on the road network attributable to heavy vehicles).  To set up RUC for electric vehicles (which pay no taxes to the Commonwealth for using roads), gives states revenue), provides a long-term strategic opportunity to develop an independent revenue stream from the use of light electric vehicles, which will grow over time as the fleet changes. As the fleet changes, fuel tax revenue will erode (although not so much from heavy vehicles) and states that adopt RUC will be increasingly able to pay for their roads with less Commonwealth funding (and the consequence of this may be less Commonwealth funding over time).

 The South Australian Treasurer announced with his budget that:

The government is intending to introduce a road user charge for plug-in -electric and zero emissions vehicles. The charge will include a fixed component (similar to current registration charging) and a variable charge based on distance travelled. Electric vehicles do not attract fuel excess and therefore make a lower contribution to the cost of maintaining our road networks. The proposed road user charge will ensure road maintenance funding is sustainable into the future. The government is consulting with other jurisdictions about the details of the proposed road user charge. Current estimates are that less than about$1 million per year will be collected by the charge.

Note that the South Australian Government doesn't collect fuel excise duty, the Commonwealth Government does, and fuel excise isn't hypothecated, and you'll see that this is a clever means by which an Australian state is seeking to plan for a long term future whereby it grows effectively a new revenue source, whilst an existing revenue source for the Commonwealth Government is slowly eroded by changes in the vehicle fleet.

There is considerable wisdom in moving early on this, not least because the sheer number of electric vehicles in South Australia (I heard an estimate of 800, but I might be wrong), would mean that it is not going to be costly to implement or politically difficult when so few would face paying it.  If any jurisdiction waits till 10% or more of the fleet is electric, it will be harder administratively and politically to implement.  

To date three jurisdictions globally have light vehicle RUC based on distance.  New Zealand (which has all diesel vehicles under 3.5 tonnes paying RUC and will expand this to include electric vehicles from the end of 2021), Oregon (which has a pilot for alternatively fuelled vehicles to pay RUC) and Utah.  Wyoming has announced that it wishes to follow, and multiple US states are piloting it.  South Australia would heed well to learn from all of those systems.

Infrastructure Partnerships Australia (IPA) has been actively pushing for this sort of reform, with its report in November 2019 proposing it.  It advanced three options, from Federal leadership, to State collaboration, to State unilateralism. It looks like this is the first part of the second option (and frankly the third option is difficult to sustain for states with considerable cross border traffic).  This advocacy is to be welcomed, and needs to be supported by a comprehensive programme that ensures that South Australia's proposals succeed

There are some key issues South Australia needs to address in this process, none of which is clear from the news coverage to date:

1. Get the communications right:  The number one failure of ALL programmes to introduce direct user charging on roads is not clearly addressing concerns from motorists and not clearly communicating the policy purpose, what will be done with the revenue, how the rate will be set and reviewed, and what users will need to do. From the media coverage seen so far, South Australia has not done this as well as it could. Take this article which is so full of flaws it's not funny. 
2. Clarify how little impact road user charging (RUC) will have on electric vehicle takeup.  New Zealand has an exemption for electric vehicles paying RUC until the end of 2021, but when they eventually do pay, they'll pay around A$0.07 per kilometre. So for the average vehicle that may travel 12,465km a year that is A$872.55 a year. Noting that in NZ, fuel duty and the RUC rate are meant to be equivalent. Fuel duty in NZ is equal to about A$0.663 per litre, whereas in Australia it is A$0.423, so RUC might be assumed to be proportionately similar, say around A$0.045 per kilometre - that's around A$561 per annum for an electric vehicle owner, which is not going to be a great disincentive compared to the savings on fuel and operating costs which are much more than that. US states are not concerned about RUC affecting electric vehicle takeup, as Oregon and Utah have already implemented RUC for such vehicles, and multiple other states are piloting or have piloted RUC for such vehicles (see Hawaii, California, Washington State, Colorado).
3. Be clear on what is to be done with net revenues:  Fuel excise duty in Australia is not hypothecated, but the lesson from every other jurisdiction, from New Zealand to the USA to Europe, is that hypothecating RUC revenue is critical to public acceptability and also accountability for moving from a taxation model to a user pays model. I know Treasuries are loathe to want to treat any taxation as hypothecated, which harks bark to the failures of hypothecation in the UK in the 1930s, but there are plenty of models of hypothecation working well (New Zealand has done an excellent job having evolved towards hypothecation in the 1980s and 1990s). Yes, it will be very little money from the start, but dedicating net revenues towards the State's road maintenance budget would be a good start.  There will obviously have to be longer term discussions about what happens to the money received from the Commonwealth when fuel excise duty revenues really do erode.
4. Establish a process for setting and reviewing RUC rates that is transparent and linked to what other vehicles pay and cost allocation:  As long as fuel duty is dominant, RUC will be linked to it, but in principle, RUC rates should be based on recovery of fixed and marginal costs of road infrastructure use.  Motorists fear that a new charge will be set based on political desire to raise as much revenue as possible.  For now, it should be linked to fuel excise duty, but not determined by it, after all it is South Australia's RUC, not the Commonwealth's.
5. Develop policies on distance travelled by location: Even if the approach taken is to use odometer readings as the basis for charging, South Australia cannot avoid having to not charge for distance travelled off public roads (as this is not subject to fuel excise duty now, albeit through a refund process) and out of state.  This obviously means it must be co-ordinated with Victoria and New South Wales in the first instance (very few electric vehicles are likely to venture into Western Australia or the Northern Territory), but electric vehicle owners ought to be able to have technology choices so they can choose an option that includes location - so they are not charged for out of state and offroad travel.  If they don't choose a location based option, then a manual refund process for out of state travel might be developed.  In New Zealand there is a manual option, but commercial vehicle operators using GNSS based telematics service providers do so, in part, to automate the offroad refunds process.  A bigger issue is what to do with out-of-state electric vehicles, which will be difficult to enforce charges against without a multi-state approach.
6. Decide if charges are prepay or postpaid: The IPA paper is silent on this, but it has considerable impacts on enforcement vs. flexibility. If distance is invoiced after the event, it is much harder to enforce and pursue for payment, than if it is prepaid distance, particularly using a manual method of distance measurement (odometers). Postpayment is suitable for those using automated means of distance reporting (e.g. in vehicle telematics systems), as it can be related to a prepaid account easily, but if you are dependent on motorists reporting distance manually, then there can be issues with managing this at scale.
7. Develop a scaleable enforcement system:  On a small scale, this wont be difficult because it is easy to chase small numbers of vehicle owners, but it becomes tricker when the numbers enter the tens of thousands of vehicles. Consider what parts of enforcement are around recovering charges vs. charge evasion and fraud, and how each are treated.  Legislation needs to be flexible enough to respond to what behaviour looks like when lots of people are paying RUC and especially when it involves vehicles paying at least some fuel excise duty.
8. Decide on a delivery model:  On a tiny scale, it can be done within the State Government, but over time this is unlikely to be a suitable model from the points of view of efficiency, user choice and innovation.  Enabling an open market in RUC service delivery is the model pursued in the United States and now in New Zealand, as well as parts of Europe.  This allows for new technology options to be developed, but more critically for the more complicated task of incorporating hybrid vehicles over time, which will need fuel duty refunds in parallel with RUC collection.

It is hugely challenging for South Australia to introduce RUC in around seven months, because the legislation needed will have to be able to adapt to a rapidly changing future. It would be a huge mistake to be confined to one single model for measuring and reporting distance, or to fail to apply the lessons of other jurisdictions, but with such a small scale of electric vehicles, it is effectively a pilot that is smaller than the programmes of other jurisdictions (e.g. Hawaii is currently piloting RUC with up to 2000 volunteers).

All I can say for now is get the policy right and communicate it well.  The world of RUC is strewn with failures from those who didn't do either. South Australia has a great chance to lead Australia on light RUC policy, but if it goes wrong, it will take years before it can try again. Ask the UK, it announced a policy to replace registration fees and part of fuel duty with a national road pricing system in 2006, and has never been able to seriously entertain it since over a million people signed an online petition against it in the subsequent two years.