Scrap rego and pay for damage

Now there’s a newspaper headline that’s good to see.

For years, I’ve been saying that vehicle registration fees should be dumped in favour of a user pays alternative. And that the easiest way to achieve this would have been to make it a straight levy on fuel, because invariably more fuel use equals more use, damage and costs of the road infrastructure being used by that fuel purchaser. I read someone once that a single pass by a semi-trailer causes damage to that road equivalent to 10,000 car movements. Of course road freight costs would skyrocket, but would that be a bad thing?

And then there’s the issue of paying rego on every car you have, even if you are a collector, with the reality being that you can’t possibly drive more than one at a time.

Now a report called Moving People – Solutions for a Growing Australia has recommended something similar, with a twist. The report developers (Australasian railways Association, International Association for Public Transport, and Bus Industry Confederation of Australia) rightly point out that the replacement could also be scaled according to time as well as distance.

Number plate recognition software or tollway tags now make it feasible to monitor vehicles travelling into CBDs or on key arterial links during peak periods. Knowing travel at these times costs more would logically lead to behaviour modification of drivers to avoid the peaks.

Roads are built to cope with peaks, not built to cope with overall usage. So small reductions in peak congestion would lead to big reductions in road construction costs.

The report has been presented to federal Transport Minister Anthony Albanese, so it will be interesting to see what he and Mr Rudd do with it.