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For whom the bell tolls? The bell tolls for SUV and sports car owners in London
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The city of London, England must just not like us enthusiasts. In an effort to reduce congestion and emissions in the city, the government will impose a tax to enter the city. The cost will be based on the level of emissions a vehicle emits, in bands of A through G.
The dollar amounts seem preposterous to most drivers, but UK Mayor Ken Livingstone feels that the drivers of sports and luxury cars can afford it, and will have no choice beginning in 2009 if they want to drive their beloved cars in the city of London.
The driver of a Porsche 911 or even most SUV's would have to pay a tax of £25 (US $47) every time he or she enters the city. So if you work in the city or have to take your kids to school 5 days per week, that works out to a staggering £6500 (US $12,220) per year! For that you could lease another 911 or even buy a vacation home in the country.
Let's hope that someone comes to his or her senses before 2009, or you may never see a sports car in London again.
Thanks to Richard for the tip!
[Source: thenewspaper.com]
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Cap'n Jack 2:05PM (11/14/2006)
This makes no sense, who is going to take kids to school in a 911?
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Jake B 2:09PM (11/14/2006)
First they ban guns, then they do stuff like this?!? They need a new Winston Churchill to kick some ass.
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Aunt Jemima 2:11PM (11/14/2006)
that is extreme.
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Gene Towne 2:12PM (11/14/2006)
The British have a special knack for taxing the hell out of the motorist, the smoker and the drinker. Add their spy cameras and parking charges, and you can, quite frankly, have England, Old Boy.
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ckm 2:16PM (11/14/2006)
Brilliant. It'll make driving an expensive, polluting car even more of a status and wealth symbol. Pretty soon the only cars in central London will be Bentley's, Aston Martins, Rolls-Royces, Porsches and Ferraris owned by rich bankers.
Not that anyone else can afford to live in London anyway. Gotta love those limousine liberals...
Chris.
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spdracerut 2:15PM (11/14/2006)
Wow... that is a bit crazy... if I lived around London though, I'd just use the Tube(metro/subway) to get around. Now only if we could get decent public transportation here in the states.
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Richard S. 2:30PM (11/14/2006)
Does that mean a Tesla roadster will not be charged anything? Who says that the Porsche 911 polutes more than say a Vauhall Vectra V6? What if someone rigs a big Hummer H1 Alpha to run on biodiesel: Would it pay less than a Ford Mondeo wagon?
Soon Ken Livingston will begin taxing beans higher because it increases flatulence which increases methane concentration which is greenhouse effect gas.
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steve 2:19PM (11/14/2006)
no maybe things like this help us get a handle on things before the planet melts--I am all for going back to a time when driving was truely for the priveledged. It will make that weekend blast in the 911 that much more valuable.
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jordan 2:22PM (11/14/2006)
Is this actually legal? Something about this doesn't seem right for multiple reasons. First, shouldn't current car owners be grandfathered in? Obviously this would be a decision that would cross a prospective car-buyer's mind when purchasing a vehicle. Second, can you really be taxed for something as frivolous as this over and over? A tax put on when purchasing a vehicle makes much more sense (not that I want that either, but of the two evils...).
While this might not count towards "taxation without representation," just really how many of these owners got to voice their opinion on the subject? I'd bet none, since the ones hurt by this are *outside* of London. Are there gates at every city limit to collect this tax, or what? How is this going to be enforced if, say, I buy myself a Prius and completely gut the insides and toss in a 13b motor? No, it won't meet this "Class A" emissions thing anymore, but what toll road clerk is going to lift up my hood and say "hey, that's not Class A, pay your fee!"
All I can see is lost business for London. This is a ridiculous move that could easily make businesses re-think their city location. Perhaps now it might be time to take themselves outside of the city to help employees avoid having to pay this tax (which makes them look better to a possible employee, knowing they'll save X per year (cost of tax minus possible extra distance driven cost).
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Hamud 2:25PM (11/14/2006)
25 pounds??? That's ridiculous... Do it and people will start to use buses often, buses will get overcrowded, then the City Mayor will increase the number of buses and they will pollute as much as or more than all the cars that left entering the city because of the tax...
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Andy 2:33PM (11/14/2006)
"Red Ken" is a socialist. Duh. Londoners, and Britons in general, complain about his radical leftist policies, but Londoners vote him in office. This new effort by Livingstone is no surprise. But it is ridiculous. On the other hand, London is a terrible city to commute in.
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jordan 2:27PM (11/14/2006)
Re: steve
First, please excuse me if I missed your sarcasm. But, if it's not...
Make your weekend trip with the 911 that much more valuable? Who says you'll be able to afford a 911? So, say you live way outside of town, how do you plan to get to work everyday if the job is in the city? Maybe you had to get a new job closer to home, but it pays a lot less. Now you can't pay for a 911 anymore.
I enjoy my weekend trips just fine, I don't need other areas of my life (my trip to work) to be handicapped to realize how "valuable" my weekend trips are.
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David 2:33PM (11/14/2006)
The point of all this has nothing to do with raising revenue and everything to do with reducing congestion in the central city. The charges don't apply to all of metro London but to the central parts of the city that are most congested, most gridlocked, and best served by surface and especially sub-surface public transport. If you've been to London then you know how densely built up it is, how narrow the streets are and how difficult it is to navigate a car through a city that has developed over several centuries without cars and lacks anything like what we think of as a normal street grid. Think Boston, multiply it by five, and you have some idea.
The question for a long time now has been what to do about a situation that was approaching all gridlock, all the time. The notion of knocking down large parts of the city to build roads, the route we took in the US in the fifties (only to end up with gridlock in rush hour at least) is not an option in a city with as much historic, incredibly expensive and commercially valuable real estate as London has.
It strikes me that anyone who criticizes what they've chosen to do needs to understand the problem they are trying to solve and have an alternative. Because we will see things like congestion fees and/or more toll roads in some American cities unless we figure out how to keep traffic moving instead of sitting. And if you think the solution is more roads, think about the tax burden that we will bear from buying central city real estate, taking that real estate off the property tax rolls, and then paying for the demolition of buildings and the construction of new roads and bridges.
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Scott Eaton 2:36PM (11/14/2006)
#9, Jordan... um, you realize this is not the United States, right?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_taxation_without_representation
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Richard Warren 2:47PM (11/14/2006)
#6 Read the article:
"Livingstone's plan is designed around government classification of emissions levels from "Vehicle Excise Duty Band A" to "Band G". Cars such as the Honda Insight and Toyota Prius classified in bands A and B will face no tax, while bands C through F will pay the current £8 (US $15) rate. Cars such as the Ford Mondeo 2 liter sedan are classified band G and will pay the new £25 (US $47) tax upon entry into the city."
Keep in mind there already is a tax, this is an increase
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fizzandpop 2:37PM (11/14/2006)
London is no place for the car enthusiast. Well that's obvious, it never has been, traffic, narrow streets, peds, bikes, market stalls, horses, cabs etc. The only reason to drive a 911 around is status. So we strip away that particular avenue of self expression, so what? People who can drive 911s won't actually care. They'll just garage them at their second homes and find another way to display their wealth and taste around the city. It's called CHANGE. And why not experiment with it? What harm is this actually doing? And before there's talk about legality and rights, remember this is England, a priviledge-based society, not a right-based society. If you live over there, you've got to earn it my son.
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Richard Warren 2:47PM (11/14/2006)
And it's not just London looking at this.
http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/gridlock-new-push-on-city-car-tax/2005/12/30/1135915692135.html
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David 2:53PM (11/14/2006)
One further point for those who hate this idea. You could I suppose simply say that Livingstone is trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist. Fine, make the argument, though I doubt many Londoners will make it. Or you could say, gridlock, so what, live with it. Though in that case you might want to think about the economic cost in terms of the lost productivity that comes from people who aren't doing much of anything except sitting in traffic. Think too of the business lost in London because people will work and shop elsewhere if they have a choice in order to avoid the congestion if not the tax.
I live in Minneapolis which might have the worst designed inner city road net in the country. It's old, poorly maintained, in part because working on any of it screws up all of it, and difficult to correct because fixing any problems requires shutting part of it down for months or years and diverts traffic to other parts of the net that are already overcrowded. It's a problem that everyone here talks about and a problem that has an impact on the viability of the city as a business location, but no one in the political establishment seems to know what to do about it.
At the end of the day these issues go far beyond taxes on sports and luxury cars and go to the question of the viability of urban transportation networks on a planet that is growing in population but not size.
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Alex K 3:03PM (11/14/2006)
They need to do something similar in NYC, but to all non-commercial cars. First they'd have to build some tunnels to connect NJ to Brooklyn and Queens in a few places. It will come to that someday. I live in Brooklyn tucked between the BQE and the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, I see the problems daily!
They use another tactic in Japan - if you cause a traffic jam, you pay for it. That would take a lot of the jalopys off the highways and reign in idiot drivers.
That said, we have most of the laws we need to have reasonable auto traffic in NYC (and anywhere else), there's just not enough enforcement.
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Brian 3:57PM (11/14/2006)
Obviously it will be cheaper to just buy or rent a garage parking spot just inside the boundaries. Your 911 will enter the central core just once. Drive your Hummer to the boundary, walk across the street, and you've defeated the whole system.
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