Cyclists do pay tax; they should also be encouraged – Yorkshire Post Letters

IN a letter (The Yorkshire Post, September 8), Tim Walls suggests that if cyclists want segregated lanes to cycle on, they should pay for them through taxation.

This left me slightly confused. Having not owned a car for the last nine years, our family decided to buy one last month. This, presumably, makes me, once more, a motorist.

Yet I continue to make most of my journeys by bike, which, I can only assume, makes me a cyclist.

And when I’m not cycling or driving, you’ll often find me on Shanks’s Pony, so I’m a pedestrian too. This multimodal life, and complex set of identities, serves me well.

Like any taxpayer, I contribute to the building and maintenance of roads (including cycling infrastructure) through general taxation. The VAT I paid on my recent car purchase was one hefty recent contribution.

My income tax goes in the pot too, as does the corporation tax that the social enterprise I run pays each year on our modest profits.

When I bought our new car I also paid £175 in Vehicle Excise Duty (often incorrectly referred to as “Road Tax”) – a tax based upon how much the vehicle pollutes.

If I had chosen an electric car, or a smaller vehicle, I could have avoided paying that tax. Naturally, my bike doesn’t attract this tax, as, like with an electric vehicle, it has zero emissions.

Yet even with all of these contributions, when we drive we don’t pay the full cost to society of driving. When you take into account factors such as the costs of pollution, collisions, delays and increased physical inactivity, research suggests quite clearly that when we drive, we are the ones who are not fully paying our way.

If anything, when I take my bike out of my garage and wheel it past my car, I should perhaps be being paid for the choice that I have made, rather than being asked to contribute further.

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Thank you

James Mitchinson