I need a bigger windscreen

(Or why the kilometer based road tax should be Europe wide)

Yesterday, there was an article in one of the free local newspapers about having variable road tax here in The Netherlands. The premise of the article was that only cars with a Dutch registration are taxable, foreign registrations seem to be exempt.

<pub-rant>...which is of course very unfair with all them stupid foreigners driving on our roads and causing traffic jams here. And they don't even pay road tax. And their probably going to work at the job I was supposed to be doing.</pub-rant>

The part of the article that caught my eye though, was about all the countries that require you to have a sticker on your windscreen:

• Austria
• Germany
• Switzerland
• Czech Republic
• Hungary
• Romania
• Slovakia

And now the Dutch government wants us to have a box behind our windscreen to tax the road usage itself. I think I'll write to my representative in the European parliament that I need a bigger windscreen on my car to accommodate all these stickers.

The article also states that The Netherlands, Belgium, Andorra, Cyprus, Malta, Latvia, Lithuania and Luxembourg are the only countries left where you do not have to pay for the road usage. So when I'm writing to my EU representative, I'll suggest that they make variable road tax an EU based tax to be spent by the country it is collected. And the way to collect it would be via an extra tax on car petrol. This will have the effect that people who drive more kilometers, buy more petrol and therefor pay more tax. So the usage is taxed, not the possession. The more a road is used, the more maintenance is needed, making it right to tax the usage. A knock-on effect would be that people who buy cars would get an incentive to buy a more fuel-efficient car, reducing the carbon-dioxide emission.

Hmm, if this is the case, then it seems I don't need a bigger windscreen, we need a EU-wide road tax on fuel and do away with the fixed part of the road tax,

Zaaf