First you need a vision, then you can think about a universal road user charge

The August EV sales numbers are in. This single data point shows us that the threat of an EV Road User Charge has clearly not dented the appetite for EVs. We can sleep easy and not worry about how the need for a quick fix to the budget has dissuaded people from buying an EV.

EV owners can happily carry the can for a decline in excise revenue. A decline caused, not by the rise in EV ownership, but by perfidious foreigners in the EU and the US imposing efficiency standards; denying Australians the right to naturally aspirated gas guzzlers like the great God Henry Ford intended. The brave new world was foisted upon us.

Road user charging is something I studied at Carnegie Mellon University’s Department of Engineering and Public Policy. A comprehensive road user charge proposal was a case I was given to anlayse.

Conducting the analysis in Pittsburgh, a city with visibly crumbling infrastructure. A city where, some years after I left, a major road bridge collapsed, injuring 10 people, with the collapse atributed to a lack of maintenance.

Sitting there and looking at the budget shorfall in road funding, it’s easy to come to the conclusion that a road user charge is the perfect quick fix for decrepit infrastructure. Getting people to pay directly for something the use seemed logical to me, as I’m sure it does to Jim Chalmers.

A well constructed road user charge is may be  great policy, but it is also terrible politics. Exposing people to the real costs of something they have had to think about will always  challenging.

We take roads for granted, never really thinking about how we all pay for them. Perhaps Jim Chalmers should be applauded for his bravery in putting an unpalatable policy back on the table, but what is on the table is not a well thought out, comprehensive road user charge.

Australia must consider the transition to a low-carbon economy holistically, not as a series of isolated problems. This transition is an opportunity to achieve better and fairer outcomes for all Australians.

Owning a car is a costly necessity for most people. Expanding the road system to meet the needs of a growing population of multi-EV households will cost us billions and create congested, ugly and polluted cities. The transition is an opportunity to give people the choice to liberate themselves from the costly burden of car ownership.

A road user charge is a useful tool to shape how Australians live their lives and fairly allocate the costs of providing infrastructure.

But it must fit with a clearly articulated vision for what we want Australia to look like. True bravery lies in creating that vision, selling it to Australians. Do this, then deciding whether a road user charge should form part of how we pay for it will be easy.