VTR1000.ORG

Hi All,
Not been on for a while - been thinking of you though! Having just renewed the road tax for my 'storm I had that all too familiar sense of annoyance, and because it's £80 and for me, as well as probably most of us, totally disproportionate to the mileage we do and the emissions we give off as well as road wear and tear.

In short I had decided that a petition might be the way forward so had a look. I found one that is as above on the gov.uk website. I can't establish a link as i am computer thick but if you go to gov.uk/e-petition and then search on mototrcycle road tax it comes up with the above - abolish motorcycle road tax.

I believe a bit of tax is fair enough but it should perhaps be linked to things like mileage covered a year or just be generally more proportionate given that you don't need to pay it for quite a few vehicles and this petition had 1700 'signatures' already and therefore we should all sign it before it expires in March next year.

Cheers y'all

F'storm Jedi

Road tax should be abolished completely in my opinion. We already all pay a "pay as you go" tax for all our vehicles in the form of fuel duty. The more you use the more you pay. Pretty simple and doesn't require any administration costs and is pretty fair. If you don't do may miles then you don't pay a lot.

I just had my Monster MOT'd last month and due to personal commitments this year it had done less than 80 miles since its last MOT but I still had to pay the £80 road tax.

Al.

It's not road tax! lol

Apparently tax rates are based on either engine size or fuel type and CO2 emissions, depending on when the vehicle was registered.

If you have a 600cc bike it's £80 same if you have a 1000c or 1300cc it's £80.

A 1549cc and below car is £145.00 or more.

Becareful what you wish for!!

Free road tax for motorbikes would be great! They are efficient, don't cause traffic jams, use less energy than other vehicles, and do little damage to the road, so, why should we get hammered each time we decide to ride one?

But, that's been an age-old argument since tax began, and I can't ever see Mr Govt change it - they'd lose billions.

Pays to ride a British bike from time to time!

Me old 1956 Beeza C12 benefited from free historic road tax, and no MOT required (new rules for certain classics which started on Nov 2013).

Having no MOT required for an old clunker is not a scary thing for other road users to hear - they imagine things in an unroadworty condition. But, it's the opposite.

Most folk who ride/restore Brit bikes do so to a better standard of roadworthiness than some modern Jap bike riders. My C12 was a complete restoration, and lovingly kept. You'll rarely see an old Brit held with tape, string, wire and bungees! And not many young guys will want to ride an old Brit that's falling apart, just to get the advantage of free tax or MOT!

On the Japanese side of things..., want cheap road tax? Ride a Honda C90! - just £17 a year - that's not even 5p per day! Superb bikes, great laugh, and I just sold mine last month to a young guy (early 20s) in Aberdeen.

Even £80 for a large machine is not bad I suppose - it's just 22p per day.

Years ago, I used to rebel against buying road tax for each machine I had - which is why I just bought one road tax, then swapped it round to whatever bike I was on at the time. Afterall, I could only ride one at a time, and to me, it made no difference if the road tax was valid or not for that bike. The road duty WAS paid for, and it was still on a motorcycle - end of argument - no matter if that bike was a moped, Honda superdream, XS1100, or whatever - it was a motorbike road tax, and I was still using the same little bit of road on 2 wheels.

I could see the point if I had a current motorbike road tax being used on a car etc.

I didn't think it fair that before the SORN days, even if you had a bike in a box in bits, in your bedroom, it had to be taxed. But I'm glad of the SORN capability, as it means I can have as many bikes as I want. Yeah, ok, Now I behave and buy separate road tax for each bike I want on the road.

What I WOULD like to see, is the road tax available to buy on a monthly basis, as required. Not the minimum of 6 months.

I rarely keep a bike for 6 months, and so I object to the DVLA making money out of me with the new system, by only giving me the next full month (can't backdate it), and the new keeper re-taxes it, which gets backdated to the 1st of the month - there's that "bit in-between" that the Govt benefits from.

Excuse me whilst I go pop a vein!!

Just went on to it and it says This e-petition is now closed

add it on to the price of the fuel. Simple !!!

I seem to recall this petition doing the rounds before. Is it an old closed petition on the .gov site now

Abolish tax altogether.

(:-})

I've seen a lot of petitions advertising this recently.. people don't realise the full picture.

1 - What we call 'road tax' is actually 'vehicle exercise duty' and has no responsibility to go towards the roads.. that generally comes from income tax and the like
2 - 'bikes produce less CO2'.. well yeah, the average bike does as they're more fuel efficient (so we can exclude the VTR from this).. but CO2 is but one of the harmful gases a ICE can produce and the other gases (can't remember their names but one is associated with acid rain) are output exponentially more than cars on modern and old bikes alike.
3 - our economy is still pretty shite, the government needs the money (even if it is so they can waste it on wombles MP expenses or whatever but meh).. let's stop giving them loads of money that they could put towards good things for the country (excuse the optimism).. and it's £8 per month on the new system if you want to pay it that way, it's peanuts! Less than 2 hours work to ride my bike legally for a month!

Sent from my GT-I9505 using Tapatalk

Hmmmm...... so we're all pretty much singing from the same hymn sheet in that we think there is a better way to do it.
I know about the excise duty and why it's now based on emissions as opposed to that which it used to be but the aim here is to have it discussed.
If it's raised as an issue then it'll perhaps be revised.....or perhaps it won't but at the end of the day it can't hurt to spread this one around and get enough signatures.
The new system may well suck, and for the avid VTRist it'll never be experienced by us as they don't make them anymore.
There are probably many different solutions to this, there's about 5 above but whichever way would work best is up to people that probably get paid more than the majority of us, as long as it's revised. So maybe just sign it because you want change and leave it to chance or do nothing and get nothing.
And according to the petition itself it's supposed to run until the end of March next year. We only need another 98,930 more signatures
Come on peeps....do it....
If it is closed then lets confirm and start our own. That's my thought any way.

Cheers

Virt wrote:I've seen a lot of petitions advertising this recently.. people don't realise the full picture.

1 - What we call 'road tax' is actually 'vehicle exercise duty' and has no responsibility to go towards the roads.. that generally comes from income tax and the like

So we're paying excise duty and not road tax when we tax a vehicle (assuming the vehicle we tax is not tax exempt for whatever reason), that makes it worse IMO.

Firestorm_Al is right, we are already paying as we go

firestorm_al wrote:Road tax should be abolished completely in my opinion. We already all pay a "pay as you go" tax for all our vehicles in the form of fuel duty. The more you use the more you pay. Pretty simple and doesn't require any administration costs and is pretty fair. If you don't do may miles then you don't pay a lot.

I just had my Monster MOT'd last month and due to personal commitments this year it had done less than 80 miles since its last MOT but I still had to pay the £80 road tax.

Al.

Chris.

In the news last week were Boris's latest plans to tax vehicles in London- a pollution/emissions tax pitched at £12.50 a day for polluting vehicles incl. motorbikes (and taxis AP!) that aren't v low emission. I actually find it hard to argue against this as recent air quality research sugests that pollution is now the no. 5 killer in London, with around 4,000 deaths per year. Most of this comes from vehicles with diesel being the main culprit. But diesel bikes are pretty rare and bikes help cut congestion, thereby cutting pollution too, so any new tax on bikes should at least reflect that! At least initially, the proposal would only cover a small patrt of central London.

Sorry to disagree but can anyone take Boris seriously he is like a simple kid just shows anyone can get in to politics FACT of the matter is bike tax should be abolished and on another note see if car drivers did a CBT before going out in their car or part of their lessons you would get a lot safer car drivers