We must love our cars. We go further in them than any other people in Europe - and more, even, than Americans, writes James Nix.
A contributory factor to our high car use is the parking that many companies provide. The argument for taxing them runs as follows: employees who have several alternatives to the car for getting to work - bus, train, bicycle - will drive for as long as parking remains an untaxed perk, just to occupy "their" spaces in the car park.
And, having laid on parking for existing workers, employers want to be fair to new recruits and often pay their parking bills - for spaces in multistorey car parks intended for shoppers.
As things stand, a city parking space is worth more than a typical company car, and providing spaces is a tax-efficient way to pay employees, according to a 1999 report. But plans to tax company parking have stalled. A blueprint to tax employer-provided spaces was drafted in the late 1990s and updated after the introduction of the euro. It said parking cordons should be mapped out for Dublin, Cork, Limerick, Galway and Waterford. Inside the cordons, private non-residential parking spaces would each be valued at 3,000 a year, to be taxed as a benefit in kind.
The Minister for Finance, Charlie McCreevy, appeared to commit the Government to this strategy in the 2000 Budget, but an inter-departmental tax strategy group could find no "practical, straightforward and equitable" way to implement the measure.
To be fair, it is hard to decide where to put cordons, when to extend them and who to put in charge of the process. And businesses hoping to attract employees with perks might move outside the cordons, where office space with oceans of untaxed parking could reduce the value of city-centre property and contribute to urban sprawl.
One alternative is to tax company spaces built after July 1st this year, irrespective of where they are. Spaces provided before then would be exempt.
Would drivers view such a move unfavourably? The issue is not that simple. When Conor Faughnan of AA Ireland was asked about long journey times in Dublin, his response went to the nub of the issue.
"One of the root causes is Dublin's planning. The city is spreading outwards at a ridiculously disproportionate rate. There's an awful lot of idle land within Dublin that could be used for housing. We need some economic incentives to make sure it's used rather than using greenfield sites ever further from the city."
Failure to introduce economic incentives would have stark consequences, he said. "Places like Edenderry, Dundalk and Carlow are becoming suburbs of Dublin, which is absurd. There is no way we can adequately serve people who come to work in Dublin from outlying counties with public transport. The car becomes their only option to get to work. When they reach the M50 they become part of Dublin's problem. We need better public transport and a higher density of housing."
What economic incentives can curb the cities' outward march? Increasingly, planning applications for new workplaces must be accompanied by mobility-management plans, to help cut the amount of time employees spend getting to work. To some extent mobility- management plans put the spotlight on employers, who must look to bikes, buses and trains before getting the go-ahead for a new workplace.
Yet there is no national policy on mobility-management plans. One local authority can restrict new companies to one parking space per three employees. A neighbouring authority could allow more parking spaces than employees.
National measures are required to make local policies consistent. The Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government, Martin Cullen, has already signalled the introduction of carbon taxes, which will increase petrol prices. By stopping further rises in transport emissions he hopes to contain Ireland's liability under the Kyoto Protocol. Raising the price of petrol will probably cut car use, but it will hit people who are locked in to long- distance commuting while neglecting to tackle the forces that stoked high carbon emissions in the first place.
Although necessary as part of a package of measures, a carbon tax is reactive, like rushing to the stable door after the horse has bolted. A parking tax is proactive: it shapes the locations chosen for new development.
How should a tax on company parking be structured? Ideally, it should be twofold. The company that provides the space should be charged an annual tax, to discourage construction, and the employee who uses it should pay benefit-in-kind tax, to charge for use.
There is a bigger picture. Increasingly, governments are using their revenue- raising powers to ensure that key resources are used sparingly, from air and water to landfill and road space. Taxes that suppress work, such as levies on income, are being reduced in response to more environmental taxation. At the core of this so-called green-tax shift is revenue neutrality: the environmentally friendly consumer should not face an overall tax increase. Unfortunately, new environmental levies are ending up as supplementary taxes. Perhaps Budget 2005 will offer a way out.
