Bill on Radio 2 in a minute (12:07 ish)

Vehicle Excise Duty, or that which motorists refer to as car tax (there is no such thing). It is by far and away my favourite petard upon which I like to hoist uppity Daily Mail reading drivers.

1) VED never covered the full cost of road building and maintenance. If you disregarded the whole cost of running the DVLA and the issue of centralised budgets, the capital raised from this would only ever have covered 2/3 of the road budgets (including motorways which we aren't even allowed on). This would mean that if you aren't a car owner (which many cyclists are) then motorists would in effect owe us money for subsidising them.

2) Bicycles are responsible for less than 1/10000th of the degredation of the road surface. Therefore in comparison to an SUV a bicycle should be considered liable for precisely 4.5p (others would be lower). However, as the majority of new roads are unsuitable for bicycles and the majority of restorative maintenance doesn't focus the first 1.5m from the kerb where cyclists most commonly ride, this should reasonably be assessed at 0.5p.

3) And this by far and away my favourite. Currently, VED for vehicles registered from 2001 is assessed on their CO2 emmissions per kilometre. As bicycles emit less than 100g CO2/km they would be levied in band A which pays no VED. Therefore you can reasonably claim that you pay your share of VED as a road user.

I would willingly pay £15 a year not to have to explain that to a bloke who has just nearly run me over as long as I get a tax disc - i can stick it in my spokes and i'll be cool too