Establishment of a car sharing ecosystem based on tax incentives that put commuters with company cars into contact with other types of commuters, an idea suggested by Benjamin (Limal)
The idea is to make a strength of what is regarded by many as an aberration of the Belgian tax system, namely the company car.
The basic premise is that company cars are generally more recent and therefore less polluting than the rest of the car base and that in most case these cars are simply used primarily for commuting during peak hours.
The question which arises becomes: “Rather than combating this system, is it possible to transpose it into something which will encourage car sharing in this type of vehicle” instead of using personal cars which are in principle more polluting?
Since a tax system already exists to assess and tax the benefit in kind provided by having this kind of vehicle, it is easy to imagine an ‘Uber-style’ solution to put passengers and drivers in contact with each other while quantifying the contribution of each of them to car decongestion (for example by recording the number of car-shared km per year).
In this model, a participating driver would accumulate “points” per passenger transported per km and should see the tax on their company car decrease accordingly. The participating passenger, in addition to not using their own car, should also benefit from a reduction in their road tax proportionately.
And so, fewer cars (especially the more polluting ones) on the roads at peak times, less traffic, fewer opportunity costs for businesses, lower infrastructure maintenance costs.... a gain for society as a whole.
The main obstacle to deploying and keeping this type of solution operational could be its cost. A partnership with private players of the Uber type could however be envisaged, with for example them making their technical platform available in exchange for an authorisation to operate in some other segments of the market.
