> The goal for the revamped funding system, which also includes a higher gas tax rate and lower baseline vehicle registration fees, is to make sure drivers contribute their fair share to the costs of maintaining the roads they use
The "fair share" most small cars - especially fuel efficiency focused designs that remove as much mass as possible - should be paying approximately $0. Road damage per-axel is proportional to the weight carried by the axel raised to the fourth power! A fully loaded 5 axel tractor trailer does thousands of times more damage than one of the small electric cars they are worried about taxing.
The "fair" solution where maintenance costs are paid in proportion to the actual sources of damage would be to ignore most carts entirely and raising the registration fees on the vehicle actually damaging the roads the heavy trucks. As vehicle weight grows, their responsibility for maintenance costs exponentially.
Does the equation not also depend on non-damage-related costs for roads? How much of the total cost of a road arises from resurfacing costs? If a large portion of the costs are unrelated to repairing damage (initial construction, drainage, cabling, signage, traffic management, monitoring, probably a host of others), then it could still make sense to charge cars nearly as much as trucks.
This. It's nuts to build infrastructure and then punish its use. Overuse or non-propertional damage should be punished, of course. Infrastructure costs should be divided by its users (or society as a whole) and then users should be encouraged to maximize utilisation.
Imagine someone would do this to bike lanes, railroads, or optical fiber. The facts that gasoline cars are a problem for the climate and that cars take up too much space to be generally available in dense cities have nothing to do with roads per se.
No - the use of gasoline does not impact the cost of the road. But it can be used to persuade people to use the bike lane next to it. People are amazingly sensitive to costs - check for instance tax benefits. As soon as a product is subsidized by means of a tax rule, people run as fast as they can to get it. Hybrid and now electric cars are a great example (at least in the Netherlands).
By having people pay by the mile instead of whether they own a car or now, usage is more evenly charged. You drive a lot? You pay a lot. Even nicer would be to add a charge to the gas prices: your car uses a lot? You pay a lot. But it seems that the gap between buying gas at the pump and riding your car is too wide: people will get a guzzling car regardless. But if you know that every mile you pay 10 cents..? I guess it will get people out of the car very, very quick...
But road usage by cars is not the problem, CO2 emissions is. By doing this kind of punishment-by-proxy the whole taxation becomes ideological (car too big, car too foreign) and loses legitimacy. Keep in mind that in a democracy you shouldn't aspire to force people to do "the right thing", you should aspire to create consensus. A high tax on gasoline is easy to understand and easy to argue for. Double payments, illogical taxation, and "nudging" just pisses people of into the arms of right-wing parties.
Well, not exponentially, it is still just a power law.
But I agree that taxes should be damage-based. Tax those lorries to hell, if they want lower taxes, they should buy one with more axles and more tires per axle.
Yes of course. But some will be more competitve by having less weigth-per-axle. So after one replacement-generation of trucks, roads will be in better shape because trucks are less prone to damage them on average. And in general, trucking goods needs to be more expensive anyways to make less pollution transport options like ships and trains more competitive.
Consumers can also be made whole by removing vehicle taxes on cars or subsidizing other modes of transport that consumers use from those trucking price increases.
> Road damage per-axel is proportional to the weight carried by the axel raised to the fourth power!
That's not true. But the truth is even worse than that. The effect is highly non-linear. Depending on type, composition, age and temperature, the road material require minimum load to become plastic. Below that critical load the surface can withstand wear and tear of practically infinite amount of trips (have you ever seen a road where the surface was rubbed away by passing cars?)
Of course, some aging processes continue regardless of whether cars are or are not using roads.
True, but roads decay even in the absence of use. So, there's a cost involved in just having the road available and in good shape; that cost should be shared by all users.
If registration fees for large trucks were increased it is likely that the costs would be passed on to the consumer. We would see higher shipping fees and potentially higher prices for goods at stores.
We can debate which we'd rather pay but one way or another the cost would come down to us.
Having the people in a position to reduce the damage be responsible for the cost means they can make sensible decisions. Right now, for example, it makes sense to ship something much farther so you can have a really cheap distribution center outside of town, even in cases where this is more expensive overall.
Wouldn't this be a good economic incentive to buy more locally? Since it sounds like currently shipping costs via trucking are ignoring this externality.
Currently the complete cost of shipping food includes road damage that is not priced into shipping but instead borne by all citizens. By making those responsible for road damage, pay for it, they have an economic incentive to stop the damage.
Not priced into shipping, but equally borne by all tax payers. If all tax payers benefit through transportation of food and other essentials, that’s not really an externality? The people paying are the ones who benefit?
Ah yes! My girlfriend did this move a few days ago and I thought of axles lol. I guess they also do them in dance. It looks like a complicated spin no?
Would also add there is an miles travelled does not equate to time on the road (highway vs local driving) and state funding has biases as well (highway vs local roads, urban vs rural infrastructure)
I'm not a transportation or tech expert, but the idea that detailing in law the protection of user data will somehow make it come true is absurd. This said, not sure what the alternative is.
From the article:
One challenge may be convincing drivers there’s a benefit to installing a mileage tracking system in their vehicle and easing any privacy concerns about the device creating a data trail showing where they’ve been. The state work group recommends giving users the option of using either a GPS or non-GPS tracking system and shoring up data protection laws to safeguard any location-based information, similar to an existing law that shields information on vehicles passing through tolls.
“Legislation passed to protect this data can be tailored to address when and how the information can be shared and used and can increase customer confidence that personal information is protected,” the interim report says. “Confidence in the protection of the data generated may enhance customer willingness to participate in the program.”
Jonathan Gifford, director of the Center for Transportation Public-Private Partnership Policy at George Mason University, said the privacy issue is “a live one” but he thinks it can be resolved by giving users options about how their mileage is tracked and what happens to their data.
“Some of the options out there do have a device that is plugged into your car’s data port and keeps track of when and where you drive but it doesn’t share that information,” he said. “It’s sort of a tracking device but it doesn’t share the data.”
Yeah, and they told us the contact-tracing databases would only be used for public health purposes. The only way to ensure privacy is to never collect the data.
"The Singapore Police Force (SPF) can obtain TraceTogether data for criminal investigations, said Minister of State for Home Affairs Desmond Tan in Parliament on Monday (Jan 4)"[1]
This was a reversal from earlier promises that it would only be used for contact tracing Covid19 exposures.
It's better than what happens in most of Europe where governments automatically track your vehicle's movements through cameras. At least you have a choice (for now).
Simple solution, take an odometer reading every year and use that, and accept the slop from not knowing how many miles were on restricted access highway vs dirt road vs suburban street.
This is probably the best solution since it's already illegal to tamper with odometer reading. Maybe enable people to declare long out-of-state trip mileage, like their thousand-mile road trip, so they aren't paying state tax on that.
In my town, when a few of us got rooftop solar, some homes reduced their electric bills significantly, in some cases, to less than zero, so the Light Dept said (publically in meetings) we weren't paying our fair share. The real issue was a threat of loss of revenue. It is fair to ask homes that pay nothing, always pay something, but the term "fair share" is inaccurate and emotive.
Why don't you fully cite what they said? The issue is that maintenance of the grid also has costs. So if everyone hovers on net zero(or even pumping electricity back to the grid), who pays the cost for maintaining the electric lines and the salaries of people who work on managing the grid? The grid will go down with no repairs. Money doesn't grow on trees.
That's what they mean by fair share, the homes are still connected to the grid, and can use it with their rooftop solar doesn't generate enough power, but they pay nothing or close to nothing when an electric line needs repair, their nonsolar neighbors pay it for them. I don't know if 'not paying the fair share' or 'freeloading' are the right terms, what would you call that situation? If the distribution fee is bothering people, why don't they disconnect the grid and pay nothing?
I don’t think the implication was they shouldn’t pay a fee, but that the term itself is loaded. An honest accounting would indicate the very few of us pay our fair share of anything
The general idea of charging road users partly in proportion to miles traveled makes a lot of sense. But why, every time this is proposed, do people talk about fancy tracking mechanisms? Why can't we just use odometers?
I mean, yes, the odometer cannot measure how much of your mileage is in Virginia versus other states, or how much is on what kinds of roads, but it is so much cheaper to implement that I would expect it to still work out much better?
I'm purely guessing here. But roads are owned by different government agencies: federal, state, county, municipal, HOAs, and private. And those different agencies might have different ideas on how they want funding. If you drive primarily on town streets, which you pay for through property taxes, your odometer won't know to charge you less.
This is based purely on my experience on trying to add bike lanes in my city. It was fairly easy to get it done on our sidestreets, the city owns those, but major streets are federal or state owned and will take years due to bureaucracy.
Big trucks use odometers to enforce driver regulations and there is a whole semi-hidden market for tools and fixes that disable the odometers, even electronic ones. Menaing, they are easy to interfere with.
I still agree with the other's posters that tracking is conveniently useful for other things.
This is like people who argue that tax fraud and money laundering justify banning cash to leave only trackable means of transaction. Tampering with an odometer is illegal and though some people will defraud that doesn't justify another step towards a surveillance state.
You need location info in addition to distance since roads and infrastructure are owned and maintained by various agencies. The solution could be to build upon EZPASS. Have the EZPass readers in every signboard or lamppost along the highways. They can read and record distance travelled along a particular highway so that revenue can be attributed to appropriate agency.
A lot of people in the NOVA area are commuting to DC/MD and vice versa. It seems like you’d need to be able to fairly exclude resident out of state driving for the proposal to be viable?
Having your odometer connected costs ~$1k/y in depreciation, and people don't generally disconnect it. Do you think they'll start for the opportunity to save an additional $100/y?
Older cars don't depreciate as much. Mine are pretty much done depreciating. I also understand that it is possible to flash the ECU on some newer cars to change the mileage.
I just checked and according to the NHTSA cars over ten years old aren't even required to have a functional odometer (you just have to disclose it when you sell it). I'm not sure how common odometer fraud is, or would be under your proposed law, but the bigger the incentive the more likely I think it would be to occur.
You are right though most people would comply with the law.
Driving to work is not a choice for a lot of people particularly lower class. Our cities our built around cars. As people move out of the city to save money, that makes driving even more necessary and makes public transit less of a viable option. This program relies on a very naive belief that people can control their amount of driving, but we don't control sprawl at an individual level, we don't control infrastructure. Who is this going to benefit but the bougie Tesla owners who work remotely anyway?
Whilst the initiative is good, in practice the real impact will be upon those who need a car due to location or health reasons. So their merge mileage will be just as impacted per mile as those who do excess mileage and gets down to those that can pay, pay for it.
Equally this takes into no account, how heavy the vechile is, or indeed how impacting enviromentally it is. It add's no incentive at all, and equally, a light small efficient vehicle will be less impacting upon road upkeep than a heavy HGV.
Now - what I feel is needed is a quota system in which you get a mileage quota and if you go over that, you pay per extra mile.
What are the impacts beyond this - well, this does lay down the foundation to make roads in effect virtual toll-roads and that may well for good or bad, may well incentive private roads now a consumer base has been more conditioned to paying for usage of a road.
When the world needs higher carbon taxes, policymakers want to sniff out the small glimmer of a carbon tax that currently exists. More fuel efficient vehicles is a good problem to have. It seems like a no brainer to keep raising the gas tax to further incentivize fuel efficiency.
Higher fuel taxes can be part of the solution in the short to medium term but will become less effective over time as the fleet gradually transitions to BEVs.
That was my first thought. I bet most in VA have EZPass. I am sure it's because they're scared shitless of losing the tax revenues, and want to collect on every road, which doesn't work well with the transponder approach.
The "fair share" most small cars - especially fuel efficiency focused designs that remove as much mass as possible - should be paying approximately $0. Road damage per-axel is proportional to the weight carried by the axel raised to the fourth power! A fully loaded 5 axel tractor trailer does thousands of times more damage than one of the small electric cars they are worried about taxing.
The "fair" solution where maintenance costs are paid in proportion to the actual sources of damage would be to ignore most carts entirely and raising the registration fees on the vehicle actually damaging the roads the heavy trucks. As vehicle weight grows, their responsibility for maintenance costs exponentially.