I want to set aside the author's disdain and polemics for a second:
- The federal gas tax is low and unchanged. States have their own gas taxes in addition that do go up and have done so a lot in the last several decades.
- The current compromise is to collect it once at a federal level and split the proceeds with the states. This has problems, but it's better than having every state track individual mileage on public roads (ew).
- Gas tax goes towards more than just fixing road damage - it's pretty essential in funding public transit and road infrastructure in general.
- Obviously EVs currently account for a small fraction of road use right now, but they mostly drive on dense, urban infrastructure - the most expensive to build and maintain.
- As EVs inevitably grow in popularity, this will have to be solved eventually anyway.
There are probably a million things we could debate about with the proposed infrastructure bill. But Electek's increasingly toxic coverage of these topics is not doing EVs in general any favors.
> The current compromise is to collect it once at a federal level and split the proceeds with the states. This has problems, but it's better than having every state track individual mileage on public roads (ew).
“Has problems” is an interesting way to gloss over we’ve got an administration that has openly declared war on any state he didn’t win and will no doubt withhold funds from the states he doesn't like, the same ones that will be providing the vast majority of the revenue in question.
I literally cannot think of a worse way to enforce this than letting the federal government collect the tax and then distribute it to the states as they see fit.
> I literally cannot think of a worse way to enforce this than letting the federal government collect the tax and then distribute it to the states as they see fit.
I mean, this is more or less how it already works with all the federal department funding. The same administration wants to abolish the Department of Education which is guilty of the same thing. So no side is really being consistent in this particular area.
Stop with the “both sides are the same” nonsense. Red states got some of the largest funding in Biden’s stimulus package despite not voting for him.
The democrats have consistently tried to pass bills and funding for the needy regardless of political affiliation or state of residence. Trump is literally the only one trying to use the federal government to punish states that didn’t vote for him and his Republican colleagues have been happy to oblige.
> The federal gas tax is low and unchanged. States have their own gas taxes in addition that do go up and have done so a lot in the last several decades.
Why is this relevant? Aside from your “polemics”, I mean.
> Obviously EVs currently account for a small fraction of road use right now, but they mostly drive on dense, urban infrastructure - the most expensive to build and maintain.
I suppose if it’s a small fraction of that then this all makes perfect sense. What is the specific fraction they should be funding then, and why is the federal government the right group to collect it? Or are we just making excuses for politics we like?
> As EVs inevitably grow in popularity, this will have to be solved eventually anyway.
unfortunately 100% true. the “road” projects take roughly 7865x the time they take in any other country so roughly 98.56% of that collected money is skimmed
I don't want to set the author's disdain aside at all. It's 100% justified.
This is really just a tax on leaving the stone age.
Especially given that my nissan leaf weights a little more than 1/2 of what an escalade weighs. It's purely just another disincentive to electrify, brought to you by the burn baby burn lobby.
The US has become the seed state of global idiocracy.
Zeroing out the gas tax aside, the EV tax makes _some_ sense.
Gas taxes provide the revenue that help pay for road maintenance and the rest of the infrastructure that cars use. Gas taxes made sense -- the more you drive, the more you chip in to keep the road system going.
That infrastructure still needs to exist, and will still cost money to maintain -- but if fewer people are buying gas, then the funds will dry up, even as usage stays relatively the same.
Most of the states already have an EV tax. For instance, WA charges $225/yr for registering an EV. The issue is unlike gas tax, it’s not based on actual usage. And the flat fee they’re charging is way higher than the gas tax anyone driving a gas car with avg fuel consumption would pay for driving the national average of annual mileage.
I pulled some numbers and I get $239 for the average car and average use based on [1], [2], [3]. Using the same numbers the Federal part would be an additional $79. Do you have different numbers for Washington state? Like, do people drive less than 10,952 / year or have more efficient gas vehicles?
The math doesn’t work out very well for Washington, and I’m leaving out federal gas tax in the math below.
Washington has a gas tax of 55.6 cents per gallon. The tax on 405 gallons of gas in Washington is $225
Average mileage driven in US looks to be around 14,000 miles (plus or minus 500 miles), which means you’d need a car that averages 34.5 miles per gallon to pay less in gasoline tax than you’d pay in EV tax.
I drive around 5000 miles a year and still pay $225/year for my EV. However, Washington is moving to a mileage based system for EVs, hybrids, and high economy cars. They are just going to go by odometer readings, which is about the only way it will work in the USA.
Offhand, the maintenance costs are something similar to a scalar that is the square of a vehicle's weight.
Rather than indirectly taxing via fuel it would be more proper to do so by said maintenance scalar (weight based) and the distance driven as the inputs. Presumably paid at the time of registration renewal or at vehicle inspections.
That sounds like a lot of infra change to setup, so there should be plenty of planning and cutover time.
Sounds like it's a fairer system that would be harder to corrupt. You're right, it'll never be implemented because we're totally infested by regulatory capture.
It seems like the point isn't that it's intended to tax EVs, it's intended to shift the cost of road maintenance onto the vehicles that cause most of the road maintenance needs. Basically, it's aligning incentives so that firms bear the true cost of their actions.
If that results in taxing semi and heavy duty trucks, that may be a good thing. A lot of the wear & tear on highways comes from trucking; if it shifts a lot of that truck traffic to rail, it likely would significantly reduce the total cost to society.
It's not flawed logic though. If, say, a mile of highway costs $1 million and it needs some expensive repaving/reconstruction every 20 years, who should bear the cost?
The current model is roughly that all of society shoulders the cost roughly equally per person, regardless of how much they use that road or how much they drive in general. But clearly, some people derive more benefit from the road than others. The guy who doesn't drive derives 0 units of benefit. The gal who drives on it once a year derives 1 unit of benefit. The daily commuter gets 100 units of benefit. For the trucker moving $10M of goods a year on that road, their company gets 3000 units of benefit. So in a sense, the people who drive less are subsidizing the people who drive more - kind of like going to a fixed-price buffet dinner (people who eat more are subsidized by people who eat less).
Targeting more of the cost burden on heavy goods vehicles isn't an issue in my opinion. The thing is, that highway costs $1M no matter what. The only thing we can decide as a society is how to split that cost among the people. In the current way, I think the truck is underpriced and is doing more than its fair share of damage. If we change the prices so that car drivers pay less (not zero) and the truck driver pays more, that's okay. The truck's costs get passed onto consumer, such that people who buy more goods pay more road tax - exactly as intended.
Taking a step back, I think a lot of (not all) problems in society are a result of mispricing - often for political, special-interest, and/or "feel-good" reasons. When people pay less than the true cost, they over-consume. When people pay more than the true cost, they under-consume.
Done that way, personal vehicles are barely going to be a blip on maintenance, but keep in mind this also pays for new construction as well as other non-pavement traffic infrastructure.
The EV tax was only implemented because it's easy to implement both politically and practically, not because it's the best solution.
A better tax like others are suggesting based on mileage, weight, or usage (tolls) would have to apply to all road users, and require more rules and enforcement and be more difficult.
Are EVs that widespread in the US already that you're at the stage where you need to move from incentivising EV purchases to normalising their taxation?
This is how Congress works, for better or worse. Bills get proposed all the time by any one of its five hundred or so members, it doesn't mean either one will pass. That's democracy.
Asking them to maximise roadway capacity (that’s to say just one more lane bro) in order to solve congestion, at the explicit request to have other modes of transport minimised. “recover roadway capacity from other purposes to support driving” because that’ll solve congestion. Deeply, deeply unserious.
Thats nice but that doesnt work for vast majority of the United States. Cars are here to stay. People live in the suburbs you aren't going to mass migrate hundreds of millions of people.
I've been paying my EV tax for 1.5 years now in NZ. It's about 2x more than hybrid cars pay thru tax. Just dropped $800 for the next 10k km. Also some sort of registration rebate has been removed so another $100 per year.
Gas tax is politically toxic. But maybe an excise tax on oil profits? (If you could come up with a Constitutional way to tax only energy exports, that would be better still.)
The electorate is not so stupid that "it turns out people really don't want what I'm peddling so I'm just gonna reframe it and those idiots will be none the wiser" is likely to work.
Nevermind the fact that by moving it from gas to oil companies you're also then taxing "energy" more generally and it's gonna show up across the entire economy.
$130/yr? No matter how heavy the vehicle or how many miles you drive?
This is all so silly. Every other mode of publicly funded transportation infrastructure has direct user fees based on usage, why not roads? Some combination of highway tolls and a weight-based mileage fee.
But that would be an impossible sell because Americans have the impression that roads spring from the ground for free, since they're paid for indirectly with other taxes and figuring out how much of your personal tax bill goes to roads is nearly impossible.
> $130/yr? No matter how heavy the vehicle or how many miles you drive?
It could be worse. In the "Big Beautiful Bill" they originally had a $250/yr EV tax in it, which then got bumped up to $500 by a Representative who is/was a car dealer owner, before finally being removed because they decided it would be too much effort to make the states collect it for them.
Some people don't want the government keeping track of what they're doing, unless the government has reason to believe they're doing something illegal. This sentiment is so strong to Americans that it is expressly stated as a reason for rebelling against British rule. Taxing consumables allows per-distance taxing without the tracking that comes from toll roads or mileage tracking.
Also, lots of publicly funded transportation infrastructure fees don't closely track usage. Many popular public transit systems charge a single fee for unlimited continuous usage or charge per day/month. There's other weird quirks, for example when going the San Francisco Bay area, I always plan my stops in a clockwise direction, because then I don't have to pay bridge tolls when traveling in that direction (north and east), but would in the opposite direction (south and west).
I do think that a lot of people think that public roads are "free" and cost nothing to build and maintain. It is really hard to make people think about where the labor, materials, and funding come from.
Really this shows that the operators of 18-wheelers should be paying a lot more. Looks like diesel tax is 20-30% higher, not proportional to the thousands of times more damage the 4th power law implies. (A half-full 18 wheeler is about 40,000 pounds so, let's say 10x the weight of a passenger car).
Gas has a nice linear relationship with road usage. (Farms can currently buy tax exempt gas and diesel explicitly for this reason).
A lot of states have experimented with mileage-based tracking for EVs but there is no realistic way to do it that's not super fiddly or privacy invasive.
Couldn't states take an odometer reading at tag renewal time and charge based on distance traveled? It wouldn't perfectly capture usage of in-state roads, but it should be close enough on average, it reuses existing mechanisms, and it doesn't require any sort of location tracking.
No, I mean just charge based on the odometer reading. Don't offer exemptions. The state where the car is registered collects the tax for every mile driven. It would lead to some mistakes in the small scale (what if I live in northern Oregon but do most of my driving in southern Washington, or vice versa?) but it seems like a serviceable alternative for the macro-scale problem of how states can replace the funding from gas taxes. And it does so without the expense or privacy invasions of schemes like automatic plate tracking or in-car GPS tracking.
I think the biggest problem is that EVs and hybrids travel less total miles on the road due to their nature, so it should be an odometer based price based on actual usage not a punitive high dollar amount compared to a gas vehicle.
> travel less total miles on the road due to their nature
Kinda opposite really. If I wasn't driving much I'd get a big ass gas guzzler for cheap rather than drop 50k on an EV. Driving long legs in a gas car is pain in the ass too, IDK how people do it.
It's difficult to take articles like this seriously when they use hyperbole like "...the most evil industry the planet has ever seen [oil]", never mind things like chattel slavery.
I don't own an EV and am sympathetic to the idea that other road users are far more damaging and thus should pay more, however, I would much prefer a flat tax over some insidious Federal tracking device that monitors how much I drive.
Expect more and more attacks on anything that challenges the status quo.
Great article from the Guardian.
The American epoch of oil is collapsing. What comes next could be ugly
>Democracies across the planet are now threatened by what might be called fossil fuel fascism – an extremist political movement that breaks laws, spreads lies and threatens violence in an increasingly desperate attempt to maintain markets for oil, gas and coal that would otherwise be replaced by cheaper renewables.
You would pay little to no taxes if you completely removed yourself from society and lived deep in the wilderness, but I but you aren't going to do that. I wonder why that is?
When it comes to any good or service, there are only two choices: the user pays, or other people pay. The status quo is that drivers pay a lot for roads through gasoline taxes and vehicle registration fees, but the rest of society (including non-drivers) pay through income taxes, sales taxes, and property taxes. Moreover, a lot of taxes paid for road construction/maintenance are not proportional to how much you drive; a driver doing double the miles in a year is paying less than twice of another driver.
Please explain your ideal scenario of who pays for roads. And if your answer is "someone else" (e.g. "taxes", "government", "corporations", "billionaires"), further explain why "someone else" can't use the same argument to make you pay.
> but the rest of society (including non-drivers) pay through income taxes, sales taxes, and property taxes.
The rest of society also pays for the transportation costs of consumer goods, which include diesel and gas taxes which end up funding roads. Every time you buy something that rode on a truck, a fraction of the price you pay is road taxes.
We also subsidize fossil fuels at around US$800 B/year direct, and much more than that indirect (wars, pollution, warming etc). A 100% fossil tax is what we need to kick that habit.
I want to set aside the author's disdain and polemics for a second:
- The federal gas tax is low and unchanged. States have their own gas taxes in addition that do go up and have done so a lot in the last several decades.
- The current compromise is to collect it once at a federal level and split the proceeds with the states. This has problems, but it's better than having every state track individual mileage on public roads (ew).
- Gas tax goes towards more than just fixing road damage - it's pretty essential in funding public transit and road infrastructure in general.
- Obviously EVs currently account for a small fraction of road use right now, but they mostly drive on dense, urban infrastructure - the most expensive to build and maintain.
- As EVs inevitably grow in popularity, this will have to be solved eventually anyway.
There are probably a million things we could debate about with the proposed infrastructure bill. But Electek's increasingly toxic coverage of these topics is not doing EVs in general any favors.
> The current compromise is to collect it once at a federal level and split the proceeds with the states. This has problems, but it's better than having every state track individual mileage on public roads (ew).
“Has problems” is an interesting way to gloss over we’ve got an administration that has openly declared war on any state he didn’t win and will no doubt withhold funds from the states he doesn't like, the same ones that will be providing the vast majority of the revenue in question.
I literally cannot think of a worse way to enforce this than letting the federal government collect the tax and then distribute it to the states as they see fit.
> I literally cannot think of a worse way to enforce this than letting the federal government collect the tax and then distribute it to the states as they see fit.
I mean, this is more or less how it already works with all the federal department funding. The same administration wants to abolish the Department of Education which is guilty of the same thing. So no side is really being consistent in this particular area.
Stop with the “both sides are the same” nonsense. Red states got some of the largest funding in Biden’s stimulus package despite not voting for him.
The democrats have consistently tried to pass bills and funding for the needy regardless of political affiliation or state of residence. Trump is literally the only one trying to use the federal government to punish states that didn’t vote for him and his Republican colleagues have been happy to oblige.
> The federal gas tax is low and unchanged. States have their own gas taxes in addition that do go up and have done so a lot in the last several decades.
Why is this relevant? Aside from your “polemics”, I mean.
> Obviously EVs currently account for a small fraction of road use right now, but they mostly drive on dense, urban infrastructure - the most expensive to build and maintain.
I suppose if it’s a small fraction of that then this all makes perfect sense. What is the specific fraction they should be funding then, and why is the federal government the right group to collect it? Or are we just making excuses for politics we like?
> As EVs inevitably grow in popularity, this will have to be solved eventually anyway.
So now is a good time? Why?
unfortunately 100% true. the “road” projects take roughly 7865x the time they take in any other country so roughly 98.56% of that collected money is skimmed
I don't want to set the author's disdain aside at all. It's 100% justified.
This is really just a tax on leaving the stone age.
Especially given that my nissan leaf weights a little more than 1/2 of what an escalade weighs. It's purely just another disincentive to electrify, brought to you by the burn baby burn lobby.
The US has become the seed state of global idiocracy.
Zeroing out the gas tax aside, the EV tax makes _some_ sense.
Gas taxes provide the revenue that help pay for road maintenance and the rest of the infrastructure that cars use. Gas taxes made sense -- the more you drive, the more you chip in to keep the road system going.
That infrastructure still needs to exist, and will still cost money to maintain -- but if fewer people are buying gas, then the funds will dry up, even as usage stays relatively the same.
Most of the states already have an EV tax. For instance, WA charges $225/yr for registering an EV. The issue is unlike gas tax, it’s not based on actual usage. And the flat fee they’re charging is way higher than the gas tax anyone driving a gas car with avg fuel consumption would pay for driving the national average of annual mileage.
I pulled some numbers and I get $239 for the average car and average use based on [1], [2], [3]. Using the same numbers the Federal part would be an additional $79. Do you have different numbers for Washington state? Like, do people drive less than 10,952 / year or have more efficient gas vehicles?
[1] WA gas tax $0.554 (Federal gas tax is an additional $0.184. California is $0.7092.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_taxes_in_the_United_State...
[2] Average fuel efficiency 25.4 mpg. https://gocarlife.com/average-gas-mileage-for-a-car/
[3] 10,952 average passenger + light duty miles driven per year. https://truedrivingcost.com/articles/how-many-miles-american...
The math doesn’t work out very well for Washington, and I’m leaving out federal gas tax in the math below.
Washington has a gas tax of 55.6 cents per gallon. The tax on 405 gallons of gas in Washington is $225
Average mileage driven in US looks to be around 14,000 miles (plus or minus 500 miles), which means you’d need a car that averages 34.5 miles per gallon to pay less in gasoline tax than you’d pay in EV tax.
I drive around 5000 miles a year and still pay $225/year for my EV. However, Washington is moving to a mileage based system for EVs, hybrids, and high economy cars. They are just going to go by odometer readings, which is about the only way it will work in the USA.
And they’re planning to charge 2.6 cents per mile, per https://wstc.wa.gov/studies-surveys/road-usage-charge/
So that’s $364 per year for 14k miles. Vs. the $225 currently paid as an electrification fee.
It’s capped at $225, at least during the pilot.
Do you know how they plan to get the odometer data? Thanks.
Some states require annual vehicle inspections.
Washington doesn't.
The honor system I think, Washington doesn’t require annual inspections.
Offhand, the maintenance costs are something similar to a scalar that is the square of a vehicle's weight.
Rather than indirectly taxing via fuel it would be more proper to do so by said maintenance scalar (weight based) and the distance driven as the inputs. Presumably paid at the time of registration renewal or at vehicle inspections.
That sounds like a lot of infra change to setup, so there should be plenty of planning and cutover time.
That shifts the costs onto shipping companies, a more concentrated and coordinated interest with better lobbyists than the general public.
Sounds like it's a fairer system that would be harder to corrupt. You're right, it'll never be implemented because we're totally infested by regulatory capture.
This unfortunately is flawed logic if it's intended to tax EV's as it would target semi trucks and heavy duty trucks more than EV's. https://ctr.utk.edu/electric-vehicles-damage-roads/
Why shouldn't the vehicles which do the most damage pay the most tax?
It seems like the point isn't that it's intended to tax EVs, it's intended to shift the cost of road maintenance onto the vehicles that cause most of the road maintenance needs. Basically, it's aligning incentives so that firms bear the true cost of their actions.
If that results in taxing semi and heavy duty trucks, that may be a good thing. A lot of the wear & tear on highways comes from trucking; if it shifts a lot of that truck traffic to rail, it likely would significantly reduce the total cost to society.
It's not flawed logic though. If, say, a mile of highway costs $1 million and it needs some expensive repaving/reconstruction every 20 years, who should bear the cost?
The current model is roughly that all of society shoulders the cost roughly equally per person, regardless of how much they use that road or how much they drive in general. But clearly, some people derive more benefit from the road than others. The guy who doesn't drive derives 0 units of benefit. The gal who drives on it once a year derives 1 unit of benefit. The daily commuter gets 100 units of benefit. For the trucker moving $10M of goods a year on that road, their company gets 3000 units of benefit. So in a sense, the people who drive less are subsidizing the people who drive more - kind of like going to a fixed-price buffet dinner (people who eat more are subsidized by people who eat less).
Targeting more of the cost burden on heavy goods vehicles isn't an issue in my opinion. The thing is, that highway costs $1M no matter what. The only thing we can decide as a society is how to split that cost among the people. In the current way, I think the truck is underpriced and is doing more than its fair share of damage. If we change the prices so that car drivers pay less (not zero) and the truck driver pays more, that's okay. The truck's costs get passed onto consumer, such that people who buy more goods pay more road tax - exactly as intended.
Taking a step back, I think a lot of (not all) problems in society are a result of mispricing - often for political, special-interest, and/or "feel-good" reasons. When people pay less than the true cost, they over-consume. When people pay more than the true cost, they under-consume.
Done that way, personal vehicles are barely going to be a blip on maintenance, but keep in mind this also pays for new construction as well as other non-pavement traffic infrastructure.
States already charge EV registration fees for lost gas tax revenue.
The EV tax was only implemented because it's easy to implement both politically and practically, not because it's the best solution.
A better tax like others are suggesting based on mileage, weight, or usage (tolls) would have to apply to all road users, and require more rules and enforcement and be more difficult.
Are EVs that widespread in the US already that you're at the stage where you need to move from incentivising EV purchases to normalising their taxation?
Yes, and they have been for a few years now. I don’t know of a state that doesn’t charge higher tab fees for EVs in 2026. Maybe Alaska?
No, but the oil companies don't want EVs, so Republicans don't want EVs.
Why not tax tires?
A disincentive to replace your tires? What could go wrong.
Can't save them all.
A deeply unserious country. What else can you say?
This is how Congress works, for better or worse. Bills get proposed all the time by any one of its five hundred or so members, it doesn't mean either one will pass. That's democracy.
That Duffy sent this letter to the governors: https://ops.fhwa.dot.gov/memorandum/Freedom_to_Drive_Initiat...
Asking them to maximise roadway capacity (that’s to say just one more lane bro) in order to solve congestion, at the explicit request to have other modes of transport minimised. “recover roadway capacity from other purposes to support driving” because that’ll solve congestion. Deeply, deeply unserious.
So to recap: we should pave the earth for gas cars, tax EVs into oblivion for the damage they do, and call it "freedom."
[flagged]
Hmm pretty sure this train I'm on right now is taking me home from work. Transit is such a failure that I haven't owned a car in 15 years...
Thats nice but that doesnt work for vast majority of the United States. Cars are here to stay. People live in the suburbs you aren't going to mass migrate hundreds of millions of people.
Both things can be true?
Let me guess: single, no children? Or a full-time stay-at-home spouse if more than 2 children?
Alternatively, not the US.
I've been paying my EV tax for 1.5 years now in NZ. It's about 2x more than hybrid cars pay thru tax. Just dropped $800 for the next 10k km. Also some sort of registration rebate has been removed so another $100 per year.
How much do gas cars pay in tax?
Gas tax is politically toxic. But maybe an excise tax on oil profits? (If you could come up with a Constitutional way to tax only energy exports, that would be better still.)
> If you could come up with a Constitutional way to tax only energy exports, that would be better still.
The only constitutional issue with taxing energy exports is gettin Congress to pass the law and POTUS to sign it.
> only constitutional issue with taxing energy exports
“No Tax or Duty shall be laid on Articles exported from any State” [1].
[1] https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/ Art. I § 9
I learned something today.
They can just outlaw exporting energy, but not tax it.
The electorate is not so stupid that "it turns out people really don't want what I'm peddling so I'm just gonna reframe it and those idiots will be none the wiser" is likely to work.
Nevermind the fact that by moving it from gas to oil companies you're also then taxing "energy" more generally and it's gonna show up across the entire economy.
> by moving it from gas to oil companies you're also then taxing "energy" more generally and it's gonna show up across the entire economy
Tougher to notice. And you can pitch it as a windfall tax.
You mean the same electorate that elected a nominally Republican candidate who campaigned on raising taxes, and then proceeded to do exactly that?
>The electorate is not so stupid..
Respectfully, they are.
$130/yr? No matter how heavy the vehicle or how many miles you drive?
This is all so silly. Every other mode of publicly funded transportation infrastructure has direct user fees based on usage, why not roads? Some combination of highway tolls and a weight-based mileage fee.
But that would be an impossible sell because Americans have the impression that roads spring from the ground for free, since they're paid for indirectly with other taxes and figuring out how much of your personal tax bill goes to roads is nearly impossible.
> $130/yr? No matter how heavy the vehicle or how many miles you drive?
It could be worse. In the "Big Beautiful Bill" they originally had a $250/yr EV tax in it, which then got bumped up to $500 by a Representative who is/was a car dealer owner, before finally being removed because they decided it would be too much effort to make the states collect it for them.
Some people don't want the government keeping track of what they're doing, unless the government has reason to believe they're doing something illegal. This sentiment is so strong to Americans that it is expressly stated as a reason for rebelling against British rule. Taxing consumables allows per-distance taxing without the tracking that comes from toll roads or mileage tracking.
Also, lots of publicly funded transportation infrastructure fees don't closely track usage. Many popular public transit systems charge a single fee for unlimited continuous usage or charge per day/month. There's other weird quirks, for example when going the San Francisco Bay area, I always plan my stops in a clockwise direction, because then I don't have to pay bridge tolls when traveling in that direction (north and east), but would in the opposite direction (south and west).
I agree with your comment a lot. My ideal for road pricing is something like a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_miles_traveled_tax multiplied by weight (maybe squared, due to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law of road damage).
I do think that a lot of people think that public roads are "free" and cost nothing to build and maintain. It is really hard to make people think about where the labor, materials, and funding come from.
Really this shows that the operators of 18-wheelers should be paying a lot more. Looks like diesel tax is 20-30% higher, not proportional to the thousands of times more damage the 4th power law implies. (A half-full 18 wheeler is about 40,000 pounds so, let's say 10x the weight of a passenger car).
Gas has a nice linear relationship with road usage. (Farms can currently buy tax exempt gas and diesel explicitly for this reason).
A lot of states have experimented with mileage-based tracking for EVs but there is no realistic way to do it that's not super fiddly or privacy invasive.
Couldn't states take an odometer reading at tag renewal time and charge based on distance traveled? It wouldn't perfectly capture usage of in-state roads, but it should be close enough on average, it reuses existing mechanisms, and it doesn't require any sort of location tracking.
Individuals would have to track miles out of state or off of public roads.
It sounds like it would be easy but states would open themselves up to endless nickel-and-diming or fraud.
No, I mean just charge based on the odometer reading. Don't offer exemptions. The state where the car is registered collects the tax for every mile driven. It would lead to some mistakes in the small scale (what if I live in northern Oregon but do most of my driving in southern Washington, or vice versa?) but it seems like a serviceable alternative for the macro-scale problem of how states can replace the funding from gas taxes. And it does so without the expense or privacy invasions of schemes like automatic plate tracking or in-car GPS tracking.
Washington state has a pilot to do this, it will be mandatory in a few years.
I think the biggest problem is that EVs and hybrids travel less total miles on the road due to their nature, so it should be an odometer based price based on actual usage not a punitive high dollar amount compared to a gas vehicle.
> travel less total miles on the road due to their nature
Kinda opposite really. If I wasn't driving much I'd get a big ass gas guzzler for cheap rather than drop 50k on an EV. Driving long legs in a gas car is pain in the ass too, IDK how people do it.
tax what you want less of...
(wonder where the bill really originates from?)
It's difficult to take articles like this seriously when they use hyperbole like "...the most evil industry the planet has ever seen [oil]", never mind things like chattel slavery.
I don't own an EV and am sympathetic to the idea that other road users are far more damaging and thus should pay more, however, I would much prefer a flat tax over some insidious Federal tracking device that monitors how much I drive.
Expect more and more attacks on anything that challenges the status quo.
Great article from the Guardian.
The American epoch of oil is collapsing. What comes next could be ugly
>Democracies across the planet are now threatened by what might be called fossil fuel fascism – an extremist political movement that breaks laws, spreads lies and threatens violence in an increasingly desperate attempt to maintain markets for oil, gas and coal that would otherwise be replaced by cheaper renewables.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/may/...
I'm getting really tired of every single attempt to be taxed into oblivion. Just leave me the hell alone
You would pay little to no taxes if you completely removed yourself from society and lived deep in the wilderness, but I but you aren't going to do that. I wonder why that is?
"If you don't like it, why don't you leave the country?" - common denominator who thinks he is not a pig.
When it comes to any good or service, there are only two choices: the user pays, or other people pay. The status quo is that drivers pay a lot for roads through gasoline taxes and vehicle registration fees, but the rest of society (including non-drivers) pay through income taxes, sales taxes, and property taxes. Moreover, a lot of taxes paid for road construction/maintenance are not proportional to how much you drive; a driver doing double the miles in a year is paying less than twice of another driver.
Please explain your ideal scenario of who pays for roads. And if your answer is "someone else" (e.g. "taxes", "government", "corporations", "billionaires"), further explain why "someone else" can't use the same argument to make you pay.
> but the rest of society (including non-drivers) pay through income taxes, sales taxes, and property taxes.
The rest of society also pays for the transportation costs of consumer goods, which include diesel and gas taxes which end up funding roads. Every time you buy something that rode on a truck, a fraction of the price you pay is road taxes.
I mean we're dealing with an administration that paid off windfarms billions to NOT build
but this endless war of choice is making everything in the world extra horrible
and Russia just got another pass to sell more oil at top dollar to fund their own war
We also subsidize fossil fuels at around US$800 B/year direct, and much more than that indirect (wars, pollution, warming etc). A 100% fossil tax is what we need to kick that habit.
>subsidize fossil fuels at around US$800 B/year direct
I would like to see a source for that. Usually this is from someone who thinks corporate taxes should be on gross revenue instead of profit.
I think corporations should pay import taxes on services, that would fix a lot of tax dodging
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