Don't tax fuel. Tax tires.
If you tax tires according to their load rating, and also perhaps
by their wear rating, you can properly tax vehicles on how much "road"
they are "using up."
There is a down side to this approach. Folks will not replace worn
out tires. They will also buy the very cheapest tires possible. Unsafe
incentive.
Bill D.
On 6/15/2022 11:13 AM, Mr. Sharkey via EV wrote:
By no means am I any sort of an expert on this, but I have been
following some of the efforts by Oregon to replace/augment/make more
equitable the road fuel tax structure, both for EV's and ICE's.
One pilot program was based on annual mileage. The shake-down at the
end of the program was that it was unfeasible due to several problems.
1) Reporting of mileage would be an honorary task for owners of older
cars that didn't have integrated GPS systems. Add-on GPS devices could
be purchased and installed, but the up-front costs didn't appeal to
potential participants. I believe that smart phones were proposed as a
solution, but... (see #2, below)
2) There was a lot of push-back from drivers who feared that the GPS
devices, either integrated in the car's navigation system, or the
add-on/phone app, would be used for tracking and potential privacy
invasion.
3) There was no reliable way that any GPS could accurately determine
if the car was being operated on a public highway or private property.
Obviously, if you are racking up miles on Interstate 5, that's beyond
question, but what about those fractions of miles that add up off the
public streets? My driveway is 1/3 mile long, am I going to have to
apply for an exemption for the .6 miles that I drive on my own
property each time I go to town?
4) The state doesn't necessarily get 100% of road fuel tax dollars.
Some of it goes to the counties where the fuel was purchased, and
there are city municipalities that add a local fuel tax on top of the
fed and state taxes. The GPS can give a rough picture of where you did
your driving, but when it comes down to fractions of a cent times
multi-millions of miles, accuracy is demanded. Cities that enjoy a tax
base generated by gas purchase would be losing some of that revenue to
out-of-town use of the same fuel purchase.
5) The program did nothing to tax itinerant users of roads, tourists,
truckers, etc. who don't report mileage to OR. At least the current
system catches some of them at a fuel pump before they cross out of
the borders.
The only halfway effective way to get road maintenance money out of
drivers, is to convert all major thoroughfares to toll roads. Imagine
how popular that would be. Still, if there was a drive-on scale at the
toll booth, weight could be factored into the toll for a more accurate
compensation of road wear. Add detectors for studded tires, and they
might be able to make enough easy money to leave us poor EV'sters alone.
Overall, anything much beyond an at-the-pump, per-gallon-fee will be
creating a storm of additional accounting and record keeping. My
electric bicycle looks better al the time.
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