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To fix the potholes and crumbling roads, federal, state and local governments rely on fuel taxes, which raise more than US$80 billion a year and pay for around three-quarters of what the U.S. spends on building new roads and maintaining them.
I recently purchased an electric car, the Tesla Model 3. While swerving down a particularly rutted highway in New York, the economist in me began to wonder, what will happen to the roads as fewer and fewer cars run on gasoline? Who will pay to fix the streets?
Will toll roads become universal to bridge the funding gap?
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How Electric Cars Could Make America's Crumbling Roads Even Worse
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Anyone can make an omelet with eggs. The trick is to make one with none.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 26 2019, @03:14PM (1 child)
Around here, a lot of the roads are not being paid for, terrible condition. Partly it's our climate, many freeze-thaw cycles over the winter with temps averaging around freezing. Once there is a crack for water to get in, the roads will crack. Since this isn't very dependent on traffic, the cost could be spread over all road users--which is nearly everyone, so the general tax fund.
Back to user taxes -- if the tax is for the damage done, then trucks should pay the largest part by far. Road damage from weight goes as the 4th or 5th power of the weight. Bicycles don't damage roads, cars very little and trucks (overload in particular) do most of the damage.
(Score: 1) by Sulla on Tuesday February 26 2019, @04:32PM
State of Oregon has been looking into a GPS mileage tax to pay for road work.
http://www.myorego.org/ [myorego.org]
https://www.oregon.gov/das/OEA/Documents/2017report.pdf [oregon.gov]
Is a report they produce every two years about the state of the roads, who does the most damage, etc.
When i last looked back in 2015 they were talking about how there is essentially no difference in damage done by light trucks and by cars. Previously they lumped all vehicles less than 8,000lb together because they did the same amount of damage, they have raised that to 10,000lb because they found that the extra 2k didn't effect road damage enough to have a separate group. When the program first launched it was to get all the small fuel efficient cars that are doing just as much damage as a truck, but not paying nearly as much, to pay their share of the road repair costs.
Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam