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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday February 26 2019, @02:36PM   Printer-friendly
from the exceedingly-crumbly dept.

Phys.org:

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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  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday February 26 2019, @04:17PM (2 children)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Tuesday February 26 2019, @04:17PM (#807007)

    Some countries tax tires to pay for roads - not saying that's a good idea, but it is one...

    The fuel tax in the US doesn't even completely pay for maintenance of the existing road network, much less its expansion or other un-recovered costs of vehicle use such as: pollution, direct health risks due to traumatic injury, simple waste of time/life spend sitting in metal boxes for un-necessary travel.

    The highway system in the US is, in addition to an essential cog in the economic engine, one giant taxpayer funded amusement park. People love getting in their cars and going places for any reason or no reason at all. There are real costs associated with this, and not all of them are currently being borne by the people choosing to do the driving.

    I hope we continue to be a wealthy enough society to provide such frivolous amusement with taxpayer cost-assistance.

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  • (Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday February 26 2019, @11:27PM (1 child)

    by bzipitidoo (4388) on Tuesday February 26 2019, @11:27PM (#807332) Journal

    Yeah, the federal tax on gasoline has been stuck at 18.4 cents per gallon since the mid 1990s. Every other such tax I know of is a percentage, but somehow that one is a fixed amount. Inflation has reduced the purchasing power of those tax moneys by over 50%. The setup is an outrageous giveaway to Big Oil.

    Yes, Americans like to drive. One thing that struck me last time I visited Canada was how much less road there was. Texas cities have gone big into roads. Lots of limited access highways. and new massive, stacked interchanges for them, with much reworking to cut down on traffic weaving. It's quite the stunning display of wealth. Meanwhile, Canadian cities will have intersections with stoplights where Texas cities would have an interchange. The freaking Trans Canada highway gets the old stoplight treatment even in major cities.

    However, Texas has gotten sneaky about funding all those roads. It's not just that they're going for tolls, it's the underhanded manner they're going about it. Can't turn an existing, free public highway into a toll road. So, they built these "service" roads on the outer edges of the new limited access toll highway, and designated those as the official state highway. There are places where there are 14 lanes of road. 4 each direction for the toll road in the middle, and 3 more each direction for the free state highway. They also made a shabby start with the collection system. Photograph your license plate, and bill you later. One of the early problems was they wouldn't give people much time to pay. You might get a notice of a bill for the toll road on or after the day it was due, with a warning of a big penalty if you were late.

    Anyway, the headline is disingenuous. It's not the fault of the electric car that there's going to be even less money for roads. It's the fault of the revenue system.

    • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 27 2019, @12:31AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 27 2019, @12:31AM (#807375)

      Every other such tax I know of is a percentage, but somehow that one is a fixed amount.

      Imagine it's a percentage. Imagine fuel prices drop. Imagine people driving more (and more to the point, companies using more trucking and less e.g. train freight), putting more wear on the roads, but you simultaneously have less funds for road repair.

      It should certainly allow for inflation somehow, but I don't see that a percentage is a better way to do that than directly indexing it to inflation.