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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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Grelb's Reminder:
Eighty percent of all people consider themselves to be above
average drivers.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday February 26 2019, @04:25PM
In the US road maintenance costs are split somewhat evenly between Federal, State, County and City. I worked at the State level DOT for a short while, but long enough to experience the ongoing constant negotiation between the levels of government about who takes responsibility for maintenance of which roads.
In general, you'll see it in the highway names: Intrastate/US highways are _usually_ federally maintained, State Road X would _usually_ be state maintained, and the local feeders, neighborhood streets, etc. are handled by their respective county or city.
In specific, they horse trade responsibility for roadway miles back and forth between the levels - for instance when a City wants to more than basic improvement on a State road, they might exchange responsibility for that portion of that road for an equivalent number of road miles that they would otherwise be responsible for. That's about the simplest of examples, politics is rarely that simple.
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