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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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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Woman on Street: Sir, you are drunk; very, very drunk.
Winston Churchill: Madame, you are ugly; very, very ugly.
I shall be sober in the morning.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday February 26 2019, @05:00PM (5 children)
Yes, I rant about privacy. But, the fact is, they're watching us anyway - might as well make some use out of it.
Actually, though, it isn't necessary to log every mile you travel, and report every mile to the gubbermint. The vehicle has multiple onboard computers anyway. Give them the software to work this stuff out. The only detail necessary in your report to the state looks about like this:
Alabama: 2356 miles
Alaska: 0
Arizona 0
Arkansas 780 miles
California 0
Colorado 0
Connecticut 0
Delaware 0
Florida 9128 miles
Georgia 10575 miles
etc and so forth
Trucking companies make a similar report, but the numbers are much, MUCH bigger. I've never heard of any of the states auditing a trucking company, trying to get an extra thousand miles worth of taxes out of them. It's pretty damned tough to chase down those last few miles! Set up the software, then trust it to do the job properly.
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Tuesday February 26 2019, @07:41PM
The weigh stations that trucks have to drive through record the DOT numbers of commercial vehicles, so states have first pass rough data on it.
With electronic driving records, trucking companies already have high quality miles per vehicle/driver/state.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 26 2019, @11:25PM (3 children)
That makes sense, but instead of recording mileage, which is only a mediocre proxy for road wear, the car should record kilowatt hours. The amount of energy a car uses to move is a good proxy for road wear.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 27 2019, @12:23AM (2 children)
Bullshit.
The only deficiency of mileage is that it doesn't include vehicle weight, which is by far the biggest factor in road wear. And at least for cars and light trucks, this is trivially accounted for by considering the vehicle's weight from the registration database. (For commercial trucks, on the other hand, the actual vehicle weight may vary a factor of two or more depending on loading.)
Power usage isn't an improvement, as it has a lot more to do with acceleration habits and traffic anticipation than with vehicle weight, and these have no significant relation to road wear.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 27 2019, @08:07AM (1 child)
Because energy is never about mass X velocity. so that would have nothing to do with . . . are you always this stupid, or only when you post on the intertubes?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 28 2019, @12:16AM
First, you need mass raised to the 4th power or so to reflect actual road wear, so "mass X velocity" won't cut it.
If we want to get pedantic, road wear is related to axle weight4, not mass, but since the current crop of EVs generally have 2 axles and more-or-less symmetric weight distributions, that's practically a constant factor; it's only worth worrying about the distinction when freight trucks start going electric in any kind of scale.
Pretty much:
So yeah, at least in the context of EV energy consumption, energy is never about "mass X velocity".
no u