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?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 26 2019, @06:05PM (2 children)
In California electric cars will pay an additional fee. $100 a year. Starts in 2020.
Road Repair and Accountability Act of 2017 (SB1)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 26 2019, @07:04PM
It was upheld in a referendum also. [ballotpedia.org]. As a concerned CA voter, I looked into this and found that our road spending per mile was comparable to Utah's. Some conservatives were arguing that we spend too much, but I think the driver of our spending has more to do with challenging terrain than liberal government--we have Utah's mountains, snows, and fires and probably more mudslides. Those same sources were also advocating the idea that they wanted us to be closer to the bottom in per-mile spending rather than the top. When I looked into that, I found Mississippi. You generally don't want to be like MS. Sure enough, articles on MS roads are talking about crumbling bridges and such. That's a recipe for disaster in CA, so I believe I was quite rational in agreeing to keep this tax.
I'm quite happy to pay a surcharge and/or higher fuel tax on my vehicle rather than the proposed alternative, namely tracking us to get mileage data. Fuck that. I prefer privacy.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Wednesday February 27 2019, @01:25AM
Roads in the US get repaired? I thought they just got a bit of hardfill and tar shovelled into the bigger potholes and then signed off as all OK.