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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.
TOO BAD YOU CAN'T BUY a voodoo globe so that you could make the earth spin
real fast and freak everybody out.
-- Jack Handey, The New Mexican, 1988.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 26 2019, @06:47PM (3 children)
I have an electric car in WA state -- bastards charge me an extra $100 every year for registration: https://apps.leg.wa.gov/rcw/default.aspx?cite=46.17.323 [wa.gov]
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Tuesday February 26 2019, @11:13PM (2 children)
The Bastards! Making you pay for you fair share of infrastructure maintenance! What kind of non-libertarian tyranny do you live in, anyway? May I suggest the Libertarian paradise of Somalia [youtube.com]? The answer to Socialism. And now you have cholera.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 27 2019, @07:15AM (1 child)
Is it really a fair share though? How many miles of gas is that equivalent to under the gas tax? What if the electric car owner drives 100,000 miles a year, or zero? No, a flat tax like that is nowhere near a "fair share."
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Wednesday February 27 2019, @07:41AM
Doesn't matter. The fact that you raise this question is proof positive that you are cheating on your taxes, and pose a classic case of the "free-rider" problem. So even though it will cost us more in resources than we gain in lost revenue, we will hunt you down, to make an example of you, for the sake of others and the system as a whole. You want taxes to be completely "fair"? Do you think than any human society has the ability to calculate that? No, they do not. So instead, we err on the side of overtaxing the rich, since they can afford it, and going after squeaky wheels such as yourself. We're coming for you capital gains, Chuck! And your falsified mileage! Expect us.