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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: 2) by PocketSizeSUn on Tuesday February 26 2019, @07:18PM
Your concern is noted and mostly considered trolling.
The federal gas tax is split between road, general transportation (mass transit/bus/rail) and deficit reduction (aka general fund).
https://www.kiplinger.com/article/spending/T063-C000-S001-a-brief-history-of-the-federal-gasoline-tax.html [kiplinger.com]
In most states the gas tax goes to the general fund . It is NOT dedicated to road construction and repair (that is almost always a bond appropriation bill where the city/state/fed uses bonds sales to fund the infrastructure spending).
While it was first sold to the public as a dedicated tax it did not remain one.
The days of dedicated taxes are always numbered ... and idle pool of money has way to much attraction to be spent on other "worthy" causes ...
At any rate bond programs do the job, so while build up a tax pool to pre-pay maintenance? Any pool of money will be repurposed, directly or indirectly, and spent on a cause which is frequently in direct opposition to the original promise.