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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday February 26 2019, @02:36PM   Printer-friendly
from the exceedingly-crumbly dept.

Phys.org:

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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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 26 2019, @09:06PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 26 2019, @09:06PM (#807261)

    No, tire wear is not a simple function of mileage -- I posted above on this, copying here as well:

    Tire wear is a bad metric, very slight changes in driving style can make huge differences in wear. My SO accelerates moderately while unwinding the steering wheel after a city corner, this is a common behavior. I wait until I'm nearly straightened out before accelerating moderately. I also lift the throttle when I see a red light ahead, coast down and minimize braking. I get nearly twice the tire mileage that she gets. I adjusted my driving style at some point in my middle age after working with tire experts at a couple of different tire manufacturers.

    It's the combined turning and accelerating that makes all the difference to the front(drive) tires. But it's hard to see that this would have any appreciable effect on wearing out the roads faster?