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: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 27 2019, @12:31AM
Imagine it's a percentage. Imagine fuel prices drop. Imagine people driving more (and more to the point, companies using more trucking and less e.g. train freight), putting more wear on the roads, but you simultaneously have less funds for road repair.
It should certainly allow for inflation somehow, but I don't see that a percentage is a better way to do that than directly indexing it to inflation.