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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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But what can you do with it?
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 26 2019, @08:31PM (2 children)
Tire tax. Each tire has specific characteristics, and it is know how much tires wear with general use.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 26 2019, @08:49PM (1 child)
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?
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Wednesday February 27 2019, @07:51AM
Alert! AC claiming SO! Alert!!! Obviously not correct. Disregard all comment. Besides, sounds like he is a terrible driver, and deserved to be taxed for the excessive tire wear his bad driving causes? Maybe we need a tax on Break Pads*, so that those who use their brakes more often, due to bad driving habits, could pay for the roads for the rest of us! Hooray!
And they do have an appreciable effect on the roads, when I plow their sorry asses and excuses for vehicles into the blood pavement because they pulled some stupid stunt like accelerating before being lined out. Sorry about your SO, but they really, really, needed to go.
(*Pads that break, when you brake. Then there are those than which they're breaking and not signalling turins and florins in the rigamarrole of the spelling of the English, when, one dare not call it a "language", really. )