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How Electric Cars Could Make America's Crumbling Roads Even Worse

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

Phoenix666 writes:

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 Wednesday February 27 2019, @02:01AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 27 2019, @02:01AM (#807422)

    except road wear per vehicle is by miles driven. They could have a fudge factor by vehicle (going up by power of 4 by gross vwhicle weight), since road wear (aka road usage) goes up by that factor.

    The fuel tax is a crude proxy for road usage. Miles driven per some factor of gross vehicle weight would be much better than gas tax.

    Bigger vehicles tend to use more fuel, and also contribute more to road wear.

    now cue all the SUV and pickup truck crybabies and other edge cases... suck it up, buttercups.

    At least in some states or areas, there is already an annual or semi-annual vehicle inspection infrastructure in place. No need to over-complicate it like Oregon was proposing to do (obd-II dongles with GPS that phone home periodically). Of course it'll piss everyone off for various reasons.