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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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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 28 2019, @01:03AM (3 children)
Oh, and I forgot to get back to dollars, but if you take a more realistic 3000-4000 ratio... $50k/year for a truck would be equivalent to $12-$17/year for a passenger car.
I don't know about other states, but I'm sure paying more than double that here in IN.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday February 28 2019, @02:43PM (2 children)
I meant to reply to this earlier. Your vehicle registration doesn't play into this discussion, really. You pay somewhere between 20 and fifty dollars for your registration, whereas 18-wheelers pay somewhere between 150 and 500. Probably more than that now, but there were times when I was routed through Illinois to renew plates on a tractor and/or a trailer. $100 a pop for the trailers, and I think it was $120 for the tractors. That was registration only, and did not contribute to highway taxes, fuel taxes, the bingo card fees, business tax, or anything else.
Similarly, someone mentioned the purchase price of a private vehicle being comparable the taxes paid by a big truck. Except, that has no bearing on the discussion at all. The purchase price of any vehicle goes to the manufacturer, the dealer, a bit of sales tax, and nothing to road use.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 28 2019, @07:09PM (1 child)
Not clear if you're saying it doesn't count because it goes into the general fund rather than specifically going to road upkeep, or just because it's a smaller number than commercial vehicles pay?
If the former, note that Indiana allows counties to levy a excise and wheel taxes that get paid along with, and in addition to, your state vehicle registration fee, specifically to cover road upkeep. (In my county, this is an extra $25/year for passenger cars.) Besides, fuel taxes and the like often go into the general fund as well -- if that's the criteria for exclusion, it becomes impossible to have a meaningful discussion of whether any class of vehicles pays "their share", since no matter how much anyone pays, the politicians can (and too often do) spend it on other stuff and leave the roads unrepaired.
If the latter, well, what I'm seeing is, tractor-trailers pay 10x as much, while doing 1000+x the road damage. So add that tiny $500 into your $50000 figure you mention, and it's still significantly less than passenger cars are paying in proportion to road wear.
But even disregarding registration/excise/wheel taxes entirely, look at just the gas tax. Indiana's state gas tax is 29 cents/gallon. At 30 mpg and 15k/year, that's 500 gallons per year, or $145. (We additionally pay normal sales tax on gasoline, but I'll ignore that because I know most states don't.) The state taxes diesel (and other non-gasoline fuels) at 48 cents/gallon, so combining the increased per-gallon with increased fuel consumption, of, say, 4mpg, a tractor-trailer might be paying 12 cents/mile in fuel tax vs 1 cent/mile for our passenger vehicle. Again, paying ~ten times as much, but doing thousands of times the road wear.
Same story for tolls -- tolls on I80 are $11.10 end-to-end for passenger vehicles, and up to $130.80 for 7+ axles. Once again, it looks like tractor-trailers are doing multiple orders of magnitude more road wear, and only paying one order of magnitude more.
I'm open to being convinced that there's really some hidden subsidy for cars, or some tax I'm not understanding for commercial trucking. But so far, the numbers just don't seem to be adding up.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday March 01 2019, @12:42AM
Go with the former. All taxes, fees, etc, had some intended use when they were passed by the legislature. To my knowledge, no registration fees were ever intended for highway maintenance. Those monies were intended for other things. Fuel tax, highway use tax, mileage tax, etc were all intended for infrastructure upkeep. All of that is a generalization, I suppose, and I probably shouldn't have brought it in here.
I've not heard of that wheel tax - it would definitely count in this discussion.
But, we're kind of distracted here, because politicians don't use our money for it's intended purpose, often as not.
I'll restate my argument against that 9600 times as much damage, for clarity. I found that number in the PDF that was offered. That PDF was published in 1978, and it very specifically discusses overweight trucks. It discusses trucks in one instance that are routinely 30,000 pounds overweight. It also discusses the individual states failing to enforce federal laws, both on federally funded roads, as well as state funded roads. In the context of the discussion in that PDF, I can, and do, believe that some trucks in that era were probably causing that much damage to the infrastructure.
There is no fault with the concept that heavier vehicles cause more damage than lighter vehicles. The Federal DOT has a rather complex formula for determining permissible weights on the axles, as well as gross weights. Those trucks that are operated legally, and conform to federal guidelines are certainly causing hundreds of times as much damage as the typical privately owned vehicle, and maybe even a thousand times. But, that almost ten thousand times as much damage is out of the question. It's an obsolete number from a bygone era.
Long story short, I've argued primarily against that high shock-value number, which is simply not true.
I still believe that trucks pay their fair share, but you have made a case for re-examining that idea. Maybe they don't pay their full fair share. If you or I were to make the effort to find out, I'm still certain that it's pretty close to fair. That was what the federal government was shooting for when they imposed the current weight limits and taxing scheme, after all.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.