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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: 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.
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