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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?
-- ubiquitous cry from Linux-user partner
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Tuesday February 26 2019, @04:12PM (2 children)
Add a .10 cent tax to logs, require that all owners of electric vehicles burn one log per mile driven.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday February 26 2019, @04:29PM
As long as the logs are required to be beetle infested, sounds like a win-win.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday February 26 2019, @06:54PM
Can I use a lump of Clean Coal instead of a log?
The thing about landline phones is that they never get lost. No air tag necessary.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 26 2019, @05:00PM (2 children)
Have the car send gps logs to the government, while the driver files logs too. Government will check for discrepancies, and fine/jail the driver as appropriate.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday February 26 2019, @06:55PM (1 child)
Golly, I wish I would have included that in my idea posted above. :-)
The thing about landline phones is that they never get lost. No air tag necessary.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 26 2019, @07:25PM
You missed the part about having to duplicate the data filing / putting yourself out of compliance by omitting to include a drive / being safer just to overestimate.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 26 2019, @07:15PM
Spend less on wars.
(Score: 2) by PocketSizeSUn on Tuesday February 26 2019, @07:18PM
Your concern is noted and mostly considered trolling.
The federal gas tax is split between road, general transportation (mass transit/bus/rail) and deficit reduction (aka general fund).
https://www.kiplinger.com/article/spending/T063-C000-S001-a-brief-history-of-the-federal-gasoline-tax.html [kiplinger.com]
In most states the gas tax goes to the general fund . It is NOT dedicated to road construction and repair (that is almost always a bond appropriation bill where the city/state/fed uses bonds sales to fund the infrastructure spending).
While it was first sold to the public as a dedicated tax it did not remain one.
The days of dedicated taxes are always numbered ... and idle pool of money has way to much attraction to be spent on other "worthy" causes ...
At any rate bond programs do the job, so while build up a tax pool to pre-pay maintenance? Any pool of money will be repurposed, directly or indirectly, and spent on a cause which is frequently in direct opposition to the original promise.
(Score: 2) by mendax on Tuesday February 26 2019, @09:23PM
A national solution is needed because of all of the out-of-state cars on many states roads. For example, think of all the Virginia, Maryland. and Washington, DC-registered cars wandering around in the Washington, DC area on any given day. Then there are the roads in rural parts of many states that are frequented by out-of-state cars.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Wednesday February 27 2019, @01:23AM
Better!
Is there a semi-standard mechanism for reporting potholes in local streets/freeways? It seems that between inexpensive digital photography, ubiquitous connectivity, to-the-phi-and-rho-degree local street-level imaging, it would be simple to have a standard for reporting and voting on all the potholes on streets you drive down daily.