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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: 2) by Absolutely.Geek on Wednesday February 27 2019, @11:46PM
Road User Charges in New Zealand
We already charge RUC's for diesel vehicles in NZ; since diesel doesn't have the road tax in the pump price the tax is paid per kilometer driven. Different weight classes have different RUC values. I used to drive a diesel station wagon RUC was ~6.2c/km when purchasing in 20,000km lots (the admin fee is static so bigger purchases are better up to a point); this rate applies to all vehicles 3500kg and below.
Large trucks have much higher rates.
The problem is not difficult to solve. Charging per km traveled is much fairer then building the tax into something else. I have always thought we should remove the road tax from petrol and make all road tax via the RUC model; that way a hybrid driver pays the same tax / km as a V8 driver.
Don't trust the police or the government - Shihad: My mind's sedate.