tax per mile

Income tax, sales tax, bonds etc. You notice that road projects have signs showing 90% by Federal government. How many bond issues relate to roads and bridges.

Those driving high mileage cars are saving taxpayers trillions and should be encouraged. They are paying taxes on whatever energy they use.

 

Very interesting proposal.
I agree - tire wear is closely associated with road wear.
Lower speeds ,gently braking, lighter vehicles cause less tire and road wear.

However, pot holes/uneven road conditions OR no roads at all (farming equipment tires, certain types of construction vehicle tires, ATV tires) can also cause higher tire wear.
The load that a tire is handling also deterimines how fast the tire tread and the road surface will wear out. Bicycle tires create very little wear on the road compared to an 18 wheeler's tractor trailer tires.

Roads also wear out because of road salt applied to melt ice off the road and the sand they put down to provide more road grip when there is snow on the road. Tire chains used to grip the road when there snow and ice on the road also can tear up the road surfaces too.

Eventually bridges rust and the concrete crumbles.

 

Recently Maryland's ICC (MD-200) is having problems collecting the electronically money via EZ-Pass. It's not yet perfected - the electronic toll collection system still has some glitches/gremlins.

 

Apparently registration based, taxing in lieu of gas taxes will start in three weeks in Washington State:

Source: Electric-car owners in Wash. face $100 annual fee |
KING5.com Seattle

The article is dated Dec. 24, 2012 . . . 'lump of coal' everyone.

The article claims "It costs the average motorist, driving roughly 12,000 miles in a vehicle that gets 23 MPG, about $200 a year." This is a problem because it means the 'road usage' tax is not related to the actual usage. It is going to be hard for a typical EV driver to get 12,000 miles in a year when their cars are somewhat range limited. Also, it begs the question of the Plug-Ins, especially those with larger capacity traction batteries.


Bob Wilson

 

Any monpoly has a risk of corruption and graft.
Restricting, regulating, and/or checking power is the only solution.
It's like the old saying goes,
Power corrupts - Absolute Power corrupts absolutely.

 

I agree.

No only are BEV low mileage vehicles because of their range limitation but there are enough of them to create a meaningful tax base. The equity argument is petty (motor vehicle) class warfare. %\
Stuff like that are a distraction (red herring) to addressing and finding a solution to the real problem - funding road maintenance and construction.

 

Bob you're usually pretty quick to do the math on such issues - but if you divide 365 days by a 12,000 mile driving year, that averages out to a measily17-ish mile 'one-way'
trip. You could have more than a 50% diminished battery capacity and still manage to handle little trips like that.

SGH-I717R ? 2

 

They planned to do this in the Netherlands a few years back, up to 0.20$ per mile iirc but the fear was the gasprices (close to 10$ a gallon) would stay the same and the roadtax would not be cut entirely either (can be over 5000$ a year for a big diesel SUV, 2500$ for my diesel Volvo and my Prius is still taxfree but will be $500 or more as of 2014 (do not know exactly how much yet)).

So it was abandoned. Pity as I wanted to buy stock in one of the companies in the running for manufacturing the electronical equipment for tracking all 8 million cars in NL (GPS based continuous tracking system). (Cost: 500-1000$ PER CAR...as long as this is more than 100$ per car, we shouldn't even be considering this, as these billions (tens of billions for the US) are going to private companies, not the government...so they have to be payed yet do not contribute towards the goal we are all trying to achieve!)

This always makes me giggle. We pay more than 5$ a gallon just in tax. And we pay roadtax regardless of whether we use the car or not. And we pay an extra government tax when buying a new car. (Nowadays it is CO2 dependant, but it used to be 42% besides the regular 19% we put on everything apart from food, buying a Mustang in the US for 30k (?) would probably mean at least another 30k in taxes to get it on the road here, hell even a Tesla Model S costs 130.000$ here instead of 100.000 in the US (and no incentives: you don't pay the extra-government-tax, and no roadtax for 5 years, that's all the incentive we get as a private person, buying it as a company is a different matter though! I'm considering founding a company just to be able to use those incentives!)
All in all we pay somewhere between 60 and 70% of our income to the taxman (income tax, duty, tax on goods, etc). But this does mean our healthcare is somewhat affordable (I cost the healthcare system probably 250.000$ in the last 2 years, but I pay a flat rate, the same as before I got ill), our roads are somewhere between good and excellent, and generally not suffering from a few niggles the US may have...

 

EV/PHV cost more to purchase, so some states make more money on taxes to begin with. In VA we pay extra property tax each year on a more expensive vehicle.

I would like to make a study in my area of the extra tax cost of owning a Hybrid, probably Camry Hybrid makes sense to study because an equivalent non hybrid version can be basis.

My thought is states do not have to subsidize clean cars. But don't charge us extra taxes over equivalent less-clean car.

 

You may want to re-read that chapter on capitalism. There are public goods including highways, police, and army that do not work well without some government control.

Even in my state where we are now building toll roads, funded by private foreign corporations, the state is involved in building, maintaining, regulating them, and policing them. There are no private roads of any important capacity that are purely capitalistic.

That depends on how you define conservative. Saudi Arabia seems much more conservative. I good capitalist should not necessarily go in for what is defined as conserative today, nor should they ignore that highways don't work in an unregulated free market without any government.

Absolutely something we can agree on.

 

Maybe I am biased by living in Maine, but we have ONE road big enough to be a viable commercial highway (and it is). All the rest would never be built or maintained if it required a for-profit corporation to do so. Ever.

I invite you to do the math for the street you live on. What would you need to charge per trip to run your road as a profit making venture?

 

Well the statement had nothing to do with highways (about capitalism)

But either way highways can be private just fine. We have all electronic toll collections in NC and they work fine - but the money goes to the state. No reason it can't be a capitalist private road - lots of states have them now.

Ideally you would pay for the road you drive on and have some cost based on tire use but we aren't going to get ideal.

Funny that it is a left coast state that is trying a new tax to raise ... $16,000 in revenue per year. I'm quite sure that more than that has been spent talking about it even if talk is cheap.

The policy is a huge plus for the Volt who gets away with the least tax per road use.

Taxing those that are really trying to help the environment and global energy balance is really assinine politics. But hey $100 is nothing in the grand scheme of things. Like someone else mentioned, we get that in vehicle property taxes per year here - which if I buy a Tesla will be far more than $100 more than my Civic anyway.

 

It makes us cry because if US had a $5 gallon gas tax we would be as energy efficient as Europe, use 50% less energy, require no oil imports, no $400B a year oil import trade deficit, a tax imposed by oil producers on US, we would not have needed to spend $14T on oil wars over the last 30 years, we would not have $14T in oil war debt, would be meeting our Kyoto global warming responsibilities and millions of dead and wounded soldiers and their families would not be crying over wasted lives. I'll take the giggles of the gas tax over the tears of lives and treasure lost due to a lack of a gas tax.

So do we.

So do we.

The smart targeted gas tax seems to be difference maker though, making Europe 50% more energy efficient with all the benefits.

 

Tire Tax ! Hello Mexico 4 radials all around please.

 

How about a brake pad tax?

 

Whoa!!! That will propel the Prius to the best seller list.

 

How about a politician tax. We could tax them at 120% of their salary.

 

I wouldn't mind a justifiable "infrastructure and social cost" based tax. To me, a surrogate measure would be vehicle weight and fuel purchased. Vehicle weight reflecys, to some degree, the highway maintenance burden imposed by the vehicle, and fuel purchased is a measure of the amount of driving done and emissions generated, reflecting the contribution to congestion and pollution. Some sort of first-moment calculation would be required to fairly take into account both factors. It's not unrealistic to imagine a future where very complex algorithms could be run in an on-board computer to come up with an exotic tax on what you drive, how you drive, why you drive, and where you drive. The civil libertarians will go nuts.

 

My thought is taxes are awful and stop looking for ways to increase them. The less taxes I pay to Gov the more I have to invest which creates jobs and expands the tax paying base.They the Gov have more than enough to pay for roads. They just have to learn to manage what they have better. No different than any other middle class family recently with the Great Recession.

My other thought is have a carbon tax. If you drive a Hybrid or a EV you pay no tax, you drive a gas guzzler or Diesel you pay taxes. Reward clean technology don't kill it before it can benefit all.

 

Why should hybrids and carbon-sourced EVs not also pay the carbon tax? They all should pay according to their fossil carbon use.

The reward for clean efficient technology is in paying less tax. The best reward will be for non-carbon-sourced EV.