California exploring getting rid of the gas tax, replacing it with road charge program
California exploring getting rid of the gas tax, replacing it with road charge program
I know people will quickly balk at this because people tend to balk at new taxes, tax changes, and anything happening in California.
But it's a good idea. Driving electric should not get you out of paying for roads.
The only way out of paying for roads should be not using them. And that bumps up demand for better public transit, which does substantially more to combat climate change than everyone driving electric cars.
Something needs to change. When these massive EVs (Hummers, cybertrucks, etc...) are worse for the environment and roads than other vehicles they should be paying proportionally to the damage they cause.
It's crazy to me that somehow we're transitioning to EV but at the same time have found a way to make them more dangerous.
worse for the environment and roads than other vehicles they should be paying proportionally to the damage they cause.
Which means the trucking industry should be paying a lot more.
Are large EVs actually worse for the environment compared to an equivalent sized ICE vehicle? I find that hard to believe.
Tires on EVs wear down faster than ICE vehicles.
The EU has regulations on tires to control pollution.
Meanwhile, the is dismantling the EPA...
The EVs are heavier, which causes more road wear than a similarly sized ICE and they will also produce more tire wear pollution for the same reason. Overall, they'd still be better than the ICE comparison for the environment due to no tail pipe emissions but a smaller EV would obviously be better.
I was mistaken with how much co2 they produce but here's an article about it https://www.inverse.com/input/tech/gmc-hummer-ev-carbon-dioxide-emissions-electric-truck
they should be paying proportionally to the damage they cause
Good news, electricity is already taxed. Driving larger EVs already costs more in taxes than driving smaller, more efficient EVs.
I'm of the opinion that large heavy vehicles should pay more to use the roads than smaller light vehicles. Beyond the $20 to charge a large EV SUV. How much road tax comes from electricity? Pay for what you use ya know?
Yeah, but road wear is exponential. Driving a vehicle with twice the weight uses four times the public resources, but I don't think you want to tax electricity that high.
Electricity produced by solar panels is not taxed.
Most electricity is not used by EVs so there is no correlation to road maintenance. It's an inappropriate way to fund roads. It would make more sense to tax tires.
An electricity tax could be used to convince people to self generate their electricity but utility monopolies would lobby hard against it but it will never solve road funding.
The obvious thing to do is just base the cost on your insurance and the fee to vehicle registration. But lets be real, the weight of the vehicle has an exponential effect on road wear so they should just charge heavier vehicles a registration premium regardless of fuel type
For those who don't understand the the degree to which this matters, behold, the fourth power law of road stress:
There should simply be an annual fee based on vehicle weight and distance driven
Keep the vehicle in your garage and only drive a handful of times? Low fee, drive a monster truck thousands and thousands of miles? Large fee.
This also solves the problem of electric vehicles not paying towards road maintenance, as they are heavy and would wear the roads more than a standard vehicle that uses gas.
The problem is distance driven has a linear effect. The weight has an exponential effect. If you drive a monster truck 10 miles a year and you drive a shitty commuter that weighs 1/5 the amount 3,650 miles a year, the monster truck is gonna damage the road more. If the fee is anything but a 4 power exponent from weight and linear with distance then you're punishing miles driven more than they are contributing to road wear.
In fact the only time distance matters is if its 0 then why even bother licensing a vehicle heavy enough to be worth surcharging? If most people drive their vehicles more than 10 miles a year but less than 10000, you'd want the fees to scale with normal use cases rather than some fringe use cases that encourage people to own vehicles they never use.
Edit: The way to do it is probably surcharge people for the weight of the vehicle + the weight of the gas the vehicles use in a year.
Not obvious, there's tons of holes in that plan and I'll throw down a couple I thought of while I brush my teeth. I lived in California for years.
-Out of state plates are not included. Sooo many out of state vehicles
-This has an outsized impact on shipping and industry such as work vans, small business trucks (can be argued that it should be, but I'm not convinced that the cost should be borne by those areas vs the bajillion people that don't carpool to/from LA everyday)
-A heavy vehicle pays a premium at registration, but what if it's only driven a couple times a year? Vs a lighter vehicle that drives 40k miles in a year. Has to have some kind of use component to plan.
I'd argue that it's way more complicated than any sentence that starts with "the obvious thing to do..." Everyone wants a simple and fair solution buddy life is not that simple and California's traffic, transportation, road maintenance, and road based industry is about as complicated as it gets.
I'd argue that it's way more complicated than any sentence that starts with "the obvious thing to do..."
For every difficult problem there is a solution that is simple, easy, and wrong.
Does California require annual inspections? Here they record your mileage - I think it has some effect on allowable emissions. So we already have a way of collecting mileage
The fourth power law indicates that a heavier vehicle that is 5x heavier per axle does more damage to the road in one day than one day than a lighter vehicle (1x) would do in a year travelling the same route every day.
So no, its not disproportionate or unfair to fee vehicles by weight. Japanese kei trucks aren't even very big so there's market solutions that exists. Plus there's an argument to be made that if you're only using a truck once a year its more effecient to rent it than buy it.
As for simplicity, you're right no plan is going to easily be both fair and simple. Where I live there's weigh stations along the highway that weigh big trucks and these capture out of state trucks. I'm sure a registration fee can be collected there, too for out of state vehicles, even at a day rate. You can also offer parking fee discounts for registered vehicles.
If you boil down to "why do we care about this" generally the answers ARE easier to come up with.
I mean, out of state plates shouldn't matter much. The residents of the state should be paying for the road maintenance, not people from out of state.
So the total cost of the roads should be bared by the residents, and their fees should be high enough to account for the damage done from out of state vehicles
I say this Soley because our of state vehicles don't need to be in California, and they don't need Californian roads, so why should they pay for them?
The residents of the state benefit from them being there because they are delivering goods to be sold in California to Californians, or to travel and spend tourist dollars in California providing jobs to locals, etc.
Residents should pay for the roads because the roads benefit the residents by allowing out of state traffic. It shouldn't solely be a straight charge to every vehicle that uses the roads.
Agreed on the weird side affects.
My state charges an ev surcharge and since I do very little driving it costs more than the tax on what little gas I would use.
The problem with your example is you could read it as cars cause effectively zero wear on roads, compared to a truck
If you give people in California public transportation, they would use it almost as much as New York in a year.
San Francisco has something like four entirely separate public transport systems with all different rail gauges within IIRC a couple hundred meters of each other (cable cars, VTA, CalTrain, BART). That's before even getting to the road-based stuff, which includes electric trolleys, and water-based stuff
Oregon does all commercial vehicles based on weight-mile-axle taxes. More weight, more axles, more miles, all increase the tax burden proportionally. Then you buy PUC credited diesel with no state gas tax. Works fine and can be extended to electric vehicles fine.
The issue I'll take with it is the filing and monitoring system they'll try to make private citizens do, which options are limited to either direct government GPS tracking (fuckkkk no) or an inefficient bureaucratic hellhole of odometer pictures (will cost additional tens of millions to administer). The Oregon system works fine because commercial vehicles are fairly strictly regulated, but that will break down with the general public.
Does Oregon do annual inspections? Pretty sure odometer readings are part of that. And since that data is already reported to the state, they can take that and tax appropriately.
We have no annual inspections, only limited emissions tests inside two major metro areas.
I followed the link, then the link to the California Road charge web site. What I was looking for and didn't find in any place is: "How will the mileage be monitored and how will the fee be collected?" I think those are important questions before one could decide if this is a good plan.
I personally like the idea of taxing tires instead. Since the wear and tear on roads is in direct causation to weight, the faster a tire wears out (because of weight) the more damage to roads would be caused. This means that lighter cars, causing less damage, would replace their tires less frequently, meaning paying less tax.
However, large heavy trucks that do the most damage also would have to replace their tires more often and thereby shoulder more of the burden of road repair, which is appropriate because heavy vehicles are doing much more of the damage.
If a tire tax is to generate enough money for that purpose then it'll significantly increase the cost of tires. As a consequence, lower income earners will not replace their tires when they should, leading to more road accidents.
As a consequence, lower income earners will not replace their tires when they should, leading to more road accidents.
I'm not a California native, but a quick google search shows that California already has vehicle inspection requirements and if they fail, they are not legal to drive on California roads. Tire wear check could be added as one of those things check and fail it, if tires are in need of replacement.
EVs are especially heavy, too, and they eat tires much faster than ICE cars. Tire tax is 100% appropriate, and a brilliant idea.
Tire lifetime varies dramatically with the type of tire. I’ve had tires that lasted 10,000 miles and tires that lasted 40,000 miles on the same car and in similar driving conditions. That is a difficult variable to solve for.
Weight in kg x mileage recorded at safety inspection x some factor = tax
Seems like a straightforward calculation.
Tire wear is not as standard as you are implying. There are many factors in tire wear including the hardness of the rubber compound. Stickier tires for better steering and braking wear faster than, say, high mileage tires for hybrids to get the best MPG or electric range.
The tires on my hybrid are designed for more miles that my Honda that weighs half a ton less.
Tire wear is not as standard as you are implying. There are many factors in tire wear including the hardness of the rubber compound. Stickier tires for better steering and braking wear faster than, say, high mileage tires for hybrids to get the best MPG or electric range.
If you're looking for a perfect metric for road wear that works across all vehicles, you're not going to find it. A perfect example of this is today's gas tax. The size of the vehicle, the engine, the amount of cargo being carried, even the wind direction that day all influence the fuel efficiency of the vehicle and would raise and lower the amount of fuel it would consume, yet the static per gallon tax is levied on each gallon regardless of the day or car. So even today's gas tax doesn't capture perfectly the usage.
I'd argue a tire tax gets much closer. You left out one piece of info on your tire comparrison. Those tires are rated for different amounts of miles of use, so that could be added as a metric to get a more accurate taxation:
Victoria has an EV tax already, and they basically just ask you to send a picture of your odometer.
I suppose that that's probably the most-reasonable way to incorporate EVs into paying for the roads, but that's going to suck for people who have an ICE vehicle registered in California but do most of their driving in other states, since they're basically paying tax twice, once to California in terms of the ownership tax, and then again to the other states in terms of fuel.
considers
Hmm.
How about instead retaining the existing gasoline tax without changes, but making the Road Charge tax apply to only EVs, since the issue (gas tax not functioning) is specific to EVs? Then if and when other states adopt some kind of change to deal with EVs, if it differs, can adopt that policy.
EDIT: I guess that might subsidize users of plugin hybrids who do a lot of short-range city driving.
There are some states that already do that and it’s invariably unfair
Let’s be unfair the other direction: keep the gas tax and add a registration tax for all vehicles. Then EVs don’t get out of paying for road wear and we’re still incenting the transition to EVs
Electricity is already taxed.
We don't need more government tracking of our every move.
The electric tax doesn't go towards fixing roads, though. That's why it needs to change, otherwise the only people paying into that are non-electric car owners.
I totally agree that the government shouldn't have more of our data, so I looked up how the pilot program worked and honestly I'm not too mad about it. There are 3 options:
All of those are overhead-riddled runarounds that could be avoided entirely by the state simply allocating the tax dollars it's already collected in a different manner, which ought to be well within its capability to do.
Anyway, if all they cared about was your odometer reading they get that already when you renew your vehicle registration. They could just charge you then -- when you're already standing there with your checkbook anyway -- and not need to create and hire an entire new department to review people's potato pictures of their dashboards.
I thought tolls were supposed to pay for road repair. Cali simply cannot resist finding any way to extract money out of you. Shortly after the road use tax I am sure they will find a way to tax gas again
Very few roads in California have tolls.
This I did not know. I learned my something new today. I can’t move 100 ft without hitting a toll in Florida lol.
I’ve lived in Cali almost 15 years and only taken a toll road like 5-10 times total
Many mentions of factoring weight in this thread, I believe should also consider size of vehicle, how much space the vehicle occupies on the road. Some combination of miles, weight and size.
For those asking how tracked, a prior trial used a device plugged into OBD port like some insurance companies use. That trial generated monthly billing for miles driven in state. Tracked not just miles driven, but also where the vehicle was driven. This is done so miles driven out of state are excluded from the road charge. Not perfect as miles driven inside national park (Federal not state maintained) were included in the billing. Hopefully that big was fixed.
I like concept but the very real privacy issues, uh, not so much
Haha fuck that, you really wanna collect even more information for the gestapo administration?
Why not both? They should keep a pigouvian tax on oil.
I'll vote for it.
