As gas tax revenues drop, states like Utah want EVs to pay for road upkeep

boing
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For sure- I didn’t mean to imply these are unsolvable problems. I only hoped to point out that there are more salient criticisms of EVs to make rather than the intellectually dishonest ones typically being thrown around.

One romantic idea to solve the grid problem is to have the car supply power to the house when not in use. It becomes a backup battery and a buffer for a renewable energy system with a few simple circuits on the charger. This takes the load off the grid quite a bit, since the car is offsetting what the house would normally be using. Of course there are a ton of problematic assumptions in this idea too- that the car doesn’t get driven when the house needs power, that everyone has a nice suburban house with a garage to park their car and solar panels on their roof, etc etc. So much of the Green Dream is riddled with unexamined privilege.

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Probably mostly.:wink:

It still doesn’t capture all the uses of roads for things like maintaining utilities, emergency services, or things the user benefits from indirectly and never has an interaction with directly, like elder care, meals-on-wheels, home nursing, and all of those myriad public, NGO, and private services that everyone benefits from and doesn’t want to pay for.

In general, I object to user fees as a replacement for just plain taxes. User fees have exploded in the last couple of decades as state and local governments scramble to make up for lost funding. There are fees for hiking, biking, paddling, boating, parks, cross-country skiing, running - pretty much any activity you can think of, there are fees, even when it takes place completely on public land that should already be covered by general taxes.

Even fishing licenses are starting to bug me. Don’t get me wrong - I support license fees for enforcement of rules, enhancement of fishing opportunities with programs for growing and releasing hatchery fish and preserving wild fish. But this year, license fees went up four times COL, while delivering less quality than last year (and the year before that, and so on). There is the fraudulent fee that they are making us pay that was approved by the state legislature for restoring wild fish, which the state F&G dept. tried and gave up on, but they are still collecting the fee for. There is the fee for fishing for fish that, most years, we aren’t even allowed to fish for. There is the fee for fishing for fish that live so far out in the ocean that 99% of anglers can’t even reach them. There are people in this state that genuinely fish at least partly for subsistence, and they are being priced out of fishing - which means they will keep fishing as poachers, and will ignore the rules, damaging the fishing and the environment in general for everyone.

Tl;dr: I would much rather see an appropriate level of taxation to cover federal, state, and local government programs for almost everything and drop user fees completely. We’re all in this together, and user fees just divide people artificially.

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Probably, some are captured, utility maintenance use of roads gets captured by road tax to the utility company which in theory gets rolled into the utility rates. Except utility rates a frequently not set by market forces but by government choice (because utilities tend to be one per geographic area, and a market of one is not subject to useful market forces).

Maybe more importantly the road cost for those things is really a pretty small percentage. Like does meals on wheels really put much wear and tear on the roads?

Entirely valid position. General taxes have some real benefits. Being not-regressive for example. They also have some disadvantages. Use-fee has some advantages too. For example it focuses money on things people use. It is valid to argue that that isn’t what the government is for though, the “free market” can (mostly) handle use-fee-style services. The government is for things that providing to everyone regardless of ability to pay benefits us all (health care as a controversial, but I believe correct example, roads, basic research, and so on).

I thought in theory hunting/fishing licenses are a thing to cap the number of hunters/fishers to a sustainable level. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t cause other problems though (as you note, forcing people to choose between breaking the law and starving is bad)

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I’m not talking about things like going to see movies or buying plants at a landscape place. I’m talking about activities that are primarily done in or on public lands like parks, navigable rivers, lakes, the ocean, and national forests. The public is using our own resources, and often are the ones maintaining them voluntarily, where necessary. Hiking trails in national forests are a great example. While the Forest Service does put a little money into maintaining (sometimes, “maintaining”) the parking areas at trailheads, most of the actual trail maintenance is done by volunteer groups. No need for anyone to be groped by the invisible hand.

Not remotely. State Fish & Game agencies spend rather a lot on marketing and driving more people to buy licenses. Cynically, their goal is to get as many people to buy a license and fund the agency (which leads to some really questionable decisions, and why their funding should be less dependent on user fees, but that’s a different topic). I’m not remotely saying that fisheries biologists are in it for the money. It’s in the running for the lowest-paying job in science. But I am not aware of any US state that uses license fees to intentionally discourage people from fishing. The regulations regarding seasons, size, and species limitations handle that. Hunting can be different, with limited sustainable hunting managed by tags that are either purchased, bid for, or based on a lottery system.

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Yep, parks do cost money to keep open (parking, rangers and such). I’m happy for that to come from income tax though.

Yeah, theory and practice are sometimes viciously at odds :wink:

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I’m a Tesla Model 3 owner. Ohio just instituted a $200 per year fee for BEVs in the state. The state gas tax was increased to $0.375 per gallon. I don’t have an issue paying for the wear and tear that my car does to the roads, I would just like to see the calculus behind the fee. Since it’s a flat rate, I have to pay that rate regardless of how much I drive on Ohio roads.

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So, if the regular plate costs $34.50 (as far as I can tell from their website) the difference is $165.50. If the tax is $0.375 per gallon (fixed) that equates to the tax on 441 gallons of gas. Assuming a relatively new vehicle gets 25-30 mpg, one would have to drive 11,000 - 13,500 miles or so to break even with the equivalent of the gas taxes. If you drive less than that in your EV then you are overpaying as compared to a ICE vehicle owner. Drive more than that and you are saving.

At about $2.50 per gallon (tax included) the operating cost for the ICE vehicle are $0.10 per mile. For home charging the costs are about $0.03 per mile.

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Poor people have to drive more. Any use-based system is going to disproportionately affect them. Rich people can afford to just have all their stuff shipped to them and pay no road tax.

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That’s what ground rents/land value taxes would do — collect a rent based on the value of the land, value created by the economic activity adjacent to that land. Taxing the development itself discourages land use and depresses the taxable value of the land.

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Like Brainspore said, that doesn’t reflect how much you are using the road. In NC most vehicles get a yearly safety/emissions check, where they record miles driven for the year. Realistically the state could calculate based on the vehicle a fair road tax for everyone.

However, people are shit with large lump sum debts. It is in the state’s interest to roll the tax into something that is purchased frequently and raise the cost 20%. That would make things more complicated, but having your tax divided out over 12 months would be better than a single lump payment. (Or weekly, as most people fill up there ICE vehicles that often.)

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I assure you, the amount you drive does not accurately reflect how much you use the roads.

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Then you don’t have any roads. That’s one way to get to zero emissions (which is, of course, a fallacy, as EVs still have to be built which isn’t emission-free and fueled which in many places is coal or natural gas) but in the meantime, peep this notion from 10 years ago…

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I think everyone here is more or less on board with the idea that roads are a public good that everyone should have access to. The question is

  • Is this the kind of public good that we should fund the way we fund things like schools, police and the EPA? (i.e., from a common tax base that is unrelated to individual usage) or,
  • Is this the kind of public good that we should fund the way we fund the postal service and municipal water supply? (i.e., a government-provided or tightly regulated monopoly in which funding is closely correlated to individual usage)

I believe fair arguments can be made for both positions.

One reason to consider the latter approach is that when any public resource is effectively free to use then anyone running a private business is sure to exploit that resource to the extent the law allows. For example: if the amount we paid for access to clean drinking water wasn’t strongly correlated to how much we use, then there would be no financial motive for either businesses or individuals to conserve water. If the postal service was effectively free to use then the net result would likely be a huge windfall for companies like Amazon at the expense of everyone else. The same principle is true for roads: if you make roads an effectively free resource for everyone to use then you better expect big corporations to squeeze every penny they can out of the opportunity.

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Yes, the risk you’re talking about is socializing losses, a big problem in our society today (mainly in the financial arena). I covered that issue in my post, though- tax corporations commensurate with their abuse of said systems.

That said, your analogy to the postal service is an interesting one, although the cost of that is so low per person that its effect as a regressive tax is probably trivial. It also benefits from near zero bureaucracy, unlike most attempts to apply user fees to roads. The point of supply is easily controlled.

Water is a little fuzzier. I grew up with flat-rate water, and a lot of places still do that. The whole notion of “too cheap to meter” as was promised with nuclear power. Of course, flat-rate-anything is pretty much always a regressive tax also, so in this sense a user fee might actually benefit lower income people.

The main point I was going for was that all current user fee systems on roads (gas taxes and tolls) are very much regressive taxes because they are high relative to their single-use utility. A tech worker doesn’t sweat $5 a day to take 20 minutes off their commute on a toll road, but that’s crippling to a dishwasher. We’re not talking about buying stamps here. This is luxury pricing on life-or-death goods.

A better analogy for me would be healthcare. The current system works fine for people who can afford it, but is a nightmare for those who can’t. If we agree healthcare (and roads) are a critical public good, then the system of progression taxation that we all agree is fair is a great way to pay for it. Social systems are about leveling the playing field, and use of roads is a clear case where that is needed.

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If we tax corporations according to (for example) how much wear and tear they put on public roads then it seems we’re basically in agreement that there should be some connection between how much use an entity gets out of the roads and how much they should pay for the construction and upkeep of said roads.

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There are key differences though:

  1. The bureaucratic load of doing so. I propose that fair taxation of individuals per-use is hopelessly complex and will never be fair. Meanwhile, there are only a handful of trucking companies large enough to be worried about them socializing their losses.

  2. The plain social justice of doing so. User fees are regressive taxes on individuals, as we all know. Not so on corporations. Social systems are intended to protect the vulnerable. If we start billing human beings for using those systems case-by-case, we’re no longer living up to that ideal.

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I don’t think we’ll ever get a perfectly fair system, but in an ideal world there would be some kind of calculus based on (weight of vehicle × miles driven per year) or something similar. That would put us in a situation analogous to where we are with drinking water. Trucking companies would pay orders of magnitude more into the system than individual commuters, but everyone would have at least some incentive to avoid excessive use. And those costs would factor into the economics of the products we buy. Just as the cost of an almond should have some connection to how much water was used to grow it, the cost of having goods shipped to my home should have some connection to the cost that the delivery truck put on the roads. People who made conscious decisions to avoid private vehicle use would pay the least of all, just as people who currently practice water conservation pay less for their monthly water bill.

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Taxes are feudal and basic.

I would prefer that Utah require EV cars to add pothole repair capacity in situ during stop and go traffic.

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I think in principle everyone agrees on the basics there- we need to allocate these resources in a shared way that is somewhat relative to use. However in practice, many social systems are vastly too complex to even attempt per-use billing, and my humble opinion is that roads fit into this category. I made the analogy to air because I think it’s apt. People (in my opinion) underestimate how much every single moment in their lives depended on a road. Every single object we touch, from the faucet in the bathroom at work, to the salt in the bacon in our lunch came on a truck that went on that road.

For systems like this, we seem to mostly agree that progressive taxation is the way to handle it, because we all need it, per-use measurement is impossible, and we want to avoid being regressive. A better analogy than mail or water might be the military. We all benefit from that to some unknown degree. Sure, I might prefer to be charged only exactly the percentage of a B-29 bomber that benefited me personally, but that’s ludicrously impossible. So it is, in my opinion, with roads.

We are a society, not a collection of individuals. This is the fallacy buried deep inside libertarianism, and why the only successful societies have all decided that there’s a bunch of stuff we should all agree on pooling our money for. If roads aren’t that, then I don’t know what is.

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I’d argue that access drinking water is even more of a human right and a human necessity than access to roads, but while our society pools resources to provide access to clean drinking water* we still don’t provide individual citizens with unlimited water for free. I don’t think that makes our municipal water systems “libertarian.”

For public roads, like other public services, it’s less a question of “should we pool our resources to provide this social good?” than a question of “how do we keep this pool filled?”

(*Exceptions apply for certain residents of Michigan)

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