More than half of US states (including Texas, for crying out loud) currently require smog checks on vehicles, and a number also require periodic vehicle inspections. The odometer readings are taken during these tests, and the vehicle type is also known during registration. So in many cases the states already know how far you’re driving every year, and the vehicle type. So where’s the insurmountable logistical hurdle in linking an annual road maintenance fee to the mileage and weight of your vehicle?
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Well, water metering is effectively libertarian, but that doesn’t make it bad. Every ideology has some good ideas. 
This is back to point #1 in my previous numbered list, though- water metering is relatively easy to do, so fair direct user fees are practical (though we still have subsidies and tax deductions for the poor, because it is still slightly regressive). I’ve yet to see a practical implementation of “road metering” that isn’t wildly unfair to poor people, though, and that’s where (in my opinion) social justice has to override ideals of resource allocation (for now- see below). Even water metering is relatively new, as recent technology has made this practical to do. Water rates used to be flat because the idea of putting a special meter on every single house and apartment seemed ludicrous in the 1970s. I specifically remember dinner table conversations at our house back then about what a stupidly impractical and expensive idea that was, and how it will never happen. 
You could certainly argue that we have the technology to do something similar for cars now (and perhaps that’s what other people are arguing for in this thread) but there’s certainly a can of worms on personal privacy, data security, and other issues. As soon as the metering system involves tracking movement of citizens, the hairs on the back of my constitution go up.
I think we’re all basically in agreement on the ideals and perhaps even the ultimate goal here. I think there’s only a gap in short term implementations.
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That’s an interesting suggestion. However, the reality is there would be large infrequent bills for people. In California, smog checks are not required for the first five years, then only every two years after that, and they stop on older vehicles. Gas vehicles older than 1976 and diesels older than 1997 are smog-exempt and never get inspected. So at best, you’re talking about getting a big bill for the amount of road you used in the past two years. Periodic huge bills are precisely the sort of thing that keep poor people poor.
Ideally you’d need frequent (every year at least) inspections on every car, which (at least in California) is not happening at any level. All of this is my point- short of electronic data gathering, I don’t think mileage data gathering is practical, short of GPS trackers installed on every car that send the data to definitely-won’t-be-hacked government database. And how do we handle the millions and millions of old cars on the road? Order them all in to have a tracker installed?
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I definitely disagree with that. It’s only “easy” to measure water use because we’re already set up to do it, and even so it usually requires sending a worker out to your property every month to check your usage. Imagine a world where water metering was never built into the infrastructure and trying to add it after the fact. People would think it was a ridiculous burden.
In contrast, there are many options for monitoring road usage that don’t require major infrastructure investments or sending workers to your home every month.
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I suppose you could just have self-reporting of odometer readings every year as part of car registration process, with fines or other punishments for anyone later found to have been falsifying the information (kind of like cheating on your taxes).
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Right, because it’s robbery to expect someone to pay for something he uses. It’s robbery to make people pay for tickets to a roller coaster, or to make them pay to get into a movie theater, or to make them pay for groceries they take out of the store.
The hydrocarbons used in roads are basically toxic waste from petrochemical refineries. They have effectively externalized a destructive product of fractional distillation. They emit VOCs, endanger the health of workers, affect the local environment, and have no other use. If you couldn’t drive your Dodge Ram on it, it’d be labelled “dangerous to man” and stuck in a hazmat barrel.
Maybe we should charge big oil for the opportunity to spread their toxic slop across the landscape. Or charge them a massive fee for disposing/sequestering their gunk.
The chutzpah of charging EV owners is the appalling, all-American response I’d expect from a Republican led state-house. They bow to the oligopoly instead of thinking of creative solutions for the greater good Let’s just keep on enabling petrochemical companies and maybe tear down those cancer-causing windmills. What could go wrong?
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Some countries do that anyway. It also helps used car buyers, as it makes it much harder to “clock” a car (lower the odometer reading).
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I was thinking another alternative which is likely to never get even proposed as legislation is to tax all private roads of HOAs, especially in subdivisions outside of the urban corridor within a certain range of miles. I know this seems biased but the biggest problem is that housing and other building development is too sparse which leads to excess pavement being constructed. This is something that needs resolution over the use of EVs or any specific vehicle. If things were closer together then the cost of infrastructure would go down, thus any further taxes would be merely inflation adjusted.
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Sorry about that. It worked when I sent the link, honest.
Oh, I’ve no doubt. I suspected you may have gotten boingboinged, for all that this seems less likely for a purely bbs thread. I’m getting a non-specific “database error” message now, for what it’s worth. If you’re not currently messing around with the site’s innards, I’m strongly suspecting a sudden load spike is the culprit.
I know these are rather cheat-y rhetorical constructs to make a point, but they are to illustrate why even (very intrusive) vehicle telemetry is problematic, if the intent is to measure road use:
- I had a period of almost three months where my car sporadically did not report vehicle speed to my instrument cluster, or record mileage to the odometer. Oddly, the ECU could read the speed just fine, so I could drive around using a CANBUS code reader with the ECU-reported speed as my speedometer. Even after spending over $1000 at the dealership replacing speed sensors and instrument clusters, it didn’t work. The techs at the dealership called engineers at the manufacturer, and they still couldn’t figure it out. Then, for no apparent reason, it just started working again and has been fine for five years.
- Due to a very badly performed construction zone on the highway I drive every day, a bump (more like a sidewalk curb in the middle of the interstate) caused a chunk of the engine of my car to fall off. As a result, I had to have the short block replaced. When everything was rebuilt, I had to get it tuned. It took a total of about 15 hours of tuning on a dynamometer to get it dialed in. That was a lot of “mileage” that my car registered that was all done in what was essentially a garage.
Fixed…thanks for your patience.
Text is below (what I should have done):
pulling your weight
An old idea, perhaps, as it’s mentioned elsewhere on this pile of cruft, but it maybe belongs here.
Given that our public infrastructure — roads, bridges, etc. — are in sad repair, partly due to reduced expenditure and partly due to higher loads — more and heavier vehicles, it’s time to find a better way to collect the funds needed to maintain it all.
Right now, the purchaser of a large vehicle —
glorified pickupSUV, large luxury car — will get hit with a “gas guzzler tax” at the time of purchase, but does that really impact the purchasing decision? Just roll the tax into the financing and who cares? Hardly a disincentive to buy one. But what if the tax were felt regularly, like at the gas pump?If every vehicle reported its curb weight to the pump at fillup time, a tax could be assessed based on that, as either a weight or as a class of vehicle. Imagine paying a dollar or more per gallon based on the size and weight of your vehicle, or the schadenfreude of the more sensible driver at the next pump. Commercial haulers pay road use taxes, many thousands of dollars worth: now that many people drive commercial weight vehicles, why not assess the same way?
This would have the obvious effect of collecting funds that are currently not being collected, but also the more helpful effects of convincing drivers to either change to a less costly vehicle or keep it in good running condition.
Feb 12, 2009
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The problem with ground rents for capital expenditures is that current residents pay for roads and other infrastructure built solely to support NEW residents.
Here we have both free-market electricity plan and a a base plan, a remnant of when there was only one public electricity provider. The government every three months recalculate the electricity costs. In most cases for a flat it’s the more convenient plan.
Normally people have a peak power of 3 kW, some people have 6 kW on bigger houses. For more than 6 kW you can have only three-phase and so on.
More maximum power, more expensive the plan both for the monthly fee and the power consumed.
So if you get a 16 kW three-phase contract you will be going to pay electricity a lot more.
Free market plans are a bit different, but anyway going to a 3 kW 1-phase to a 3-phase contract to charge the car will be more expensive.
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