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Comment by kcorbitt | Hacker News Reader

It would make good economic sense to switch to a utilization tariff for basically all road usage, instead of the current gas tax. The technology is there, with license plate readers and/or RFID toll meters. In practice this would probably look like a $5-50 monthly bill that every registered vehicle owner would get in the mail based on the roads they had travelled on and how congested they were. If we set aside the dystopian concern about tracking, this would definitely lead to a more efficient use of the public roadways and more equitable distribution of the maintenance burden.

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But I pay my taxes!

Just kidding. This is a brilliant solution, but government doesn't like brilliant solutions. The more you can hide the cost of things, the easier it is to embezzle and/or fund pork barrel projects. I say this being an elected official in a small town. It's embarrassing how much everyone is just looking out for themselves.

My first lesson when I joined the local government was that the situation is just as bad as you thought it was, maybe even worse. Small, vindictive, selfish minds.

Name and shame!

Or we can have those that cause damage to the roads actually pay for it, instead of regressively taxing the poor. A semi causes 1,400x more wear on the same stretch of road than a car! [1]

[1] https://www.lrrb.org/pdf/201432.pdf

They also buy way more gas and as a result pay more taxes.

Yes but their gas usage doesn't scale as fast as the damage caused by their increased weight.

Source? I honestly dont know, highways never seem that damaged between cities tbh.

http://archive.gao.gov/f0302/109884.pdf page 36

"A 1962 American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials Road Test Report shows that concentrating large amounts of weight on a single axle multiplies the impact of the weight exponentially. Test results show that an automobile axle weighing 2,000 pounds would have to pass over an interstate highway 7,550 times to have the same impact as 20,000 pounds concentrated on a single truck axle. As a result, the impact of heavy trucks on pavement is disproportionately greater than the weight carried."

There's a lot of similar sources out there.

Aren't most trucks multi-axle and have distributed weight?

To put some numbers to this, lets take the model that damage scales with weight per surface area to the fourth power. If you double the number of axles but maintain the same weight. Then there is half as much stress on twice as much area, 16x less damage per area, 2x area. 8x less total damage.

Yes, but at an average of 40000 lbs over the 5 axles they are still multiple times heavier per axle than a regular car.

But they also buy multiple more of gas no?

Estimates put it at about 6.5 mpg not enough to make up for the exponential way that their weight increases the damage they cause.

http://www.weibull.com/hotwire/issue116/hottopics116.htm Usually the damage done on a material varies by the stress to some power, not exponentially, as in the link. My understanding is the damage to asphalt scales with the 4th (ish) power of stress, which is in line with the provided numbers. 20,000/2,000=10 , 10^4 is roughly 7,550.

You're not just paying for the damage done, you're paying for the space. If all cars weighed a pound, you'd still need to maintain and repair the road due to aging/weather damage.

License plates are already tied to the class of vehicle. This regulatory regime would make it easier to implement what you're proposing, not harder.

> In practice this would probably look like a $5-50 monthly bill

I divided my state's total transportation expenditures(including fed dollars)[1] by estimated miles driven in 2016[0] and I got 31.5 cents per mile[2]. Is that about the order of magnitude you were thinking? If you drove 5000mi/year that would be about $130/month.

In practice the tax would probably be more successful if setup as a refund, like income taxes. So gas would have a huge tax and you'd get a monthly refund based on your actual miles driven.

> If we set aside the dystopian concern about tracking,

If you carry a cell phone you're already tracked by at least three parties: google/apple, your mobile provider, the nsa.

I think we'd be better off discussing as a society how law enforcement should use this information and passing strong privacy laws to regulate its use than avoiding more efficient taxation.

[0] https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/travel_monitoring...

[1] http://www.modot.org/about/documents/FinancialSnapshot.pdf

[2] $2,154,365,000 / 6839000000 mi

I think a fuel tax is superior while electric vehicles are still in the minority. Not only are the privacy implications much less severe, but bigger, more damaging and more polluting vehicles pay more per mile. Congestion charging should be zone based rather than road based, because of the perverse incentives that would create for rat runs on otherwise quiet streets. And doing it using concentric zones again decreases the privacy damage.

> If we set aside the dystopian concern about tracking

Sorry, but that's a pretty large thing to 'set aside'.

Until electric vehicles are more prevalent, the gas tax is essentially a utilization tax.

Not really, IC cars vary greatly in fuel efficiency. Additionally because older cars have lower efficiency and tend to be owned by the less affluent it is regressive.

Except you are taxed equally for usage at 2am when there is a surplus of road space as you are for usage at 8am when there is a shortage of road space.

Sure you are, you burn more gas sitting idle in traffic than cruising down the road, so you pay more.

Why? IMO it would be way better to follow the model used for sales tax and require charging devices to collect a tax for vehicle charging. Historically, it's much easier to tax and police dispensers vs. end users.

Wide-scale road systems are super expensive. Systems like EZ-Pass are only cheap compared to toll operators; the transaction costs are ridiculous and the vendors who operate the systems make a obscene amount of money for a guaranteed slice of a huge cash flow.

This would probably only work in urban areas where you can justify the infrastructure cost. In low-traffic rural areas the gas tax is much more efficient.

That's true. Really it would turn this into a last-mile problem where rural communities that didn't have the land value to justify big infrastructure projects would have terrible roads.

So knowing how the discourse is around here, there will likely be ardent support and the rural people can just be told to pound sand and move to civilization.

Snark aside, it makes more sense just to add an additional tax to semis during the licensing process to go to road maintenance. There's already way too much tracking going on as it is, and then there's the fun of having your plates stolen or whatever getting you stuck with another bill to contest.

If such a system were rolled out state- or nation- wide infrastructure costs would fall. If rural roads were only enrolled once major upgrade/repair work was done, it would probably constitute a small portion of the project cost.

>this would definitely lead to a more efficient use of the public roadways and more equitable distribution of the maintenance burden.

Efficient use of public roadways is a sideshow to a well running society which is the big goal which is why all mass transit (like highways) are publicly subsidized to some extent whether profitable or not. Raising the cost of any method of transportation across the board does not further that.

A tax that only poor people are hit strongly by (many here spend more than $50/mo on buying alcohol at bars and other luxuries) hurts far more than it helps. Congestion provides its own congestion charge anyway. Nobody wants to be in a traffic jam or packed into a subway car. Those who can avoid it at a cost (money, time or otherwise) they can justify do so.

I would rather live in a society that has traffic jams (regardless of the medium of said traffic) than one where people get stuck with a reduced quality of life because the cost of getting from A to B is artificially increased so that getting from A to B is more convenient for those who can afford to do so.

Would you support a congestion charge for subways, buses and bike rentals?

As long as we eliminate the gas tax in the process.

The gas tax still has a useful purpose even if there's full utilization taxes since it encourages more fuel efficient vehicles which have a lower environmental impact and reduced pollution in cities could lead to big improvements in health saving money elsewhere.

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