California Considers Placing a Mileage Tax on Drivers (2017)
cbslocal.com
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Having a driver if a hummer pay the same taxes based upon miles driven versus a a VW bug really doesn’t make sense when we know the stress put in the road by the hummer is substantially more.
Lastly, for LA, having a disincentive to have an emissions free car while driving just gets the air quality even worse.
See for instance: https://streets.mn/2016/07/07/chart-of-the-day-vehicle-weigh...
If tolls and road usage taxes were fair and proportionate, you should be paying a $0.01 toll while trucks should be paying $100.
Source: AASHO Road Test
Isn't that a feature, not a bug?
Don't we want to incentivize people to get more fuel efficient cars?
I mean sure, if one day the majority of the cars are electric, we'll have to adjust how they are taxed, but for now why don't we leave the incentive for people that buy a fuel efficient or electric car.
Just have vehicles report their mileage each year when they renew their registration and base the registration tax on that and a multiplier based on vehicle type. To keep people honest, randomly inspect the VIN and mileage at renewal time with big fines for lying.
My feeling is if you wanted to reduce the number of cars it would be better to just impose an excise tax on new car sales. Why tax gasoline over 15 years when you can get all the revenue up front via an excise tax.
Assume 30mpg, expected life 200,000 miles, that's 6666 gallons of gasoline. At $0.7382/gallon that's $4920.
Seriously why not just impose a $5000 excise tax and be done with it.
https://frontiergroup.org/reports/fg/who-pays-roads
On the other hand saw someone else mention their city used license plate readers to look at who was using their urban streets and turns out about 80% of the users weren't locals. That poses a big conundrum. Particularly in California where urban commercial property tax revenue is limited by Prop13. I think where I'm going with this is one shouldn't get too attached to the idea that things be 'fair' because that's simply impossible.
- weight of the car (lighter cars pay a lot less than heavier vehicles)
- type of fuel (CNG is taxed more than than regular gas, diesel even more so. The prices of CNG and diesel are lower though, so if you drive a lot than CNG or diesel are cheaper to run overall)
- Hybrids/EVs don't pay road tax (for now...)
There's also a variable tax on new vehicles which is based on the environmental footprint of the vehicle.
All this is pretty fair: if you're driving more you pay more tax, if you have an old, heavy or polluting vehicle you also pay more tax. Fair enough (there are even exepmtions for classic cars).Californians are spoiled though... in The Netherlands, regular gas is $7.20 per gallon.
Driving old vehicles is taxed more. So people who can only afford old vehicles are paying subsidies to those who can buy a new Tesla. This is possibly the single most asocial rule in the world, and I'm honestly shocked that we have this in Europe that's otherwise reasonably socially aware.
Also, the way the diesel scheme works is that there's a treshold so that it's only cheaper to drive diesels when you drive a lot of miles. Also, the heavier the car, the more miles you'd have to drive. But I'm sure you know this. And where exactly is 'money lost in the friction' here? Diesel prices are known, and tax brackets are pretty clear too.
I agree that we shouldn't subsidize $100k+ Teslas, but I'm all for rewarding people to drive cleaner vehicles. And calling it the single most asocial rule in the world... well, that's kind of a hyperbole, don't you think?
Related: I used to drive a 1986 Subaru Justy which ran 1:20 on regular fuel and costs next to nothing to insure and maintain. Cheapest form of motorized transport I ever had!
I'd be fine if the ultra-progressive SF politicians could just mind their own business and not to dictate other cities and towns in the state on how to govern.
this are the ones paying the gas tax right now (while i for example have Prius Plugin and my gas spending is at least 3x times lesser than it was before). Replacing gas tax with mileage tax would bring Tesla and plugin owners back into the tax paying fold.
1) Some gas tax was removed at the same time
2) The tax took into account the weight of your vehicle and
3) There was some way to report out of state driving.
https://www.king5.com/article/news/washington-state-official...
While I agree this would be a perverse outcome, it is not obvious that such a thing would be "required" at all, let alone "at all times".
Here's hoping that the option never comes to pass, if for no other reason than its being trivially easy to spoof.
Road damage is proportional to axel weight to the fourth power. A 1 ton axel should pay 16 times as much for road repair as a 0.5 ton axel.
However someone driving a 3500lb Merc e-class for below average 10,000 miles a year would have to pay 4.5c/mile or $450
Buy an F150 or Tesla S class at 4500lb for 10,000 miles a year, you'd pay 12c/mile, or $1200.
Then add say 40 cents a gallon to gas tax (in the UK gas tax + sales tax on that gas tax is 314c per gallon) to combat the effects of burning gas, and you get a cost per mile of
nissan versa (31mpg) -- 2.3c/mile
Merc e-class (25mpg) -- 6c/mile
F150 (22mpg) -- 13.8c/mile
Tesla S class - 12c/mile
nissan versa (31mpg) -- 11c/mile
Merc e-class (25mpg) -- 17c/mile
F150 (22mpg) -- 26c/mile
Tesla S class - 12c/mileI'm curious, what other options do y'all think are feasible? I suppose budgets could just be shuffled around a bit but at the end of the day that's still a chunk of money that will no longer be available.
This article is old but it seems that the idea is still being considered. A bill was recently passed to extend the life of the committee that's been investigating it: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...
Rich people either have enough money to not care about this tax, or can afford homes close to their place of work, while poor people have to endure long commutes to get to work.
Done right, a tax like this would be revenue-neutral, and enacted alongside a reduction in some regressive tax, like sales tax. The winners are poor people and people who don't drive. The losers, well-off people who drive.
San Francisco’s amenities can only exist because subsidized car infrastructure makes it possible to get here from affordable places, however painfully. Your walkable grocery store’s shelves don’t get stocked without highways and sprawl. The walkabale radius around any BART stop is thoroughly into tech-workers-only price ranges by now (or truly terrifying).
See http://www.ppic.org/content/pubs/report/R_704LRR.pdf for instance: "[In the Bay Area,] Low-income workers walk, carpool, and use public transit at higher rates than their more affluent counterparts".
And on page 86 you can see that 70% of high-income folks drive alone to work. Amongst poor people (their term), it's 51%. Meanwhile, 5% of high-income residents of the Bay Area take the bus to work. Amongst poor people, 12%.
The relevant quantity here is vehicle mileage, not mode share. I expected lower-income workers to drive much longer distances (whereas the rich would have more car trips but trivial distances). So I'm more interested in "Other research suggests that low-income workers travel shorter distances than other workers" which is genuinely surprising. I wonder how that's fared over time.
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Transferring some portion of road maintenance funding from the gas tax (which the rich buy their way into lower per-mile charges for by paying more up front for hybrid and electric vehicles) to a mileage tax doesn't disproportionately affect the poor, at least not in terms of adverse effects.
That will increase the pressure on local governments to provide adequate public transportation.
It will also increase the pressure on private markets to couple office tower developments with apartment high-rises versus the current models for most US cities - all offices downtown, all residences in suburbs.
It will increase pressure on employers to provide more diverse and distributed options versus "everybody be in the main office tower by 8 a.m.".
But you're right, in the end the tax would necessarily be regressive, which pretty much every usage based tax is.
Why not tax land value instead, easy to reduce by making better use of the land, which is something we want to encourage.
Taxing gas is still important to reclaim some of the externalities that burning it causes. Same with taxing alcohol which leads to societal problems.
I also support taxing land value, but I don't think it's a replacement for graduated income tax. I mentioned tobacco, and alcohol is obviously similar. But with gas, there are poorer people who simply cannot opt out of using gas. Maybe we should apply more tax to companies that produce or sell gas instead?
This is already discouraged (people earning $2m/year can afford to pay an accountancy firm $50k to restructure their income via offshoring or capital gains, even if they only save 10% tax on the top million)
One common wheeze is to funnel your income into a company and then take loans (including services) from it. There's an entire industry built around reducing income tax, which leads to massive tax laws to
It's quite easy to reduce gas usage -- stop buying gas guzzling cars. 25mpg (that's 30mpg in the UK) is a terrible 'average fuel economy' [0], especially based on official figures. Buy a Skoda Citigo which gets a real 50mpg (us gallons) [1]
We have poor people in the UK too, and they have to pay for gas, yet manage to cope with gas tax of 314 cents per (us) gallon.
At an average 25mpg and 3.2 trillion miles a year in the US [2], that's 128 billion gallons. Increase your current gas tax of about 50c/gallon [3] to say $1.50 a gallon -- still under half what we pay in europe. That would raise an extra $100b a year which could be distributed evenly to all 320 million U.S. citizens, a $300/year flat payment, enough to offset the extra gas tax of 7500 miles, or for a 4 person family, 30,000 miles.
This would discourage gas guzzling cars (you save a lot more by buying a car with a higher mpg) and not harm the people who "can't opt out of using gas".
[0] https://phys.org/news/2016-11-average-fuel-economy-high-mpg.... [1] https://www.honestjohn.co.uk/topten/top-10-the-best-petrol-r... [2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M12MTVUSM227NFWA/ [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_taxes_in_the_United_State...
I am not sure that this adds up...
If they’re looking for money, just raise the taxes that make more sense to raise (least painful, most money), not add a tax that affect those who drive most in crappy cars (and really who don’t give a damn about road state in LA in the first place)
The problem is disincentives like this only work if the market has a better option than simply finding a way to correct the cost.
There are plenty of people who can't afford to drive already but still do because they "have to". You have to take the stupid arguments off the table or make the better options stupidly obvious before you can expect people to start to respond rationally.
I've had colleagues throughout the years who pulled fuses or on even older vehicles simply disconnected mechanical speedometer cables to prevent accumulation of miles.
And yet almost no one does it. And even if people do do it, that's not a reason not to use that method.
Wiener bringing this up in context clearly puts the surveillance option on the table.