I'm indifferent and glad I don't live there but why not just charge what it should cost to use Public Transportation/Subways? Why look for ways to subsidize it by taxing everything else but the people who use it?
But gas isn't priced that way, because we don't do all of the above to offset its effect on our cities and the environment. So we're continuing to impose more disincentives to burn gas.
As one example, we do actually want less CO2 being released into the atmosphere, full stop. Or alternatively phrased, it's impossible to pay the true cost of the thing, as the true cost of everyone doing unrestricted emissions is that the human species goes extinct (which has effectively infinite cost).
Or, similarly, imagine an industrial plant releasing waste that spreads through groundwater and poisons adjacent properties. We don't just want the industrial plant to pay the entire cost of the thing; we actually want them to not do that at all, because it infringes upon the properties of others, who do not want it to occur.
So there's room for multiple times of frameworks that operate simultaneously -- Pay for the entire costs of some things, but also have less of or do not allow at all some things.
Earmarking tax dollars for projects is kind of meaningless.
Subsidizing public transportation is a good idea anyway. High costs of transportation disproportionately hurt poorer people. If you're not for public transportation then I'm not sure we'd see eye to eye on much of anything.
An EV pays no gasoline taxes, but has similar impact on the roads to any other car. Now, EVs are a good thing... but they do expose issues with paying for transport via gas taxes.
In the future though it probably will be a bigger problem. I suppose you could add similar sales taxes to public paid charging stations, but without separately metering home charging you'll probably still miss the bulk of EV users. Either the separate metering or a mileage reporting/road tax seem like they could fairly account for EV usage though.
In 1987, US average fuel economy was 22.0mpg. In 2018, it was 24.9mpg [2]. A 13% improvement in 31 years.
The idea that the US as a whole has made "great strides" in improving fuel economy, and that we therefore need to rethink the gas tax, is ludicrous. Even in California, it is mostly wishful thinking, and it is definitely not the case in New York.
[1] https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/wisniewski/ct...
[2] Table 3.1 in the 2018 report Excel file, https://www.epa.gov/automotive-trends/download-data-automoti...
If there are eventually too many EV's to generate any road repair revenue, we can re-assess then. For now, the incentive structure makes sense, and should be increased if anything.
EV's already have plenty of tax incentives. Taxes need to be both a stick and a carrot. EV's get a carrot, all drivers get a stick.
Just as two datapoints, the Fed hasn't raised the federal gas tax in 25 years, and in my state voters have rejected state gas tax increases for 28 years. Whatever new funding source is identified to replace or supplement the gas tax, is going to have many enemies.
Do you think of buying a subway ticket as a tax on travel?
Money is fungible. The MTA budget most recently subsidised upstate boondoggles.
So to be clear, you do consider subway and bus tickets to be taxes? How about US postage stamps? Public utility bills?
The transportation funding earmark is just sugar to help get it passed.
Because certain things are considered to be public goods, to greater or lesser extent, and therefore to follow the principle behind progressive taxation: that people aren't taxed by how much they use them, but that the rich pay far more in absolute terms than the poor.
The subway is the primary means of transportation that makes so much of the rest of the city possible, that it's certainly a public good to some extent. But it's also still so expensive to run, and people with cars have their own separate costs on top of it, that people don't generally feel it's fair for it to be 100% subsidized either.
But roads don’t really work like that. There’s no “social benefit” that wouldn’t already be priced into everything that derived benefit from the roads. If government road subsidies make road freight cheaper, charging those freight companies for their own usage would make prices reflect actual costs. We could still have redistributive social benefits for things like the road wear caused by police cars, but again, that’s a separate issue.
Sure. There are likely many reasons why it's so bad. But the solution is to fix it, not penalize people because they use the obvious alternatives that are much better.