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Comment by ses1984 | Hacker News Reader

ses1984

Isn't congestion pricing taxing people who use the roads? An Uber driver uses the roads a lot more than your average New Yorker, what taxes exist to cover that imbalance? (asking in earnest)

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.

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Paying for using something isn't usually considered a tax.

Do you think of buying a subway ticket as a tax on travel?

It's considered a use tax, like the existing gasoline taxes used to fund roads and highway tolls.

The difference is that the subway ticket directly finances your subway ride. It's just like how a private subway company would have financed it, so calling it a "tax" just because the train is run by a government entity is a bit weird.

Your subway fare goes into the city budget. The cost of the subway system comes out of the city budget. Your subway fare only "directly finances" the subway system as long as it's convenient to think of it that way. If there was ever a huge surplus of subway money, it would go to other projects. If there was ever a huge deficit elsewhere, money would come out of the subway system.

Perhaps, depending on the city. I believe the NYC subway is state run.

So to be clear, you do consider subway and bus tickets to be taxes? How about US postage stamps? Public utility bills?

All that really matters is the effect on the bottom line, not the what you call each line item. Some debits map very logically to services like public utility bills, you pay for what you use, so it's convenieng to think of it in terms of usage fees instead of taxes. Some things don't map that clearly, like real estate taxes or sales tax, so it's convenient to think of them ad taxes.

> the subway ticket directly finances your subway ride

Money is fungible. The MTA budget most recently subsidised upstate boondoggles.

Ubers have a $2.75 + $0.75 per passenger surcharge now. That may go away or get modified with the future changes.

Gasoline/Petrol taxes are probably your best analog if you want people to pay in proportion to how much they're driving.

Not with the strides we've been making in fuel efficiency.

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.

I heard a proposal to tax tires instead, which I suppose would let EVs and hybrids pay their fair share (although it would probably cause more cheapskates to drive around on bald tires)

Don't we levy road taxes on tires already? (albeit at very low rates)

Or just get new tires in a neighboring state.

There's a Federal-level excise tax on gasoline, so you could take that approach with tires. I don't think it's a great idea, though... too many people already drive on shitty tires years past their prime.

That's fair I didn't think about EVs. For now their adoption rate is low enough that Gas Taxes are still a decent stand in (~2-4% it sounds like with quick googling). https://bnef.turtl.co/story/evo2018?teaser=true

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.

This link says that in 2017 EVs accounted for 1.2% of the US auto market in sales numbers [1]. (But half EV sales are in California, so elsewhere the numbers are even worse.)

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...

Do gas taxes even pay for the negative environmental and health externalities of producing and burning the gas, regardless of road wear? I don’t have a source, but I highly doubt they do.

I'm okay with EV's getting a "discount" since they create less pollution. Gas vehicles can pay more than their fair share towards road repairs in exchange for the damage they're doing to the environment.

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.

It's not a discount, it's free. And given the price of EV's, you're not just suggesting a regressive tax, your suggesting a regressive tax where near the top of the tax bracket pays no taxes.

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.

It will have to be fixed eventually, but it's not that big of a problem (yet) & reworking highway funding is going to be a horrifying & colossal undertaking we'd like to do only once!

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.

Electric usage taxes or separate metering and rates for EV charging will be coming. That or much higher registration fees to offset the lost fuel tax revenue, which has already started happening.

Shouldn’t gasoline taxes just cover the direct negative externalities of gasoline, namely the environmental and health impact of creating and then burning the gasoline?

Maybe in theory, but it was a useful shorthand for road usage fifty years ago when recording the number of miles each citizen drove (for a highway use tax) was a rather daunting task.

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