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Comment by gonzo41 | Hacker News Reader

Or, Imagine where we toll everyone daily who get's on a highway in a car, and instead provide sheltered lanes for bicycles. And those bikes are simple sturdy steel bikes with wire cage panniers and can hold a ton. And in this utopian world a lot of health related issues are reduced because of the incidental exercise that people get on commuting around.

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That world is called Europe :) Taxation is indirect, gasoline is taxed.

There's taxes on gasoline in the us and most other countries as well

Which is great for all those people who fill up on electricity. Mostly rich people.

Many more people ride bikes than drive electric vehicles.

I mean, it is cheaper but it's not that cheap. There was recently a post here showing very clearly that for example in Germany electricity is so expensive that a good diesel car beats it in terms of cost easily. Even here in the UK if I were to charge at public points it would again be cheaper to just drive a diesel. It only becomes cheaper when I charge at home with a good tariff.

Besides, seeing as our roads are exclusively maintained from fuel taxes, I cannot see this going on forever - the government will have to find a way to tax the electricity going into electric cars somehow.

I imagine an odometer reading would do the trick. Like a gas meter, but on electric cars.

I mean the car I have(volvo phev) currently has a deal where Volvo pays me back for the 1st year of electricity used by the car, they do it by having the car automatically upload the number of kWh used to Volvo servers, then they will pay me back based on the number of kWh I've used during that year.

I don't see why something similar couldn't be done for taxes - the car keeps track of kWh used and you just pay tax based on how much you used. Obviously, that runs into certain immediate problems - like, what if you drive abroad? Normally you'd simply buy fuel while abroad, so therefore contribute to taxes there - but with this system this wouldn't work anymore.

Maybe a GPS and pay-per-km-driven scheme would be more tamper proof. You can spoof a GPS as well, but it can be double-checked automatically by state traffic cams.

Sounds evil-ish, but how about gasoline tax paying for electric car recharge? Electric cars being very expensive to buy is a problem though. You'd end up subsidising those who are already wealthy.

Gas tax doesn't stop car dependence. In LA one gas station might be two dollars more a gallon than another one 5 blocks down the road (not due to tax, I'm really not sure why this happens), and both are packed with customers during rush hour. If you are well off enough where you can afford to pay >$5 a gallon without thinking about it, no reasonable tax is going to change your behavior. These people sitting in traffic 5 days a week in these black Mercedes luxury-safari-imperialist SUVs wouldn't care if gas was $15 a gallon.

True. Once you get rid of cars, the world is a bicycle lane.

Better plan for all the hip and knee replacements.

Nothing is utopia. In fact any utopia is probably a dystopia.

Bicycling is actually good for your hip and knees. https://creakyjoints.org/diet-exercise/cycling-and-arthritis...

I suggest you look for more than just arthritis related information. The amount of mechanical wear it causes is significant over time.

That is not to say it doesn't have benefits but to suggest the entire population can haul their arse on a bike doing a 20mi round trip every day for 40 years and be hopping along nicely is a dream.

Not to mention the incidental injuries of which my colleagues suffer from, and myself going back a few years (hospital wasn't much fun)

No, come on, provide something concrete. Searching for "cycling joint wear" just provides unreliable sources saying you don't use your joints up, but it doesn't provide unreliable (or reliable) sources saying the opposite.

It is easy to avoid incidental injuries, and everyone would much rather the trauma of an incidental cycling accident than the trauma of a highspeed car crash. Mentioning them in just scaremongering. Ride at a safe speed on a proper path and look where your going. If you can't look where you're going, you're going too fast; slow down. (You can't say "proper paths don't exist", because we're talking about the dreamland in which they do, therefore, by definition, they do.)

20 mi round trips are unlikely. You get long trips in cities developed for cars.

And get a properly fitted bike. Japan, I'm looking at you.

This is 20th century nonsense that has been debunked. Your body is not a battery that you use up, use means regeneration. Not using your joints for strength production is more harmful than biking everywhere.

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