Infrastructure bill program will test the feasibility of road usage fees | Hacker News Reader

Infrastructure bill program will test the feasibility of road usage fees

fierceelectronics.com

14 pointsgeox76 comments

Is this the world we want to leave our children? Serious question, because I don’t think many of the US citizens that support this have children or if they do, if they live outside cities...

Most people hate toll roads, most people hate surveillance. Here we are implementing both.

I just drove home through part of rural Kentucky. I have to, to get too and from my farm. That farm that potentially feeds you. I’m going to be taxed more than the city folk, who eat my food. They don’t even realize it.

Now, I can’t raise my rates because you can buy your beef from Brazil or Argentina or from some bulk grower. All of whom this tax won’t impact because they have scale.

This, plus a bunch of tiny leeches will eventually suck the blood from my side business. Perhaps more importantly, it’ll suck the will of the people. The farmers around me are all old. A conversation I had with the guy next to me was “people just don’t wanna work any more”. He’s right. I work so hard, hard enough to buy a farm (while still doing tech during the days). I wanted to experience what they do (just raising grass fed cattle and bees for honey and a large garden to supplement my food), my operation is just starting, but I’m on year 3 of bees and been gardening forever just growing it every year.

Politicians and people just don’t get it. These kind of bills have a dramatic impact. Farmers by me make something like $40k net a year. A tax of a few hundred or thousand would push them to decide between dental care or food or fixing the car (they’d have to go car, food, dental). For me, I do this on the side, for them, they’re basically losing their livelihood. I’m not saying this tax is the one to push them over. But it’s just another cut forcing them to bleed out.

We don’t want to leave our children a nation where the critical infrastructure used by all of us is paid for?

As gas tax isn’t feasible due to the rapid transition to electric vehicles, leaving a road tax as the only equitable option to fund infrastructure O&M expenses. Where would one expect the funding come from if not from users of roads?

Where's all the other tax which is already too high going? How has the country been able to pay for critical infrastructure in past centuries? How will the working class people who have to drive everyday and can't work from home unlike the rich tech people pay these bills?

Respectfully, your profile says "In search of projects with maximum positive impact with zero financial return." which tells me you are already financially sufficient and won't be impacted by this. The workers like nurses, delivery, uber, manual labour etc who has to drive everyday gets pounded by this.

There is a balance to be found between regressive taxes (not good) and supporting unsustainable practices (also not good). If you’re commuting 100 miles round trip everyday, you should still be paying for those roads, just as we expect you to pay for your own fuel. I would also say incomes being stagnant for the last 40 years (due to globalization and the decline in unions and manufacturing jobs) has not helped folks who live in rural areas.

Do we subsidize folks who can’t afford this? If so, how much? For how long? Important questions to be explored.

Then read the odometer. You don’t need to subject everyone to constant surveillance to pay for roads.

Speaking only of the US, you have no right to privacy in public [1]. Existing law enables both government and private surveillance systems with little recourse.

Capturing mileage by geographic area would be an acceptable solution, but mileage delta over time would be insufficient to collect and disburse road taxes based on what is needed/used/traveled the most.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expectation_of_privacy

What do you gain from carrying water for tyrants?

> but mileage delta over time would be insufficient to collect and disburse road taxes based on what is needed/used/traveled the most.

This is already reality.

A commons that flourishes instead of wilting from tragedy.

https://www.theregreview.org/2019/08/21/kadich-fixing-shortf...

https://infrastructurereportcard.org/

A theorised benefit at the guaranteed cost of perpetual surveillance. No thanks.

Laws allowing this might be constitutional. They would still be Orwellian nightmares. (We probably need a constitutional amendment addressing the issue - but regardless the fact is a proposed law can be both authoritarian and constitutional).

If they’re serious about this, I will become a single issue voter.

Everyone benefits from the roads, it’s covered via the income tax. The fact I travel means I spread wealth. That transaction is income to someone else, which is taxed.

We didn’t become a wealthy nation by having tax burden.

> Everyone benefits from the roads, it’s covered via the income tax.

Everyone benefits from roads, but not everyone causes the same damage to them.

I mostly ride a bicycle (Apr-Dec), a motorcycle (Apr-Oct), or take public transit (Jan-Mar). I cause very little damage to roads compared to someone who drives a sedan or SUV everyday. I cause an infinitesimally small amount of damage compared to an 18-wheeler.

Why do I (on my 400 lb motorcycle) have to pay as much as someone in their 4000 lb (or more) automobile?

I'm happy to put my money into a risk pool for things like public health insurance, as I don't know what kind of cheap or expensive illness I may get in the future, but I do not think that kind of principle applies to road use. Shouldn't payment be proportional to use in this case?

Exactly. This type of stuff always seems very elitist and ends up hurting the poor working class the most. Politicians who are getting paid $174K with tax payer money and other expenses paid for have absolutely zero clue how the working class lives and survives.

Why not just report odometer readings annually, and tax based on that? It would avoid the need for implementing so much surveillance to track every movement of every car.

Are you serious? A large number of people will fill garbage numbers, just as they do for insurance estimates.

Every X years you take your car to the DMV. If you lie, your penalty is 5x your reward. If you don't go go the DMV, your registration or license is suspended.

It's not rocket science.

The article states the the type of roads you drive on will be a factor in your cost. Large semis taking highways will be charged less than small state roads that crumble under the weight.

I want more automation in life. Not less. Certainly not more dmv visits.

I want less surveillance in life. Not more.

Because just like the Apple CSAM fiasco, end-to-end surveillance is the point.

Nice username for this topic.

Apparently we no longer trust each other not to lie?

Honestly I feel this applies so much more widely; it’s frightening to think on too long.

Heinlein had a great quote on this: When a place gets crowded enough to require ID’s, social collapse is not far away. It is time to go elsewhere. The best thing about space travel is that it made it possible to go elsewhere.

You can regard the ID's part as any kind of serious tracking beyond your word about what happened, but unfortunately we're a bit off on the space travel...

Counter point: for a large portion of history nobody had IDs because most people were faceless serfs whose lives didn’t matter and still had very little personal autonomy. By Heinlein’s metric, medieval Europe must have been awesome, which is clearly not the case.

I'll give you the non cynical answer: the funds wouldn't go to the right places because you'd have no idea where the driving happened. So your home state gets paid for you to drive all over the country on a cross country road trip.

Is 100% accuracy necessary? Why not try a much cheaper and less invasive option before panopticon?

I would be surprised if the numbers were that different, especially with aggregations at the state level. Each state has people who drive all over the country. Each state has people who only stay local. If we were going granular, at like a county level, tourism to low population locations like the Grand Canyon might need to be accounted for, but states encompass enough area and people that just taking the total for each person in a state would probably be accurate enough.

That’s the current situation with the gas tax. Why are we trying to change it? Right now road usage is calculated based on observations made of the roads in question. You deploy some method of counting cars over a period of time and then make your estimates. Why do we need perfect surveillance when a rough count gives us all the data we need to know to determine service schedules? I’d bet that the current methods also cost a fraction of the amount it would to develop multiple apps plus car integration plus reporting systems plus training and salaries for the people that now manage that data and the ongoing maintenance of the apps and infrastructure. I’d also bet all those new costs would be pork for someone’s district.

How would accommodations be made for people such as myself, where around a third of the mileage on my truck is not on public roads?

Clarifying question: do you buy tax-free gas for the off-road miles today, or are you paying gas tax on all of the use anyway already?

I don't qualify for a gasoline tax exemption for my usage.

Edit: For more clarification, gasoline is not taxed in my state based on usage but on sales (though the distinction may not be significant in this case). If mileage is taxed based on usage, it seems reasonable (though perhaps not feasible) to tax it only based on usage of roads the government controls. There is also a number of people (though very unlikely to be a high portion of the population) who have registered vehicles that are rarely used on public roads. You might see this with street legal race cars or street legal off road vehicles, both of which may be mostly trailered except in rare cases. I certainly have no issue paying for what I use, but it can get burdensome when I'm penalized by the governemnt for not using government products or services.

People still regularly do odometer fraud in the used vehicle market; if you incentivize that metric, some people will game it. I agree that odometer readings do seem more appealing than omnipresent surveillance.

Odometers benefit from the fact that they’re supposed to be a permanent recording, I’m sure we could come up with a non digital way of making a permanent mark. I doubt even that would be necessary though since most people don’t cheat on their taxes and auditing a physical system is easier than tracking cash flow.

Odometers are based on axle rotations; you could game that by running larger tires than stock, for example. There are perverse incentives that are difficult to solve - GPS is imperfect and mandating it is also unappealing from a privacy perspective.

For most cars there isn’t much room to increase tire size but maybe you’re thinking of putting a lift kit on a civic, might be a bit hard to pass inspection.

You’re assuming the surveillance isn’t a feature.

Road usage fees can solve many big problems:

- Congestion, aka "traffic". Road usage is currently sold for pretty much nothing. Which means highly desirable road usage is overused, turning 20 minute commutes to 2 hours.

Setting road prices so that road demand matches supply would solve many such problems.

It also seems politically impossible, since most people have a strong emotional reaction against it. Maybe it can be eased in. I have some hope.

- Pay for real road wear. The gasoline tax is a very imprecise measure of road wear. Trucks cause orders of magnitude more road damage per gallon than cars, but a gas tax can't fix that. With each vehicle category paying closer to its actual costs, the system would be healthier.

- Electrical vehicles. The instigating cause for this. If we're abolishing gas driven cars, a gas tax can't really keep paying for roads.

> With each vehicle category paying closer to its actual costs, the system would be healthier.

Yes, but consider that road damage isn't the only thing that it makes sense to charge road users for. Even in a hypothetical system where road damage from weight didn't exist, roads would still deteriorate over time, plus as you say, there's the value of the space itself.

> - Congestion, aka "traffic". Road usage is currently sold for pretty much nothing. Which means highly desirable road usage is overused, turning 20 minute commutes to 2 hours.

> Setting road prices so that road demand matches supply would solve many such problems.

Finally, a solution to help poor people work from home too /s

This is very hard to make into a progressive tax when you take into account that structurally it will 1) raise prices for all goods and most services, disproportionately impacting the poor and 2) higher paying job categories demand less driving structurally. On top of that, it will significantly change incentives on where people live and work -- rural areas are already very expensive in terms of difficulty to acquire goods and services, so adding a massive tax because you have to drive a lot when you live there will significantly damage an already poor population and wreck property values. This is a correct cost application, but there's massive political power against it, both in terms of the Senate's structural ruralness and the structural rural power inside most states.

Paying the true cost when you haven’t been previously is understandably inconvenient. I find it absolutely fascinating how much this occurs across human civilization (benefit programs, infrastructure, fossil energy consumption are a few examples) and critiques of it are quietly ignored or pushed aside.

A Ponzi or pyramid scheme aren’t the right words, but it’s closer to a species wide confidence game at scale. Everyone knows it, no one wants to fix it, they just want a chair when the music stops.

I expect this scheme to raise costs for two main categories: trucks and big city commuters.

Regular rural car drivers should pay considerably less than they do now, at least if the total amount stay the same.

Just wanted to point out congestion charging in London exists.

"The Congestion Charge is a £15 daily charge if you drive within the Congestion Charge zone 07:00-22:00, every day, except Christmas Day (25 December)."

https://tfl.gov.uk/modes/driving/congestion-charge

This sounds a bit Orwellian to me. The whole charging to a credit card or an account, it really penalize as a person for driving a car. Maybe that’s not the right wording I should use, but this just feels like a terrible idea. Why can’t we add a tax to each kilowatt per hour that’s charging an electric vehicle, and then use that as the fee? We already have the technology to know when an EV is plugged into the grid. Why not add a tax to each kilowatt per hour, if the electric company collects, gives to the state, who then gives to the federal government, who then gives back to the states along with the gasoline tax fund.

What if EV owners produce their own solar power or whatever?

Anyway, the whole thing is moot. We shouldn’t be taxing EVs until they’re at least 50% of the vehicle pool. The LAST thing we need is to disincentivize purchase of EVs over ICEs. (Which in many states like Virginia we already do, since punitive higher-than-gas-tax EV fees are applied, have to pay sales and personal property tax on the battery, have to pay regular taxes on electricity… I think policy makers still think EV owners are getting a “free ride,” and aren’t aware of these extra fees.)

Until we have a full carbon tax, we shouldn’t be taxing EVs.

Agree. I also wonder whether the scale of energy needed to power EVs is “lost in translation”. Mine seems to use ~350 kWh per month of driving (rough figure, considerable long distance/rural).

Edit-that’s probably higher than average. Average could be half that. Figured 3-5 miles per kWh.

That’s a really good point and I agree, but I don’t agree on the carbon tax. I would prefer no tax at all.

Why not just tax tires based on tread depth, tread wear, load rating, and expected life? Offer rebates for tires that are replaced before their end of life. It would be mileage dependent and vehicle tech agnostic.

I certainly hope this doesn't happen. Tires are a huge part of cars being so much safer than they used to be, and we could take a major step back if tires started being optimized for taxes instead.

How so? The tax would be based on the tread wear rating, so it shouldn't affect compound selection nor tread design.

I'll see you a 4-wheeled passenger vehicle and raise you a 2-wheeled motorcycle. It's bad enough that tolls are based on the number of axles. Makes me wish I could ride a wheelie through the tollbooth.

There'll be a lot more people driving on the equivalent of racing slicks to avoid replacing their tyres and, I imagine, a black market for retreading

The first wouldn’t pass safety inspection.

Most cities do not have safety inspections. That's particularly an urban thing to do.

The state of Virginia does it.

There are many states that require safety inspections. The effectiveness of the instections is still up for debate (supposedly little to no statistical difference in crashes causes by mechanical issues).

Yeah, I’m not sure it’s super good to do state inspections. Ends up being kind of a tax on the poor. Was just pointing out that tire inspections are part of routine state inspections.

People driving on bald tires are supposed to get ticketed.

Many EU countries have vignette sticker programs for the interstate system. Curious how they are going to proceed with the rise of EV's. This isn't a new tax per se but a transition of the current gas tax. Either do one or the other but not both.

The tax should be close to proximity to current gas taxes as to not randomly screw people especially those with long commutes or travel. Most people who live in the country aren't going to be transitioning to EV's any time soon. Commercial trucking taxes should be a completely separate affair.

I can already see this being divisive across political party lines...

Vehicles already measure how many miles they travel, and we already have periodic inspections. Why not charge vehicles in proportion to the odometer delta?

This avoids the surveillance concerns, and is far cheaper to implement. It doesn't tell you how much of the traffic is on roads belonging to different entities, but it seems like sampling should be enough to get a fair decision?

Just about every outcome of this would be good. It would reduce miles traveled, give the chance to charge people for the damage they do to the road, and encourage more compact development patterns. We know by the way people choose to use or forgo toll roads that drivers place very little value on their time compared to small amounts of money, so they'd theoretically be very responsive to per mile charges. We'd then get more direct feedback that would hopefully demonstrate where actual demand, rather than extrapolated theoretical future demand, exists. The funds could go back to the places where the driving and consequent road damage occurred, too.

But I don't know how you implement this in such a low-trust environment, since it amounts to everyone's vehicles being tracked. I guess you could just make all the data move like credit card bills (e.g. data transmits weekly, so my upload for this coming Monday covers from 2 Mondays ago to last Monday.) That would prevent government entities and, in turn, everyone who has compromised those government systems, from having real time dragnet tracking.

Then there's massive incentive to cheat on the part of drivers, so you need this system to be perfectly secure despite the device being in the hands of the the would-be cheaters. Then, what happens if the device breaks, failing to report the data?

*Edited to clarify what's good about it.

Yikes. You know how much we all hate toll roads. Guess what now every road is a toll road.

Every road IS a toll road. We just pay it through a gas tax and as more cars go alternative fuels, the country loses money.

Trusting the people in power now wouldn’t make me any more ok with this. To find constant tracking of everyone acceptable, you would have to be naive enough to believe not only that your current masters are benevolent but that all the future masters would be too.

You would think recent experience would be enough to teach Americans that sometimes untrustworthy people win elections. Maybe don’t hand them absolute power ahead of time.

WTF? We already do this via the gas tax, all this does is tax you while causing accidents. They're only doing it this way because they're cowards.

Why not take a small part of the defense budget to pay for roads?

But then how will we destroy the roads of others to later be rebuilt by our contractors? /s

I agree with the sentiment that many “cost prohibitive” societal issues, such as roads or health care, could at least be alleviated to some degree if we stopped playing world police. (US centric POV)

Just add more tolls instead of surveillance?

This could actually be the perfect answer, for large roads like interstates. And if you left municipalities and regions solely responsible for building and maintaining everything smaller, it would probably work perfectly.

Surveillance is basically how new toll roads are implemented, at least where I live. It's much faster (and better for the environment) to take photos of license plates and bill later, than it is to make everyone stop at a toll booth.

Exactly. There's a very efficient system already in place. Just raise the toll amounts to fill up budget gaps and add new tolls on roads which don't have it.

There's no need to add more new types of surveillance.

Sure. I think what critics are getting at is that even without a difference in kind, adding toll cameras to every road creates a dragnet surveillance effect where you can track everyone’s movements by observing where they are tolled. It’s a valid concern, I just don’t know what the privacy-preserving alternative is (other than an odometer tax).

Wow, kind of surprised to see people being okay with this.

- This will disproportionately hit the poor and working class people even more on top of the pandemic impacts they are already suffering from.

- Rich tech workers for example who get to work from home won't be paying much at all. Meanwhile the poor labour workers/nurses/delivery etc jobs which can't be achieved without driving to/for work will get the burden.

- I am not sure how they can achieve this honestly without adding even more surveillance.

And for what? So more money gets into the pockets of the corrupt and bloated government so they can spend it on wars?

Exactly.

https://cityobservatory.org/ten-things-more-inequitable-that...

The link says:

> Playing the “equity” card as an objection to pricing the roads actually turns out to be a way to advance the interests not of the poor, but of those who benefit already from the wealth of subsidies to car ownership. We seem to be perfectly fine with all kinds of inequity in our transportation finance system, so long as it benefits wealthier car owners.

I am not wealthy by any means, don't own a car, house, stocks etc. I walk or take the bus. So that's not me they are talking about. But I know several friends and family who are nurses, Uber drivers, farmers, delivery people etc. They are going to be impacted by this the most.

Your link tries to claim that just because we have already horrible inequities, we shouldn't complain. That's just a silly nihilistic way of looking at things.

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