Virginia maps out optional per-mile road fee program for 2022 launch
virginiamercury.com
virginiamercury.com
The "fair share" most small cars - especially fuel efficiency focused designs that remove as much mass as possible - should be paying approximately $0. Road damage per-axel is proportional to the weight carried by the axel raised to the fourth power! A fully loaded 5 axel tractor trailer does thousands of times more damage than one of the small electric cars they are worried about taxing.
The "fair" solution where maintenance costs are paid in proportion to the actual sources of damage would be to ignore most carts entirely and raising the registration fees on the vehicle actually damaging the roads the heavy trucks. As vehicle weight grows, their responsibility for maintenance costs exponentially.
But I agree that taxes should be damage-based. Tax those lorries to hell, if they want lower taxes, they should buy one with more axles and more tires per axle.
Consumers can also be made whole by removing vehicle taxes on cars or subsidizing other modes of transport that consumers use from those trucking price increases.
I don’t have the data to argue either way.
But do you take into account how much road use is consumed, and what type of roads, and where they are?
Imagine someone would do this to bike lanes, railroads, or optical fiber. The facts that gasoline cars are a problem for the climate and that cars take up too much space to be generally available in dense cities have nothing to do with roads per se.
Would also add there is an miles travelled does not equate to time on the road (highway vs local driving) and state funding has biases as well (highway vs local roads, urban vs rural infrastructure)
We can debate which we'd rather pay but one way or another the cost would come down to us.
The Grenadier Guard?
This isn't so much unfair, but it does remove incentives for the shippers to cause less damage to the roads.
That's not true. But the truth is even worse than that. The effect is highly non-linear. Depending on type, composition, age and temperature, the road material require minimum load to become plastic. Below that critical load the surface can withstand wear and tear of practically infinite amount of trips (have you ever seen a road where the surface was rubbed away by passing cars?)
Of course, some aging processes continue regardless of whether cars are or are not using roads.
From the article: One challenge may be convincing drivers there’s a benefit to installing a mileage tracking system in their vehicle and easing any privacy concerns about the device creating a data trail showing where they’ve been. The state work group recommends giving users the option of using either a GPS or non-GPS tracking system and shoring up data protection laws to safeguard any location-based information, similar to an existing law that shields information on vehicles passing through tolls.
“Legislation passed to protect this data can be tailored to address when and how the information can be shared and used and can increase customer confidence that personal information is protected,” the interim report says. “Confidence in the protection of the data generated may enhance customer willingness to participate in the program.”
Jonathan Gifford, director of the Center for Transportation Public-Private Partnership Policy at George Mason University, said the privacy issue is “a live one” but he thinks it can be resolved by giving users options about how their mileage is tracked and what happens to their data.
“Some of the options out there do have a device that is plugged into your car’s data port and keeps track of when and where you drive but it doesn’t share that information,” he said. “It’s sort of a tracking device but it doesn’t share the data.”
This was a reversal from earlier promises that it would only be used for contact tracing Covid19 exposures.
[1] https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapore/singapore-police-f...
The goal posts of what is fair are so arbitrary/subjective as to have no meaning when it come to taxes.
Just say what is happening, one group (rightly or wrongly) wants another group to bear more of the burden for paying for something.
That's what they mean by fair share, the homes are still connected to the grid, and can use it with their rooftop solar doesn't generate enough power, but they pay nothing or close to nothing when an electric line needs repair, their nonsolar neighbors pay it for them. I don't know if 'not paying the fair share' or 'freeloading' are the right terms, what would you call that situation? If the distribution fee is bothering people, why don't they disconnect the grid and pay nothing?
I mean, yes, the odometer cannot measure how much of your mileage is in Virginia versus other states, or how much is on what kinds of roads, but it is so much cheaper to implement that I would expect it to still work out much better?
This is based purely on my experience on trying to add bike lanes in my city. It was fairly easy to get it done on our sidestreets, the city owns those, but major streets are federal or state owned and will take years due to bureaucracy.
I still agree with the other's posters that tracking is conveniently useful for other things.
I just checked and according to the NHTSA cars over ten years old aren't even required to have a functional odometer (you just have to disclose it when you sell it). I'm not sure how common odometer fraud is, or would be under your proposed law, but the bigger the incentive the more likely I think it would be to occur.
You are right though most people would comply with the law.
We could divide the money how we do today, or could sample road usage to estimate an appropriate division. We don't need per-car level data.
Bypass: https://web.archive.org/web/20210902052154/https://www.virgi...
Equally this takes into no account, how heavy the vechile is, or indeed how impacting enviromentally it is. It add's no incentive at all, and equally, a light small efficient vehicle will be less impacting upon road upkeep than a heavy HGV.
Now - what I feel is needed is a quota system in which you get a mileage quota and if you go over that, you pay per extra mile.
What are the impacts beyond this - well, this does lay down the foundation to make roads in effect virtual toll-roads and that may well for good or bad, may well incentive private roads now a consumer base has been more conditioned to paying for usage of a road.
I love Virginia but they can fuck off with that: