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Comment by rmetzler | Hacker News Reader

I don't know much about American taxes (not even much about German taxes) but I think roads should be funded through some tax which is connected to cars or fuel.

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In America we have state and federal fuel taxes (per gallon) collected at the pump. Almost all of the federal tax is sent back to the states in the form of interstate highway money (and is used as a carrot/whip to impose federal regulations on states). In Illinois' case the fuel tax is supposed to go to maintaining and improving roads but, like any big pot of money, it is frequently diverted to the general fund and/or maintaining Chicago's transit system (much to the chagrin of the rest of the citizens of the state).

At this point unmaintained roads are the least of Illinois' concerns. The state has massively underfunded state pensions combined with a fleeing and aging population that probably means some for of bankruptcy protection in the not so distant future. Before that happens all available money will be used to fund pension payouts due to how politics works in Illinois and the roads will start looking like a set of a Mad Max movie.

Source: I was born and raised in Illinois (~40 miles from Galesburg) and most of my family still lives there.

> it is frequently diverted to the general fund and/or maintaining Chicago's transit system (much to the chagrin of the rest of the citizens of the state)

I don't know for sure but if it is anything like New York and upstate, I suspect you will find Chicago pays for you guys much more than you think. I think it is almost guaranteed that overa Chicago pays for you and not the other way around, the only question is magnitude.

In any case, diverting money from road construction to public transit is a good thing.

In the United States there is a gas tax but it hasn’t been adjusted for a long time and pays less than half of the cost of the roads. EVs are also becoming a factor so what I’d like would be an annual tax based on the combination of vehicle weight & pollution, especially since the comically large vehicles a lot of solo office commuters use take up enough space to prevent many roads from handling two lanes of traffic without someone pulling over to the side.

The other big factor we have is that there’s a lot of soft subsidy built in with things like minimum parking requirements, and a lot of both road and parking infrastructure is paid for by developers when first constructed but falls back to the city or private owners for maintenance. That will only make the current imbalance worse over time.

A very interesting thing I learned once is that road damage occurs at the 4th power of the weight. Every doubling of weight is 16 times more road damage. This drove home how much the road damage is probably almost all large trucks.

> The math works out that an empty 18-wheeler causes 80,000 times more damage than my plug-in. When it’s fully loaded, it causes 208,000 time more damage. Both reports conclude that heavy trucks cause over 99 percent of the road and bridge damage, yet the trucking industry contributes only 35 percent of the road taxes.

https://www.concordmonitor.com/Wear-and-tear-on-the-roads-23...

Buttigieg was pushing a vehicle mileage tax (VMT) based on how much you drive.

Eliminate the gas tax, just charge directly based on the amount of road use.

Saying it is funded through some tax misses the point. Yes, of course it is, but that's a bunch of resources diverted to maintaining roads.

In Germany you have the KFZ Steuer which brings in about €9.4b every year. You pay KFZ when you have a car.

[0] https://www.bundesfinanzministerium.de/Content/DE/Downloads/...

That’s a tax that goes to the federal government only. It pays for federal roads (Autobahn and Bundesstraße) and badly at that - the latest numbers I could find are for 2018 and there, expenses were above 10 billion euros. (1) State roads and roads in cities are paid from the states and the cities budget, the KFZ-Steuer does nothing to offset those - it’s all financed from other taxes and fees.

(1) https://www.deutschlandinzahlen.de/tab/deutschland/infrastru...

In Germany, there is no direct link of a tax and where that income is being used to - it all goes into a big tax pot, and everything is being paid out of that. What you mean is a "Gebühr" (roughly translated to "a fee"), which can be linked to a particular expense, but vehicle taxes and gas taxes are specifically NOT a Gebühr.

I very much meant what I said: Taxes do not go into the same huge pot from which they are distributed some taxes go to the federal governments pot, others to the states, yet others to the city/local council (Einkommenssteuer and Gewerbesteuer for example). There is some redistribution happening, but it’s pretty specific (Länderfinanzausgleich, the federal government pays for some costs which are handled by the local governments). So while taxes are not bound to a purpose, but they are bound to the part of the government they go to: Federal taxes go to the Bundeshaushalt, which pays for the Bundesstraßen and Bundesautobahnen (hence the name) and since all other roads are not paid by the federal government - this they can’t be paid for by federal taxes (among them the KFZ-Steuer)

> It pays for federal roads (Autobahn and Bundesstraße) and badly at that

If the tax brings in €9.4B and the expenses are €10B per year, that seems pretty balanced to me.

The expenses for federal roads are about 1/2 or 1/3 of all road costs. City roads costs are a bit hard to come by, but are in the same ballpark as the Autobahn, and I could not find a good number for Landstraßen, which would be paid for by the states. It’s not balanced at all.

In Germany, landlords have to pay a percentage of the cost of roads built around it. In some cases this might be a huge percentage, depending on how much the road is used by the public.

Only once, when the road is built, ongoing maintenance is paid from general taxes.

Actually, no, when the road is being overhauled, the town can come back with you with another invoice. See "Straßenbaubeiträge" [1]. Sometimes, these are prohibitively expensive, forcing homeowners to abandon their property, often amounting to several 10k Euros [2].

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stra%C3%9Fenbaubeitrag [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPdigJ6dOL8

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