"First off, the bill wants businesses (restaurants etc.) with free charging stations to print at the bottom of every receipt how much of the customer’s bill goes towards subsidizing charging"
Yeah, let's put the burden of this legislation on small businesses, for starters. I will rhetorically ask, who exactly are these legislators bending over for?
Let's say a customer charges for an hour at 5 kilowatt, so 5 kilowatt-hour. So the restaurant subsidizes less than a dollar worth of electricity. And not everyone uses an EV, so the bill would say something like "10 cents of your bill went towards subsidizing free charging for customers with an EV". Everybody will compare this to gasoline prices and conclude EVs are cheap to operate.
On reflection, yeah, bring it on. I can see it now: "well shit, Edna, maybe those damn hippies have the right idea after all."
Sorry, no. A particularly loud subset of the population has a "Don't tell me what to do. I tell YOU what to do" mentality. They will scream for a refund. You cannot reason with these people. At best, you can ignore them.
Certainly seems more informative than how much the charging cost.
At best this is legislators upset about missing tax revenue from fossil fuels, but its more realistically just reactionary bureaucrats stomping their feet as gas and diesel prices soar north of $5 a gallon. I suspect more than a few are stuck eating crow in their oversized SUV's and pickup trucks.
I am no fan of trucks and a big fan of EVs, but those SUV's pay the taxes that keep the roads (somewhat) functional for the EVs to drive on. NC revenue from gas taxes has been declining already which is why the infrastructure is so bad.
You should be realistic that some kind of tax is coming for electric vehicles and you will not be happy when they tell you to report your EV's milage to the IRS every year to make up for the shortfall in gas taxes.
Hi, I live in North Carolina. I pay more road taxes on my EV than I ever paid in state gas taxes, so I guess it's the other way around: I'm keeping the roads functional for the SUVs to drive on. North Carolina, like 30+ other states, already charges an annual fee to all electric vehicle owners to make up for the gas tax. It's been collected since 2014. It's $130 per year, which brings my annual registration and property tax bill to about $500 per vehicle.
Here's a map of the states with EV taxes to make up for gas taxes. It's from 2021, so already out of date, but most of the US map is colored in with fees ranging from $50 to $235. North Carolina proposed raising the tax from $130 to $275 in 2019, but the bill didn't pass.
https://leg.mt.gov/content/Committees/Interim/2021-2022/Tran...
https://www.ncdot.gov/about-us/how-we-operate/finance-budget...
They should have raised the tax in 2019 to fix the roads.
Report Ranks North Carolina As Having Some Of The Worst Infrastructure In America https://www.charlottestories.com/report-ranks-north-carolina...
Out of the 50 states it ranks 39th. That’s not good.
https://infrastructurereportcard.org/state-item/north-caroli...
18,407 bridges, 9.3% of which were structurally deficient in 2019
14% of roads are in poor condition. Each motorist pays $500 per year in costs due to driving on roads in need of repair
https://www.wral.com/report-bad-roads-cost-nc-drivers-billio...
Washington, D.C.-based transportation nonprofit TRIP says deteriorating, congested and unsafe roads across North Carolina cost the state’s drivers a total of $10.3 billion annually. In the Raleigh and Durham areas, it works out to $1,442 per driver each year.
The NC Chamber Foundation is calling for the state to phase out the gas tax and replace it with other sources of revenue. It advocates for a mileage-based user fee, adjustments to the highway use tax and dedicating part of the statewide sales tax to transportation projects to help make up the difference.
Now why don't politicians do something like that...
If the goal is to make a road user pay proportionally for the damage they do a per-gallon tax is not the solution.
Better yet, start a political group in NC that accepts donations from restaurants for the amount paid for by EV drivers to charge. The majority of EV drivers would happily pay it, and the money might go to a good cause.
(the same party that forces every package of non-hormone-boosted dairy to feature a disclaimer that hormone dairy is the same blah blah blah. More small government!)
I have less representation at the federal level than the 13 colonies had with Parliament with their "virtual representation".