Utah and Oregon Now Require GPS Trackers on EVs, Tax Drivers by the Mile
pjmedia.com
pjmedia.com
Somebody else suggested taxing tires, but that would be hard as tires are obtainable out of state.
The underlying facts of road maintenance are that basically all of road maintenance (except that attributable to erosion of the roadbed) repairs damage caused by heavily-loaded trucks. Objectively, road damage goes exponentially with axle load. Cars' axle loading is so far below that of laden trucks as to to be wholly negligible. Thus, the justifiable taxation for road usage, if any, should fall on truck operators.
Car owners benefit from truck traffic about equally with non-owners, however many cars they have, but moreso if their income is higher. So, the legitimately defensible way to pay for roads is straight from the general fund.
GPS trackers are a massive privacy overreach and people should not be okay with them. They are not necessary to levy road usage taxes.
Maintenance costs for existing road surfaces are caused by trucks. But the majority of costs for roads are still new construction, and things like intersections and traffic revisions. All of which are prompted by driver traffic.
And besides, trucks already have additional taxes that they are assessed based on their load weight.
Everyone benefits from roads' existence and from the freight delivered by truck, with or without owning a car. So tying taxes artificially to any selective use factors is inherently flawed. Tying it to GPS logs is worse.
So if you are only looking at who is incurring repair/maintenance cost, you are still only caring about a tiny cost center overall of DOTs.
I'm not arguing that GPS is a good idea, but tying road income to overall road usage is a good positive incentive that we don't want to axe completely.
1. 54 cents in state excise tax
2. 18.4 cents in federal excise tax
3. An average of 3.7% in state and local sales taxes
4. 23 cents for California's cap-and-trade program to lower greenhouse gas emissions
5. 18 cents for the state's low-carbon fuel programs
6. 2 cents for underground gas storage fees
4, 5, and 6 are not applicable to EVs. In California EVs are avoiding ~$15 per full charge in taxes (according to comparison of my 18 gallon ICE car @ $3/gal (pre-tax gas)). Not intending this to be anti-ev, just noting the tax avoidance benefits of EVs.
source: https://www.cbs8.com/article/traffic/gas-prices/gap-between-...
EV's in each of these states pay a higher registration fee than non-EV vehicles. By enrolling in these programs EV owners pay the same registration fee as for non-EV vehicles and then pay per mile up to the amount of the normal EV registration fee.
There was a Oregon senate bill introduced this year to make participation mandatory for EVs but the bill died in committee.
That's fundamentally the same problem: you're ostensibly taxing road users to cover road maintenance (except fuel taxes don't cover the whole amount), and EV vehicles aren't paying those taxes but are clearly using the roads.
On the other hand, the idea of having a government tracker in my car all the time is beyond icky. I'd much rather overspend a little via a simple annual odometer reading than have a government agency with access to detailed location logging.
A federal annual odometer reading that then distributes funds to states based on vehicle miles travelled and road network size solves the jurisdiction problem, but would never fly in the US as federal overreach.
The argument that they're making is that they only want to tax for miles driven inside the state, not for miles driven elsewhere -- and that requires location information.
It's an argument that makes no sense to me at all.
This would require making "unmetered" plugs illegal.
[1] https://www.consumerreports.org/cars/hybrids-evs/can-electri....
How long until they decide to start using that data for more than just taxes?
No, not from a monetary perspective. It simply wouldn't work, and that can't be ignored.
I think a workable approach might be having two options a person could choose from: 1. GPS (cheaper if you drive out of state often), 2. based on total mileage traveled.
For this to work, the metering would have to be in the car, with some government regulated system included in the power management. I think that's doable, but not for existing cars. A GPS could be easily installed in to any existing car, non-invasively, and mileage is already tracked.
Preventing tax avoidance is a terrible excuse for Big Brother surveillance.
We wouldn’t even need to touch entitlement programs if we just got rid of wasteful pork spending and streamlined some of the bureaucracy.
2. Roads need to be paid for somehow.
It's not even law yet here in Michigan and it has already got people talking.
A lender keeping track of the collateral for their lent money does not seem crazy to me. If anything, it should lower costs for responsible borrowers as the lender’s risk is reduced.
Spouses can also track each other via Find my Friends or similar apps. If there is a lack of trust, then it would already be obvious.
Lol, wtf is this website?
If you go to read the actual reporting, the Oregon administrators are much more even-keeled about the thing:
> "I understand that concern, but anybody that has a cell phone — the ability is already there for it to be tracked," Lively said. "Your cell phone is probably the most trackable device we own and almost everybody has one. But there are several options. We made options that people could just annually, monthly turn in their mileage. So they can tell us where the mileage started, where the mileage didn't, so that's one way they can report versus reporting from the car — so there's several ways in which people can report their mileage.
> "But the key in doing it automatically is the systems now in place allow us to know whether they're driving on state highways or private roads, because our goal isn't to charge you for driving on private roads but only when they're using the state transportation system."
https://www.kgw.com/article/news/local/the-story/odot-gas-ta...
This is legitimately one of the stupidest arguments that could be made for systems like this. First, owning a cell phone is optional, and even if you do own one, it's not that uncommon for people to shut them down for privacy reasons.
"You already put up with this device doing a bad thing, so you should be OK with other devices doing the bad thing as well" is a very weak argument.
Also, the quote makes it pretty clear that this program IS optional if people would rather just report their mileage manually.
This is going to be abused to hell and back.
A much simpler and privacy minded solution is to tax the chargers, just like taxing the gas pumps.
Before buying an EV, I was super concerned with public charging infrastructure.
Now as an owner, I’ve only used public charging enough to verify it works. With 300+ miles of range it just isn’t a concern, I either have enough to go and return, or am staying long enough to charge the car enough to return (I visit family 200 miles away at least monthly).
I’ve owned the car for 2.5 months and 5,200 miles. 12% of my charging has been public, and 43% of that was in the first 3 days because the car didn’t come with a charger and it took a week to arrive.
So based on my own experience, I’d expect public charging to be a negligible single digit %.