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Comment by angiosperm | Hacker News Reader

It would suffice to track their charge/discharge cycles. GPS seems like overreach, and ought to be vulnerable to court challenge.

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.

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Even easier, if the intent is to charge a tax per mile, simply record the mileage every year for inspection and registration renewal and charge based on the difference.

GPS trackers are a massive privacy overreach and people should not be okay with them. They are not necessary to levy road usage taxes.

> 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.

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.

It is true that new construction accounts for a large fraction of the total cost. But the extra truck tax revenue is far, far below the proportional cost of damage trucks cause.

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.

The vast, vast majority of roads are never touched by a freight truck. If you think of all of the roads built to support every house, apartment, suburban intersection they may cost upwards of a million dollars a mile to build but require little maintenance once built.

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.

My thinking was that there's been court pushback against dragnet requests on Google, etc but would that apply to data the government has mandated drivers provide?

It applies even more, as the 4th amendment limits specifically government searches.

Power utility bill as well for home charging.

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