California launches pilot to charge drivers by miles, possibly replacing gas tax | Hacker News Reader

California launches pilot to charge drivers by miles, possibly replacing gas tax

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13 pointskeploy29 comments

The first comment there on Reddit from Regayov nails it: „ I don’t think politicians have the same definition of the word “replace” that their constituents do. What they really mean is “in addition to”.“

The link to the article: https://www.autoblog.com/2024/05/26/california-launching-pil...

From the article, it is touted as a gas tax replacement, not a gas tax supplement. They could also just charge tax on EVs by mileage rather than a flat fee per year, and then just leave the gas tax alone for ICEs. The big problem is how to tax PHEVs where the two taxes would meet.

Didn't see it in the context of EVs and ICEs but it makes sense and then their idea would cover PHEVs as well.

What I don't understand is how would they find out how many miles have been driven.

Odometers are really easy to check these days, especially on an EV. It could easily just be a legal attestation, where you specify the mileage when you register the car and then the mileage at renewal. If you cheat, the gig is eventually up when you transfer title, or you could just have an in person check every two years. If this becomes common in the future, the odometer can be transmitted straight from the car since it’s hardly considered private data.

PHEVs get double taxed since they can drive on electric or gas. They get taxed on gas as normal, but also taxed by miles driven. You would have to make some guesstimates about miles driven on electric, or the car could just record that info directly.

> In theory, drivers would be able to choose how the state tracks their mileage. They could hook up an electronic device to their car, use the car's built-in tracking system or send Caltrans a picture of the odometer.

So they just want to track where everybody is going unless you opt out? How long until they mandate the tracking device in new vehicles?

Most modern cars already track you. And sell to data brokers. A brave new world!

This sounds like a regressive tax, since lower income workers often have much longer commutes.

> sounds like a regressive tax, since lower income workers often have much longer commutes

Ideally it's related to the wear and tear the vehicle places on the road. That's a function of distance. But also weight and axle count.

And does it distinguish between heavy and light vehicles? Heavy vehicles cause much more wear and tear on the road. That's something I'd love to see taken into account.

Very good point.

You can just tax tires. And collecting the tax has the added incentives of being much easier to administer and not privacy invading.

I can just see those bare tires on the 101... And now people won't be stealing rims, they'll be stealing tires.

Yeah, I like the idea of taxing the tires at first, but then you start thinking about people postponing replacing their tires to avoid tax, and creating dangerous situations on the road.

It reminds me a bit of garbage collection in Amsterdam; lots of cities try to let people pay for the amount of trash they produce, but Amsterdam will let people thrown away their trash for free, and be happy they throw it away properly, because taxing that is going to create a mess.

Taxing gas is probably the easiest way to do it. Heavier cars probably use more gas than lighter ones, right? Except EVs don't use gas at all and still use the roads. There's just no easy solution.

Replacing tires already costs money. How much would an extra tax change behaviour? It is definitely something to consider but doesn't seem like a definite issue.

Quick back-of-the-napkin calculation: Let's assume a tyre life of 31,000 miles. At 31 mpg (supposedly the average consumption in California) that's 1000 gallons. Gas tax in California is currently 0.579 $ per gallon, which gives 579 $ in gas taxes over the lifetime of a set of tyres. So the tyre tax would have to be around the order of 145 $ per tyre.

All tax is like this. The rich can always find and lobby for creative loopholes.

It’s usually the lower middle class population that gets shafted, and bizarrely the activists among them keep fighting for the government to impose more taxes.

Knowing California, there will probably be yet another carve-out for people in the lowest income category. But it will require them to fill out more paperwork and increase the workload for an already large state bureaucracy, and be poorly advertised so that even more resources are spent to get the message out. For what is probably not a lot of money compared to the spiraling cost of housing. Activists will pat themselves on the back for a job well done, ignoring the larger problem.

The rich will figure out a way to make these taxes not apply to them, just like how many take advantage of expensive new EV subsidies, solar generation subsidies, or property taxes.

And people wonder why the middle class keeps on getting smaller.

No activists fight for taxes that would target the wealthy, such as capital gains taxes and wealth taxes and are shut down by established wealthy interests.

WFH also suffer less from a miles driven based tax.

If they're using the roads less, shouldn't they?

Well, not all employers/occupations offer WFH, so those who must drive a long way to a low paying in person job suffer more from milage tax than a remote worker. This is regressive.

Taxes should pay for use. I hate the labeling of something as regressive because it will hit one group more than another when that one group simply uses more of the resource.

I'm not sure that's a very tenable position. To play devil's advocate - the taxes I pay go towards many, many, things which I never (directly) use; you can only abstractly argue that such things benefit society as a whole, which eventually probably benefits me, even if I myself don't make use of them. For example, maybe you believe this, and I'm not saying it's right or wrong, but should people who have kids in school pay more taxes allocated to schools than people that don't have any kids? Right now everyone pays equally. Should roads be the same or different? Having a transportation network benefits society as a whole, whether or not you even drive.

We need to pivot to this. As hybrid and battery electric vehicles become more common we're essentially defunding a range of services that depend on gas tax revenue.

Now we can come up with an alternative way of generating revenue, but what is clear is that the gas tax itself is no longer effective and sustainable.

>pivot

>Now we can come up with an alternative way

Spoken like a true SF commie.

Sounds like someone who works from home and drives a heavy premium vehicle for short distances comes out on top here. Pays little for miles driven, and not penalized for the relatively higher wear and tear per mile.

I'd like to see them charging for all miles driven, not just those in-state. Do that by getting the owner to report the car odometer value every year and charging for however much it went up.

Stop cheating by having existing numberplate recognition cameras keep a log of the distance you must have driven and investigating if you reported a lower number than they saw you do. Also have any police pullover reporting the number at the time of the stop.

> omnipresent surveillance to track when and where I drive

How about no

It’s difficult for me to imagine an actual, possible future more dystopian than this.

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