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Comment by SilverElfin | Hacker News Reader

Not only are they spreading, but existing ones have tolls constantly increased. Some were built with the idea of the toll expiring once the costs of construction were paid off. But instead they just become a new state tax source forever, subsidizing out of control spending.

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Roads cost money, costs are just catching up to reality. If folks are unhappy now when taxes are at historical lows while we accumulate all sorts of off book debt (in this case, “deferred maintenance”), further sadness is ahead. If one does not care to pay for roads, my recommendation is to live somewhere one doesn’t need roads, or the per capita costs are lower due to density (urban areas, broadly speaking), making paying the costs more palatable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_Trust_Fund

https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiative... (“In 2021, state and local governments spent $206 billion, or 6 percent of direct general spending, on highways and roads. As a share of state and local direct general expenditures, highways and roads were the fifth-largest expenditure in 2021.”)

https://www.resilience.org/stories/2016-04-14/unpave-low-tra... (“The U.S. has 4.1 million miles of roads (1.9 million paved, 2.2 million gravel). About 3 million miles of roads have less than 2,000 vehicles a day, less than 15% of all traffic. The paved portion of these low-volume roads ought to be evaluated for their potential to be unpaved.”)

(very similar to how climate costs are causing agriculture and insurance costs to snap to reality, with similar sadness; debts coming due)

We could fund roads (and everything else) using a progressive income tax, so that everyone pays and the wealthiest would pay the largest share.

Not opposed, but to achieve this with the current election cycle cadence will take at least 5 years, if not longer (Congressional cycles). Also, I think Medicare for All is a more pressing use of tax revenue than pouring good money after bad into sprawl infrastructure that will continue to decline in use as rural America hollows out and people keep moving to urban cores. To observe this, overlay predicted rural America population decline with road infrastructure, which you can also use to forecast which road infrastructure we should retreat from maintaining over time.

“Everyone wants civilization but nobody wants to pay taxes” is a hard concept to solve for, most especially when those with nothing or no tax liability (very roughly the bottom 60% of Americans) advocate for the wealthiest from a failed mental model.

Paying for the road-time you use, like any shared resource, seems fair to me. It would be nice to see decreases in earned income taxes though.

If the retort to this is it impacts poorer people more, then that is a separate problem fixed by redistributing more cash, so that the wealth gap is smaller.

Edit: to respond to reply about trucks causing more damage to road:

Construction costs are one cost of roads, but another cost is time cost due to congestion (and resulting effects of delays due to congestion). A variable rate toll that also incorporates congestion is the ideal way to manage road use, much like paying more for electricity or other resources at peak demand to modulate demand.

Taxes on gas?

Gas is a different shared resource (e.g. it’s effects on air quality/climate change) than road capacity.

The gas tax is supposedly to pay for roads. Now that they are supposedly paying for the roads via tolls, I guess we can expect that they will not decrease the gas tax but add another tax that supposedly pays for the roads.

There are still all the roads that aren't toll roads that still need that tax revenue to support.

The gas tax has never paid for full road maintenance. It's always been subsidized from other funds.

Unfortunately, it hasn’t seen a big jump in a while, all cars are getting heavier and electrified, and gas mileage is going up.

Odometry tax when you register the vehicle, with tiers based on the curb weight.

Also higher gas taxes for carbon reasons.

Add a mechanism for folks to file for a rebate for distance driven on private roads (an uncle's driveway is roughly a quarter mile, so half a mile six days a week 52 times each year would equal a 156 mile reduction).

The vast majority of damage on the road is caused by vehicles with high axle load, e.g. trucks, especially overloaded trucks. IIRC the damage is proportional to fourth power of the axle load.

As a consequence, personal cars barely register.

It would make sense to collect toll from trucks only, and possibly weigh them all, because overloaded trucks are extra damaging to the road.

If we only had trucks on the road, we’d need less road, right? The street where I live could be about a third of the width if it were not for personal cars.

To carry this further, of maintenance taxes for roads were structured appropriately, trucks would pay so much that it would be prohibitively expensive to ship across the states in Semis. We'd likely see a resurgence of rail transport.

Rhode Island is trying this. The gantries have been up for years, but it was challenged in court by the trucking lobby. The state prevailed with some concessions, and is planning to reinstate the truck tolls soon.

Probably, due to the small size of RI, it will just cause goods not bound directly for RI to divert along I-395 up through CT and MA, and I-290 and I-495 in MA.

> If the retort to this is it impacts poorer people more

We've ended up, though, with a growing wealth gap and more tolls.

As my grandfather wisely observed: there's no such thing as a temporary tax. I have seen this to be true in my own lifetime, as each and every time a "temporary" tax increase would expire it gets extended.

laughs in New York I-90

Yep. It's great that I have to pay to use this stretch of I-90 and then on top of that if I end up at the wrong rest area on a Sunday I won't be able to access every vendor (because they picked Chick-Fil-A at some locations).

I assume automatic tolls via transponders tend to make tolls a lot less transparent in practice.

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