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Comment by hamdingers | Hacker News Reader

$130/yr? No matter how heavy the vehicle or how many miles you drive?

This is all so silly. Every other mode of publicly funded transportation infrastructure has direct user fees based on usage, why not roads? Some combination of highway tolls and a weight-based mileage fee.

But that would be an impossible sell because Americans have the impression that roads spring from the ground for free, since they're paid for indirectly with other taxes and figuring out how much of your personal tax bill goes to roads is nearly impossible.

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> $130/yr? No matter how heavy the vehicle or how many miles you drive?

It could be worse. In the "Big Beautiful Bill" they originally had a $250/yr EV tax in it, which then got bumped up to $500 by a Representative who is/was a car dealer owner, before finally being removed because they decided it would be too much effort to make the states collect it for them.

Some people don't want the government keeping track of what they're doing, unless the government has reason to believe they're doing something illegal. This sentiment is so strong to Americans that it is expressly stated as a reason for rebelling against British rule. Taxing consumables allows per-distance taxing without the tracking that comes from toll roads or mileage tracking.

Also, lots of publicly funded transportation infrastructure fees don't closely track usage. Many popular public transit systems charge a single fee for unlimited continuous usage or charge per day/month. There's other weird quirks, for example when going the San Francisco Bay area, I always plan my stops in a clockwise direction, because then I don't have to pay bridge tolls when traveling in that direction (north and east), but would in the opposite direction (south and west).

Gas has a nice linear relationship with road usage. (Farms can currently buy tax exempt gas and diesel explicitly for this reason).

A lot of states have experimented with mileage-based tracking for EVs but there is no realistic way to do it that's not super fiddly or privacy invasive.

Couldn't states take an odometer reading at tag renewal time and charge based on distance traveled? It wouldn't perfectly capture usage of in-state roads, but it should be close enough on average, it reuses existing mechanisms, and it doesn't require any sort of location tracking.

Individuals would have to track miles out of state or off of public roads.

It sounds like it would be easy but states would open themselves up to endless nickel-and-diming or fraud.

No, I mean just charge based on the odometer reading. Don't offer exemptions. The state where the car is registered collects the tax for every mile driven. It would lead to some mistakes in the small scale (what if I live in northern Oregon but do most of my driving in southern Washington, or vice versa?) but it seems like a serviceable alternative for the macro-scale problem of how states can replace the funding from gas taxes. And it does so without the expense or privacy invasions of schemes like automatic plate tracking or in-car GPS tracking.

Washington state has a pilot to do this, it will be mandatory in a few years.

I agree with your comment a lot. My ideal for road pricing is something like a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_miles_traveled_tax multiplied by weight (maybe squared, due to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law of road damage).

I do think that a lot of people think that public roads are "free" and cost nothing to build and maintain. It is really hard to make people think about where the labor, materials, and funding come from.

Really this shows that the operators of 18-wheelers should be paying a lot more. Looks like diesel tax is 20-30% higher, not proportional to the thousands of times more damage the 4th power law implies. (A half-full 18 wheeler is about 40,000 pounds so, let's say 10x the weight of a passenger car).

If I extrapolate how much more road wear is caused by a bus and multiply by a EV fee we pay in NZ ($8 NZD / 100km), it would be cheaper to just zoom every passenger in their own Uber.

It's probably fake, but recently someone circulated a figure how much a $5 or $6 bus fare actually costs in Auckland - it's about $40 IIRC.

On flip side I do love rapid bus innovation in Auckland, when it works it works pretty well.

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