A black box in your car? Some see a source of tax revenue

I'm generally not one to argue in favor of taxation, but fuel taxes are essentially user fees for the road system. Unless and until most cars use something as an energy source that's hard to tax in this way, it's a viable, and mostly fair way to pay for roads. There's even a significant correlation between a vehicle's fuel economy and how much damage it does to the road, as both are closely related to weight.

A pay once a year (or even monthly) mileage tax is extremely punitive on poor folks. The tax at the pump works the same way as withholding for income taxes. It allows management in chunks of a tax the can get very high.

The usual argument is that with electrics and hybrids, tax revenue is going down. OK, fine, raise the rate! Plenty of people are still driving internal combustion vehicles. Higher rates will spur adoption of more efficient vehicles, which is a good thing.

If we really want to charge by the mile, add an odometer reading to the smog check. There's no need for a complicated and privacy-invasive system to check how many miles you drive.

If you tax peak drive time traffic higher, you could shift people to other patterns and not require more lanes to be added to urban highways. This can't be accomplished with a gas tax. (I used to never leave work between 4pm and 6:30pm to avoid my congested outer loop, I could have avoided tax on the unending parade of new lanes added over the past decade. If more people had joined me we could have saved quite a bit in construction costs.)

Gas consumption and road wear is at least correlated in the right direction, typically, but you could also do a more accurate job of accurately taxing for road wear by combining vehicle type, road type, and mileage.

The deal is that cars actually cause very little damage to the roads. Trucks are the real cause of road damage -- up to 80,000 pounds spread over five axles. Compare that to 4,000 pounds over two axles for a car (or 5-6k pounds for a loaded pickup or SUV) -- the per-axle weight is much higher for a truck.

The trucking lobby is very powerful in Washington, and will resist any effort to increase the diesel motor-fuels tax. They have a powerful argument in their favor: The majority of food in America is delivered by truck. Raise the tax, raise the cost of food.

But even outside of that, there's a simple way to get about a 20% increase in funds for repairing the roads & bridges, and that's to stop the diversion of funds out of the highway trust fund into the general fund. The tax money intended to go to build & maintain our crumbling transportation infrastructure, is instead being fed into the sausage factory where it gets turned into pork.

  Why is raising the gas tax not an option?

Later legislators will tell us they've listened to us, and they're going to raise the gas tax instead of instituting a mileage tax. There will be much rejoicing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window

This is one of those "uniquely American" problems.

You simply can't get any meaningfully-large group of US citizens to agree to raise taxes. On anything.

Even if it's in their own interest. Even if there is zero drawbacks of any kind. Americans will fight tooth-and-nail against anything that looks or feels like a "tax" of any kind.

In addition, many Americans already feel like the gasoline prices are "high" here. (Even though, factually, we live with very low subsidized prices: they're around $3.25 per US gallon here today).

Raising tax on fuel is not even fathomable.

Governments in general, at a federal level, might not be this way, but local cities and counties certainly often try many tricks. From "taxes" on driving, to abusing seizure laws. Hence the notion people have.