And there’s pretty substantial evidence that it usually works the way you’d expect. Even after U.S. gasoline prices crashed in 1986, it took until 1993, thanks to the implementation of the CAFE standards in the early 1980s, for U.S. gasoline consumption to reach their previous peak in the late 1970s.
But that’s how long it took the US to “recover” from high gas prices. It doesn’t tell us how we behave if gas prices were kept constant and the average fuel economy of cars increased.
I could easily see the mileage taken at the shop that does your annual inspection, with that info sent to the state or DC along with your vehile info.
I would imagine a system where there is a minimum tax rate per mile for a baseline car, truck and tractor, with verious additions or subtractions based on the weight and other characteristics that affect road wear. This information would then work it’s way into KBB, Edmunds and other sites along with the window sticker on every new vehicle. Auto manufacturers would fight to get theirs below every other model in it’s class. Talk about market-driven forces.
We’ve gotten carried away with roadbuilding. I doubt there’s any approach to taxing drivers, vehicles or fuel which could fully fund all roads without seeming screamingly unfair for some.
Basically, driving personal cars on paved roads as a transportation default doesn’t work for long unless we’re willing to subsidize it from other sources.
In the medium (next few decades) since gasoline/diesel will remain the overwhelming majority of the car market I don’t expect a driving tax to be politically feasible on top of the existing fuel tax.
However in the longer haul, I think everyone accepts that in some number of decades most vehicles will almost certainly have electric motors. At that point you do need a revenue stream to maintain the roads that benefit all of society. There are a few different options, all of which will influence behavior of manufacturers and consumers in various ways (it’s no point hand wringing over the fact that a tax will have such an effect, all of them including the current fuel taxes have some effect on consumers and car manufacturers.)
The “simplest” but most heavy handed method and most likely to give us highly variable tax revenue as well as cause the greatest market distortion is to levy a “lifetime road tax” on the vehicle. Probably the best way from a collections perspective is to levy the tax on the vehicle manufacturer and make them pay it whenever they sell a car to a dealership. Of course this price will just be passed on to the consumer, but manufacturer level taxation decreases the regulatory work load. If you wanted to replace the current gas tax it would probably add around $3750 to the price of a car and the formula if crafted properly would of course have to put a far greater tax on large trucks and such. There are a lot of problems with such a system, the biggest of which is it would be 100% fucked during an economic downturn when people buy massively fewer new cars and lots more used cars.
Another simple solution is to simply levy a tax on electric bills for the purposes of maintaining a road fund. In a way if you didn’t do the effort to categorize different entities and tax them accordingly the tax per customer would be very, very low, because all persons and businesses with electric bills would be paying in. That’s a far greater base I would think than drivers, and thus the roads would be funded from a greater share of the population than they are now.
If that wasn’t desired you could of course just levy the taxes on residential electric bills and certain classes of business (industrial, extractive, agricultural, and any sort of retail would have to be taxed. I can see the argument for certain service providers not being taxed due to their minimal impact on the roadways.)
After that you have to get into more heavy handed and regulatory “thick” solutions. Annual vehicle inspections in which the mechanic keys in your mileage is one system. The problem is it turns the gas tax which is probably paid on average semimonthly for most families and makes it an annual lump sum tax–that will be hard on lots of people. You also have to fight with people over collections, the nice thing about the gas tax is there are no deadbeats aside from people who actually steal gas at the pump, no putting liens on property or garnishing wages and all that.
Another one is an automated GPS system that synchronizes with government computer systems, I can’t speculate at the expense of such a system but I can speculate at the privacy concerns (even if more or less totally unfounded.)