Most fuel taxes are collected by the States, and the States aren’t paying for the wars in Iraq/Afghanistan.
There already are mult-state lottos that encompase most of the country, they don’t raise anywhere near enough money to touch the deficit. Plus, a federal one would just take money away from the state lottos.
And come to think about it, OP was about declining revenue of dedicated taxes meant to pay for transportation infrastructure. Your totally awesome idea to fix Social Security and the deficit isn’t really relevant, even if it was workable. Are you posting in the wrong thread?
Tax it at the dealership - put a $10,000 or whatever premium on buying a Yukon Denali and none on a Toyota Echo. Keep them off the road in the first place by making them less appealing to buy. Taxing by weight (or size - whatever works best to distinguish between smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles with more stringent pollution controls and larger vehicles that don’t have the same pollution controls or fuel efficiency requirements). Taxing all gas does reduce the amount that drivers of smaller, more efficient cars pay, but I’d prefer to see the larger vehicles kept off the roads in the first place for a variety of reasons, including my own safety in my smaller vehicle.
Possibly. It’s Super Bowl Sunday, kickoff is right around the corner, my Saints are in the game for the first time ever, and I’m at least 1.83 sheets to the wind. No way in hell I would, should, or could drive a car this evening, so I ain’t gonna.
Congestion pricing is already happening. I believe prices on bridges into NY vary with time, and the Bay Bridge tolls will increase soon, with an extra cost for rush hour crossings. There has been some talk of making car pool lanes toll lanes, with the price varying with the level of congestion. I don’t know how we’d do this in general.
Why should the little old lady from Pasadena who only drives her car to the casino on Sunday pay as much as the guy commuting 100 miles, or the trucker? The level of traffic drives both road repair and road capacity increases, so charging those not on the roads is unfair. They do make use of roads indirectly from the goods they buy, but they pay for them in the price of those goods.
Congestion pricing happens in isolated areas. The reason we never used it more in the past was because the cost was too high in terms of maintenance, enforcement, and slowing traffic to pay the tolls. It was unfeasible to put it on every street, or even on a large minority of streets.
That’s not the case anymore. The technology exists today to have transparent, dynamic pricing of road use with almost no effort to the driver. You simply add a GPS receiver to the car (if it doesn’t already have one), and a radio receiver for road pricing. The car can receive its charges while you drive, announcing them on a display inside the vehicle. At the end of the day, or the month, the car transmits the cumulative charge to the road authority, so that no one can know exactly where you were. Your position is not transmitted to the road authority at any time, other than anonymous reports to allow congestion data to be collected.
A system like this would allow prices to rise and fall as roads become congested. Real-time reception in cars and GPS’s that can be programmed to find you the cheapest way home would cause traffic to divert in real time. The flow of traffic would become much more efficient.
Congestion is one of the key causes of high fuel consumption in the cities. A program that reduces or eliminates it by changing the behaviours that cause it would save an awful lot of gasoline - and not by forcing people into mass transit or into smaller cars - by making the whole system more efficient. Win-win for everyone.
Historical road cost data and road cost projections would be used by businesses in determining where to locate. When people buy real estate, they’d pay attention to the congestion levels of the roads, as the cost would be explicit instead of being an externality shared by everyone.
Real-time congestion pricing and bulk vehicle tracking would instantly start a process where our citiies and jobs would begin to evolve in a way that is much more efficient. Real estate pricing would change to reflect the true value of the real estate - including the cost of sharing that real estate with others and a limited number of roads.
I can’t think of a single other thing that is both this easy to do and which has such a potentially huge impact on the efficiency of the infrastructure.
And you could sell it to the public. First, you’re giving them all kinds of new information they can use to improve their lives. If you make the tax revenue-neutral (say, by replacing the gasoline tax with the congestion tax), then people who improve their road-use efficiency will actually see their costs go down.
Heh. Suuure. Add a GPS receiver to the car. It’s cheap. It works in city areas and tunnels. It doesn’t think you’re doing 200 MPH every five minutes. It never thinks you’re going on the wrong road or, briefly, 50 miles from where you actually are. It can’t be blocked with some aluminum foil.
Has anyone answered the question about how this is better than the gasoline taxes we have now? It seems to do the same thing but with more intrusion and cost. I don’t see why anyone would even propose this.
Now a tax when you purchase large vehicles, that I could get behind. So long as it didn’t apply to people in the construction trades and the like. That’s who is supposed to be driving trucks in the first place.
If it is related to the wear and tear a car makes on the road andt he needs for roads in general, then it makes sense, but if you are trying to incent lower emissions it makes little sense.
So ideally a mileage tax would be related to the actually cost to have a road system and a gas tax would be related to the social costs of using fossil fuels. But it is just easier to collect at the pump, IMO.
I’m for it - since it would be one hell of a stimulus package.
I’ve read about the problems in doing this for a car pool lane on an interstate which has the advantage of being the only reasonable way through some hills. Doable, but tricky. The freeway I take home to work, on the other hand, can be bypassed by any number of alternate routes, all of which would need the transponders. If you make the congestion pricing cheap enough to not clog up these streets, it becomes a revenue generator and not a congestion reducer, if you make it expensive enough to reduce congestion, you have the difficult proposition of either metering every street or creating a disaster. If you want revenue, the gas tax is a lot cheaper to implement.
I wouldn’t want to reduce the gas tax, because it can be an inventive for more fuel efficient vehicles even for those who don’t live in congested areas.
I agree with the desire to reduce congestion. Making chunks of cities pedestrian and public transit only would help, given some way of letting trucks through. Around here having car pool lanes open from 6 - 9 am helps in that fewer cars reduce congestion and there is an incentive to travel alone outside of car pool hours - which so many have taken that things are crowded until 9:30 if not later. And of course congestion pricing where it makes sense, such on bridges.
I think for it to work it has to be universal in an area. And I believe it’s do-able. A GPS system, coupled with mapping to identify the street you’re on, and maybe a secondary system like a transponder set up randomly to prevent gaming the system, and you could blanket-cover an entire city. The charges can be generated mathematically by calculating real-time congestion levels and applying an increasing price until the congestion eases.
You could even start such a system by applying it only to the most congested roads - all others are price-free. The GPS/transponder system tracks vehicle movements, and if a particular road becomes congested a fee appears for it - but all other roads are still free. With real-time alerting in vehicles, you could have your GPS just beep at you and say, “Alert! A road on your sheduled route is showing congestion. An alternate route is available that will add four minutes to your drive at a savings of $2.00. Would you like to take it?”
Of course there are plenty of details to be worked out, but the basic system is feasible, and relatively inexpensive - the infrastructure is already comletely in place in some cities. Metering is done just like the power meter on your home - the unit is sealed and installed in your car, and various checks can be done to make sure it isn’t tampered with or turned off (such as making it ping home every few minutes so the city knows the signal is getting through). I imagine we could even figure out a way to make it voluntary, as an opt-in program that gets you a tax credit or something. Join the program, and you get a free GPS unit that gives you excellent traffic information, and also gets you a $500 per year refundable tax credit. Road charges are applied against the credit, so if you improve the efficiency of your driving, not only do you get the free GPS, but you save a little money.
This is actually a big deal and worth trying to work out, because the externality imposed by the current model of road financing is responsible for a large percentage of the inefficiency in the transportation system and the way we lay out our cities and locate our businesses. Right now, the only thing that limits road use is congestion. There is no disincentive to locating businesses on congested roads, and in fact there’s an advantage to it as congested roads mean lots of customers/workers/store sign viewings, etc. So our system has a built-in bias towards creating infrastructure that clumps together around congested roadways.
Congestion pricing would give businesses an advantage if they moved away from the congested areas. If it costs me $5 to drive to business A, and $1 to drive to business B, business B wins, all else being equal.
Get rid of the externality, and get the market working, and then you can stop subsidizing public transit, you don’t need zoning laws to try to disperse the population, etc. An apartment on a light-rail line becomes more valuable, and one on a congested highway less valuable. All the price signals start working, and we can then let the chips fall where they may.
Is this really about needing a new tax, or is someone trying to preemptively fill in a loop hole that lets all-electic cars not pay for road upkeep?
If the only issue was increasing revenue for roads, then increasing the tax at the pump would be simpler, cheaper and less likely to piss off the public.
Sam, after some careful examination of my time driving around with a GPS in New York City: No. No, it won’t work. I mean, physically, it won’t work. It’s fine on the surface streets, but once you start getting into weirder locations? Gone.
I take your point, but GPS is pretty reliable on the major roads, and the obscure ones don’t really need congestion monitoring, do they?
But you can always build a system and make it work. You can have GPS supplemented by inertial nav, by Differential GPS, by transponders, RFID-type tags and readers for vehicles, etc. These are known engineering problems. There are no technology breakthroughs required. It’s a matter of cost - and maybe such a system would be too expensive, but I suspect not.
So what happens when even smaller vehicles want yours off the road? Get rid of the bigger cars and soon yours will be the monster compared to European minis and motorcycles.
If what you want is big vehicles off the road because they scare you, you’re not going to convince me your argument’s economically serious. If you want them taxed for safety reasons, prove to me they’re unsafe.
Well, yeah. It is of course debatable, but I think that’s how things are going to go in the future. My Corolla is going to be considered a large vehicle - I can see a time when I have to trade it in for a Vespa (or bike and public transportation).
I don’t want large vehicles off the road just because they endanger my safety in my Corolla (which they do - I don’t think I really need to cite basic physics here); I said it was one of the reasons. I’d like large vehicles off the road because they use too much gas, and they don’t have the same efficiency and pollution controls as small cars and because they endanger people like me driving much smaller vehicles, with visibility problems and large vehicle vs. small vehicle problems.
A gas tax IS a mileage tax of sorts and it doesn’t require a huge bureaucratic layer to track. If it isn’t generating enough money to maintain the roads then it can be raised without incurring additional collection costs.
