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It seems to me that taxing something based on its use is a pretty much just a way to set up exactly these kinds of loopholes that continually need plugging.

Instead of taxing gasoline to help fill in the road budget, why not tax vehicles based on actual road usage, and their size and weight? Then you don't have all of the "electric cars and bikes don't pay gas taxes" stupid debates. An electric car uses just as much (if not more, due to weight) of the road as a gasoline car, while a bicycle uses so much less (and pretty much equivalent to any use of public space like walking, using a scooter, etc) that it makes the most sense for that to just be accounted for out of the general fund.

You could do this based on odometer, or based on automatic toll collection devices, or whatever. Automatic toll collection devices are probably better, because you could also include congestion charges for places where roadway real estate is low and congestion is high, like big cities.

The main reason to have taxes on something like fossil fuels would be for emissions reasons, as there is an external cost being imposed on everyone else by their emissions, and that money could go towards paying for health care costs, providing tax breaks for HVAC systems with air purification, carbon offsetting, and the like. But such a tax should be imposed regardless of use, as any use is going to wind up with the same or similar emissions.

zrobotics 2954 days ago

At least in most of the US (can't speak for all 50 states) vehicles are taxed based on weight- a 1 ton pickup will cost more each year to register than a compact car or motorcycle. And what is a better method to tax based on usage than taxing fuel? Do you really want to have to log every mile driven, and submit it to the IRS? Parent poster had a good point, in that this will need to be examined in regards to EV usage of roads, but how much $ do you think it would cost to have automatic toll collection points to cover the entire US road network, and where are those billions/trillions going to come from?

And I would also like to point out that the main reason to tax fuel isn't to cover emissions, it's to help pay for the incredibly expensive roads that we all use (regardless of mode of transport). Sure, it is a good side effect that inefficient vehicles are taxed higher than more efficient ones, but that is a side effect, not the goal. Your proposed solution is far more complicated than just metering EV charging separately and taxing a portion of it.

> At least in most of the US (can't speak for all 50 states) vehicles are taxed based on weight- a 1 ton pickup will cost more each year to register than a compact car or motorcycle

Registration fees and taxes are frequently based on weight; and tolls are frequently based on number of axles.

But the relationship between weight or axles and fees is generally linear, while the actual wear and tear on roads is quartic (to the power of 4) in the weight per axle, times the number of axles. If taxes and fees were properly proportional, there would be a much bigger difference in price between a motorcycle and 1 ton pickup truck, let alone an 18 wheeler.

> Do you really want to have to log every mile driven, and submit it to the IRS?

You can use odometer readings that you collect at annual inspections. I realize that not every state does this, but every state I have ever lived in does; you have an annual vehicle safety and emissions inspection, and at that point they can check your odometer too and include that in the calculation.

You could also use the current automated toll collection systems, which are based on transponder or license plate for those who don't have transponders, for highways and congestion charges for cities, if you want to be able to charge different rates in different areas, and just subtract those numbers from the odometer readings afterwards.

Metering EV charging separately does't really solve the problem. Gas taxes are not in proportion to actual maintenance costs of the roads, and are currently a fixed amount, not tied to the price of gas or inflation, so they don't cover the full costs. If you just applied the same kinds of laws to EV charging, you'd be left with the same kinds of problems.

By not charging proportional to road wear and tear, there is an effective subsidy of those who drive larger vehicles, and in particular commercial cargo transport on the highways, by those who drive smaller vehicles. If you were to change the way vehicles were taxed, the larger vehicles would pay more of the burden, which would mean they might switch to alternatives like train transport, or moving production closer to consumption, or the like.

A similar problem exists in cities and on busy highways used by commuters, where congestion is a substantial externality. There it's the square footage of vehicle footprint that makes the biggest difference.

isostatic 2953 days ago

> where congestion is a substantial externality

It is, however if you tax people based on congestion they cause, shouldn't you refund them based on congestion they receive?

> vehicles are taxed based on weight- a 1 ton pickup will cost more each year to register than a compact car or motorcycle

An F-350 is 3.7 tons.

Two problems with this 1) It's unlikely to be proportional to road damage - if a 1 ton vehicle that costs $100 to register, a 2 ton vehicle should cost $1600, and a 4 ton vehicle should cost $25k. 2) It doesn't take into account mileage. Own a heavy truck that you use on your own land, and do about 1,000 miles a year on the road, and you pay the same as someone that has the same truck but does 50,000 miles a year commuting.

The odometer idea elsewhere in the thread probably works well for the U.S, just have a website to post your mileage when you drive into mexico/canada, and again on the way back, with spotchecks at the border. People who do significant mileage on their own land will be annoyed, but they currently pay gas tax on that mileage

> Instead of taxing gasoline to help fill in the road budget

In the UK we don't. We tax gasoline because it has negative externalities (same as us taxing cigarettes and alcohol). It goes into the central budget that's run by Phillip Hammond in the UK. Out of that, and income tax, national insurance, VAT, alcohol tax, etc, he funds the national road network, trident renewal, the state pension, the nhs, etc. Some of that money goes to councils to spend on what they want.

Electric cars don't have those externalities of burning gasoline in the middle of our cities.

While we don't tax fossil fuels used to generate electricity, we do subsidise non-fossil-fuels used to generate electricity. It probably should be the other way round, however in any case burning gas (not oil) in a power plant out of town and charging an electric car is better than burning oil in an ICE in the middle of a city and thus should attract far less tax. Currently 42% of UK electricity is being generated by Gas - no other fossil fuels.

The councils then take the money from central government, and the local council tax (about £1500 a household), into a local pot, and fund things like bin collections, maintaining parks, operating libraries, and maintaining the local roads.

> why not tax vehicles based on actual road usage, and their size and weight?

Until relatively recently that's not really been possible (ANPR makes it possible), hence taxing fuel as a proxy.

> Then you don't have all of the "electric cars and bikes don't pay gas taxes" stupid debates.

Given that the cost of a road is wear and tear (which a pedestrian or bike causes pretty much zero)

Charging more than £5 a year for even the most extreme cyclist wouldn't make any sense. Because damage increases at 2^4, 1 mile car does about 1/100,000th of the damage of a lorry. A bike and car is a similar ratio - therefore if you charged a bike 1p per mile, you should charge a car £1000 a mile and a lorry £100 million a mile.

> We tax gasoline because it has negative externalities (same as us taxing cigarettes and alcohol).

This is contradicted by the difference in taxation for diesel fuel and heating oil (which is also the case in the US as well). Or used for generating electricity, as you point out.

I think that like many things in government, there are multiple reasons for taxing gasoline; negative externalities is one of them, but acting as a proxy for usage fees is another.

In the US at least, the federal gas tax is specifically earmarked for transportation expenses (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_Trust_Fund), which indicates that it's explicitly intended as a proxy for usage fees.

> Until relatively recently that's not really been possible (ANPR makes it possible), hence taxing fuel as a proxy.

Yes, but times change, and it is possible now. Lots of people bring up the problem of not collecting gas taxes to fund roads when electric cars usage grows. So every time someone brings that up, I suggest a fairly simple solution. Electric cars also weren't previously possible, but they are now, so rather than complaining about how we won't be able to fund the roads, how about charging more effectively for road usage.

> Given that the cost of a road is wear and tear (which a pedestrian or bike causes pretty much zero) > > Charging more than £5 a year for even the most extreme cyclist wouldn't make any sense.

I addressed this in my comment, indicating that it doesn't make sense to charge usage based amounts for cyclists:

> while a bicycle uses so much less (and pretty much equivalent to any use of public space like walking, using a scooter, etc) that it makes the most sense for that to just be accounted for out of the general fund.

There is the cost of constructing the roads in the first place, and wear and tear from weather, but that can be adequately accounted for out of the general fund; and when I say that, I mean the taxes collected at whatever level of government is responsible for paying for road maintenance that are not based on road usage at all, such as income tax, sales tax, VAT, property tax, or the like.

As someone who lives in the Northeastern US, I know very well that it isn't just vehicle weight that leads to road wear and tear; I've ridden on dedicated bike paths that were unmaintained, and frost heaves and roots of trees cause quite a lot of trouble, though it does take a lot longer for it to become unusable than roads used by cars and trucks.

Anyhow, I think we're mostly in agreement here. It is absolutely possible to do more effective taxation of vehicles based on their direct costs to infrastructure as well as other externalities.

> Because damage increases at 2^4, 1 mile car does about 1/100,000th of the damage of a lorry. A bike and car is a similar ratio - therefore if you charged a bike 1p per mile, you should charge a car £1000 a mile and a lorry £100 million a mile.

The damage per axle is proportional to the weight per axle to the fourth power. You multiply that by the number of axles to get the total amount of damage. Also, tandem axles do substantially less damage than single axles. This ends up at being a factor of about 5,000 between a passenger car and a truck, not 100,000.

It's still a big difference, and it's not accounted for by gas taxes, tolls, or vehicle registration fees, at least in the jurisdictions I've checked. Most of them seem to just go up proportional to the weight or the number of axles, not the fourth power of the weight per axle.

If you want to do it right, you'd charge fees based on equivalent single axle load times mileage, plus a congestion factor in congested areas based on the area taken up by the vehicle, times the amount of time it's within the congested area, times a time-varying congestion factor. And of course a carbon tax which covers all forms of carbon emission, and possibly a particulate emission tax that varies with density.

But despite how obvious it all sounds, it would be somewhat expensive to implement, and would face huge political opposition from industries and individuals who are effectively subsidized by paying into the highway systems way less relative to their usage than other users.

s73v3r_ 2954 days ago

"why not tax vehicles based on actual road usage, and their size and weight?"

Because this relies on either odometer readings, which, at least here in the US, you wouldn't be able to say how many miles were driven in one state vs the next. Or it would rely on tracking the location of the vehicle, which is downright creepy and sets off all kinds of alarm bells in people.

Every car is legally equipped with a tracking device known as a license plate.

There are no more toll booths in the state of Massachusetts.

If you travel on a toll road in Massachusetts, your car will be tracked either by E-ZPass transponder, if you opt in to that system (at a substantial discount), or via photographing the license plate and sending you a bill in the mail.

Also, pretty much everyone I know, even the most privacy conscious, carry a tracking device in their pockets at all times. I think that rms may be the only person I've met who I know does not.

Petrol tax goes into the exchequer, it's not ringfenced for the roads. Most roads are funded from council tax in any case.

Petrol and VED raises £33b a year, but total road spending (including local councils) is under £10b.

The solution to rationing road usage and paying for their use is road charging (with heavier vehicles paying proportionally more based on axel weight, and different charges depending how congested the roads are) which should pay for the maintenance of the roads, new road building, and renting the land to have the roads on.

chriswarbo 2954 days ago

This is kind of a perverse incentive though:

- Discourage "bad" thing (driving, drinking, smoking, sugar, ...) by applying heavy taxes

- Occurrence of that thing goes down

- Complain about falling of tax revenue

I'm generally in favour of applying taxes like this, but they need to be based on the actual harm/externalities, and be targetted effectively. Taxing electricity-used-for-vehicles seems easy to game, and only indirectly related to harm. It might be more effective to tax fossil fuels, both for transport and electricity generation, due to their environmental problems; and tax ownership of vehicles to cover expenses (infrastructure, medical care, ...) and discourage excessive use (reducing fatalities, etc.). We have car tax for the latter; perhaps it could be made proportional to use by checking odometers during MOT? (Although it's currently perfectly legal to alter odometers, as long as it's not used to defraud someone when selling the vehicle)

gambiting 2954 days ago

>>and discourage excessive use (reducing fatalities, etc.). We have car tax for the latter;

If you mean VED I don't think that achieves anything, perhaps only discouraging people from buying cars with particularly high CO2 emissions, but if you can afford a sports car with 200g/km+ emissions, you can probably afford the annual VED on it. Besides, with VED refresh recently it almost doesn't matter, you only discourage people from buying expensive vehicles as they incur extra tax due to their purchase price, not their emissions.

>>perhaps it could be made proportional to use by checking odometers during MOT?

The issue here is that obviously you have to prove that those miles were done in United Kingdom, and obviously it's not illegal to use your car abroad. Taxing fuel has the nice property of the taxes going into the budget of the country where you buy it, so the assumption is that visitors to the UK will buy fuel here and contribute at least a bit to the UK road budget - and the same goes for British drivers going abroad.

> The issue here is that obviously you have to prove that those miles were done in United Kingdom

Why? The law could just charge based on miles regardless.

However if you did choose to allow people to exempt overseas mileage you could read the odometers at ports (say charge them £10 for the privilege, so it only makes sense if you're doing a lot of mileage)

Clearly Northern Ireland would have to be exempt.

However mileage is very different, the externalities of a smart car driving 50miles from Lancaster to Carlise at 3AM is far different to that of a 13 ton lorry driving from Luton to Oxford Circus at 8AM -- in pollution generated (locally and globally), in damage to the road, congestion

chriswarbo 2954 days ago

Hmm, I hadn't thought about foreign travel. Food for thought, thanks!