[defrost]

> You could get the same benefit just by adding the class to the high school curriculum.

This doesn't contribute to the upkeep of roads in the same manner as a yearly tax on those that use them.

So no, not the same benefit at all.

[AnthonyMouse]

You're thinking of car tax and fuel tax.

But also, the value of roads scales poorly with any of these things. The ability to have a package delivered to your front door is valuable regardless of whether or not you even have a car, and the value of it depends on what's in it rather than how much the truck cost. The most sensible way to fund any kind of basic infrastructure is from general revenues.

[ilyt]

The point is to discourage use of certain vehicles, not to fund anything.

But yes, truck used to haul building materials for a building site is the vehicle fulfilling its purpose and any replacement for that purpose being suboptimal.

Truck bought to haul 2 bags of groceries is not. Tax the second one.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Truck bought to haul 2 bags of groceries is not. Tax the second one.

How do you do this without taxing the first one?

If someone buys a truck to haul building materials to a building site, they are understandably not going to buy a separate vehicle just to haul 2 bags of groceries. But then how do you know what anybody is using it for the rest of the time? The list of legitimate purposes is unlimited. You're a homeowner who is into gardening and always bringing home mulch and saplings and renting landscaping equipment for projects. You're a retrocomputing enthusiast whose hobby requires you to be constantly transporting old mainframes. You're a parent who has to transport an entire junior varsity soccer team to practice every night.

How do you propose to distinguish any of these from someone who only buys a tank to carry home groceries?

[defrost]

Is it telepathy that allows you to claim that you know what I'm thinking?

I'm stating that a number of charges go towards the upkeep of roads and related services (at least in the country I'm present in) these charges include driver and vehicle licences, fuel taxes, etc.

> So the most sensible way to ..

Proposing an alternative doesn't negate the present practices, moreover it makes sense that as much of the public cost associated with roads should come from those that use the roads the most.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Is it telepathy that allows you to claim that you know what I'm thinking?

It's the fact that the driver license fee is paid at renewal, which isn't yearly in any US state for anyone under the age of 79. Moreover, the amount of the fee is such that it's essentially paying for the licensing bureaucracy, which you wouldn't need if you didn't have licensing.

> Proposing an alternative doesn't negate the present practices

Present practices have to be meritorious to justify preserving them.

> it makes sense that as much of the public cost associated with roads should come from those that use the roads the most.

But what does that mean?

If it's contribution to the cost of road maintenance then the cost should be paid almost entirely by a per-mile tax on large trucks, because road damage is proportional to axle weight to the fourth power and passenger vehicles are a rounding error.

If it's value of the roads then we're back to general revenues because the value is proportional to economic activity enabled by basic infrastructure which has no real relationship to number of miles traveled. One truckload of electronics is worth more than ten truckloads of scrap iron. One life-saving ride in an ambulance is worth more than a thousand days of commuting.

[defrost]

> It's the fact that the driver license fee is paid at renewal, which isn't yearly in any US state

That's your quibble?

When doing the bookkeeping on revenue flowing in against cost going out it's a simple matter to look at licence fees per annum, axle taxes per annumn, fuel taxes per annum Vs road program costs per annum.

These can be broken down to monthly or per quarter, etc.

Here we have licences that can be paid for three months, or six months, or twelve months or for three years, even so the public data from the Department of Infrastructure and Regional Development (the federal department that oversees all the road related revenue (multiple sources), plans and funds road upkeep and extensions) talks about licence numbers per year.

[AnthonyMouse]

> That's your quibble?

The median license renewal cost in the US is around $30, for an interval of typically 6-8 years. Which is to say, less than $5/year. Subtract the overhead of the licensing bureaucracy. If the result is nonzero there's a decent chance it's because it's a negative number. In neither case is it paying for a material amount of road maintenance.

> axle taxes per annumn, fuel taxes per annum Vs road program costs per annum.

Car tax and fuel tax?

But put that to the side for a moment. Even if you had a country that collected a significant amount of revenue from driver licensing, and you inadvisably wanted to continue to collect that amount of money from that population (note: this is a regressive tax anywhere that most people drive cars), why would you need driver licensing for that instead of adding the same amount to the car tax?