I just did the math, and showed my work. Cars and trucks pay hundreds of billions in taxes annually, which more than covers the cost of creating and maintaining the infrastructure.
Sure, but they do contribute to the cost of maintaining roads. We need to figure out roughly what percentage of road maintenance costs come from vehicles and charge individual vehicles based on their rough contribution to maintenance costs. It's not a terribly hard calculation, especially since you can directly compare with roads that are infrequently used by trucks.
Although not true, I always liked to think that taxes on my vehicle, fuel, and tolls paid for the infrastructure upon which I drive. I have no idea whether those are sufficient, but I'll bet in my state they state of high taxes and crappy infrastructure they are more than enough.
> Studies that account for the full bore of taxes which apply to personal vehicles (sales tax, excise tax, gas tax, registration fees) show that cars provide significant net income to government far exceeding infrastructure outlays.
I'm not talking infrastructure externalities, I'm talking about environmental externalities, especially (but not exclusively) tailpipe emissions.
Gasoline and automobile infrastructure are a historically massive, ongoing expense, and cars have enormous externalities. I doubt any government in the world taxes cars highly enough relative to other goods.
This isn't true. Auto drivers pay more than their fair share for the roads-- the gas tax actually also subsidizes some passenger rail and other forms of transportation.
Again, just because heavy trucks pay extra taxes doesn't mean that they cover their impact on the road system.
"Passenger vehicles account for 93 percent of all vehicle miles traveled on public roads in the United States. While large trucks account for just 7 percent of the miles traveled, they account for the most damage to the infrastructure."
I think the actual measurement is off. If a single truck did over $3 million in road damage per year we’d have far worse infrastructure problems than we do. Chances are if you tax road damage you’re charging the hummer $10/year and the truck $31,700 or so.
much, much more than rail transport as a function of GDP
Uh, you have to compare it with the amount of people it moves. Not the absolute amount. If taxes pay for trains, upkeep, insurance, salaries for drivers, as well as the infrastructure, then that is a greater tax burden than just the highways, PER USAGE. I considered explaining that in my post, but I figured that math savvy hackers wouldn't need it. I figured wrong.
And your "gas tax should fund highways" idea is laughable.
Oh? Please...explain why.
The gas tax doesn't even cover maintenance of existing road systems,
Oh, I see. Well, if you re-read my sentence I said "SHOULD" fund highways. "Should"
SHOULD: A word meaning, "ought", as in, you "should" parse and process each sentence properly before commenting on it. You "should" look up any words you don't fully understand. That sort of thing.
See, I figured that a bunch of well-educated hackers could understand basic language concepts. I figured wrong.
It is true that new construction accounts for a large fraction of the total cost. But the extra truck tax revenue is far, far below the proportional cost of damage trucks cause.
Everyone benefits from roads' existence and from the freight delivered by truck, with or without owning a car. So tying taxes artificially to any selective use factors is inherently flawed. Tying it to GPS logs is worse.
> Now, freight and commercial trucks are effectively the biggest contributor to this tax plus they have to pay for weight. Consumers are the ones getting freebies (especially electric, hybrid etc.)
I couldn't disagree more! Wear on roads is to the fourth power of pressure. And while trucks might have 10x the contact patch your car does, they might weigh 30x as much. So the pressure might be 3x and thus the wear 3 x 3 x 3 x 3 = 81 times as much.
If you look at road costs as largely maintenance then cars are subsidizing trucks because one truck could do orders of magnitude more damage, but have to buy orders of magnitude more fuel. Why is that? Because past a certain point fuel consumption is dominated by drag, and thus, frontal area. 8-10 MPG for an 18-wheeler is reasonable. That's not 81 times worse fuel consumption, perhaps only 2x or 3x compared to modern cars.
I think it does in the UK. Taxes aren't hypothecated but my understanding is road, car and fuel taxes bring in about twice as much as we spend maintaining the infrastructure.
But does that tax levied on that car / maintenance expenses cover the costs of road maintenance, excess utility infrastructure from the sprawl that driving infrastructure incentivises, negative health and environmental externalities. I highly highly doubt it.
Oh and far from paying for the infrastructure, trucks are subsidised to use it, by everybody else, very much including bikers
Trucks are the biggest source of road damage by a very long shot (3 orders of magnitude per mile driven) and don't pay anywhere near that. Trucks would have to pay at least 2 orders of magnitude higher gas taxes than cars to come anywhere near a fair share, and that's assuming an order of magnitude difference in mileage (in a linear unit, not mpg), which is not the case unless you have an extremely efficient car and a very inefficient truck.
I calculated this out 2 months ago: The US spent 416 billion dollars on roads in 2014 [1]. At 123 billion gallons of gas [2] and 44 billion gallons of diesel [3], that would require $2.50 worth of tax per gallon. Gas near me is $3.40 with a 60 cent tax so $1.90 short or 24%.
> instance, road wear is higher for heavier vehicles, so lighter car effectively pay for the SUVs and trucks
The correct answer in that case is to quit wasting time & effort creating taxes for personal vehicles, and just make commercial truckers pay it all. It spreads the cost of the roads around to everyone who benefits (even if you don't have a car, you benefit from the roads existing). And since the damage to roads scales to the fourth power of the axle weight, the difference between a car and SUV isn't too dramatic, compared to the difference between an SUV and a big rig.
Per this source [0] it appears you are correct. Trucks contribute 99% of wear and tear on the roads but pay only 35% of the cost.
My take is that cars/pickups/suvs are overpaying by a lot and commercial trucks are underpaying by a lot.
My biggest concern is that taxes, like inflation, only ever seem to go up, never down.
In this case I would be in favor of correcting this inequality if we reduce gas taxes for standard vehicles while increasing taxes on commercial trucks, but given their track record I suspect governments will never reduce taxes, only increase them.
> Nationwide in 2010, state and local governments raised $37 billion in motor fuel taxes and $12 billion in tolls and non-fuel taxes, but spent $155 billion on highways.[3] In other words, highway user taxes and fees made up just 32 percent of state and local expenses on roads. The rest was financed out of general revenues, including federal aid.
This did not include $28 billion from the Federal gas tax, so $49 billion becomes $77 billion.
Looking into the Census data, it also inexplicably doesn’t include $21 billion of “Motor vehicle license” revenue. So we’re up to $98 billion.
It also does not appear to include motor vehicle sales taxes, nor motor vehicle property taxes.
I can’t find a figure for property tax, but I did find a report that in 2013 sales taxes for new and used vehicles totaled $38.9 billion. We are now approaching 100%...
An AutoAlliance report calculates in 2013 the auto sector paid $110 billion in State taxes and $98 billion in Federal taxes. [1] Even this does not include vehicle property taxes, as the amount is not readibly calculable due to the sheer number of entries that collect this kind of tax.
By comparison, the report linked from your [2] link did include this;
> In 2010, state and local governments spent $60 billion on mass transit, ... , in turn raising $13 billion in mass transit fares, ...
Seems like it’s mass transit that’s the one which is heavily subsidized.
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