I think a tire tax would work much better, as tire wear should be closer to being proportional to road wear caused by the vehicle. The proportion may change over time, necessitating tax updates, but clearly fuel consumption isn't proportional to road wear.
"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.
In most countries, cars are required to get an annual inspection which includes the odometer readings. It would be quite easy to also tax based on that, but it would have to be retrospective.
Why not just report odometer readings annually, and tax based on that? It would avoid the need for implementing so much surveillance to track every movement of every car.
This seems like a good idea. We have used gas taxes for a long time, but electric cars don't pay this tax. If we want to pay for roads based on how much people use them, we will need to switch to something other than gas taxes. Odometer readings could work, but it's not clear how to get honest readings. Weight isn't perfect, but it seems like a less-bad options than the others.
Why not just tax the tires? Seems like they are good indicator on how much you are using roads and how many miles you drove etc.
(Safety maybe an argument. Don't do it so people don't drive on shitty old ones)
I believe part of the issue is that as hybrids and electric vehicles become more popular, they won't be contributing anything for their road use so we do need to seek alternative means of taxing vehicles. I think the simplest method would be to implement some system of yearly odometer reading as it's low-tech, low-cost, and non-invasive.
Replacing tires already costs money. How much would an extra tax change behaviour? It is definitely something to consider but doesn't seem like a definite issue.
>it's not obvious how one would replace it to do the same thing for EVs.
Taxing tires would work. Also, mileage is already recorded during vehicle inspections. That could be used to calculate tax but would be more open to fraud.
We already have vehicle mileage tracking devices: odometers.
Just have vehicles report their mileage each year when they renew their registration and base the registration tax on that and a multiplier based on vehicle type. To keep people honest, randomly inspect the VIN and mileage at renewal time with big fines for lying.
I propose we tax vehicles based on their 0-60 time. Soft tire compounds and abundant wheel torque and available power are directly correlated with tire wear and tire wear directly translates into particulate pollution.
This tax would also have the side effect of being slightly more burdensome on particular demographics that are most likely to come up with half baked "let's tax X" ideas that fail to pass even the most cursory analysis as these demographics tend to drive fast high performance sedans.
Edit: Just to be clear, lower number = more tax. Work vans pay little, high performance toys pay a lot. This is a semi-satirical proposal.
I like it. We might want to take some extra efforts to make sure the odometer is accurate, but there's pretty strong incentives to fool with odometers already.
Apparently the average person pays 150-400 in gas taxes per year now. I guess the depreciation from mileage on car is of a similar order of magnitude. And we seem to do OK now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odometer_fraud
Wear from bikes and pedestrians is too small to be worth metering. You'd spend more on tracking and enforcement than it costs.
It's true that automobile use-in-terms-of-road-wear taxes would look very different from what they are now. A compact ICE car's total tax burden would drop to almost nothing. Ditto motorcycles. Truck and large SUV taxes would increase significantly. 18-wheelers would see enormous tax increases (road shipping is effectively heavily subsidized, now).
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