Cars don't pay for their costs and it's not close. Fuel tax doesn't even cover a small fraction of infrastructure cost in most European countries. Building roads is heavily subsidized from federal budgets, land given for free, accident costs covered by public money etc. etc.
At least in the US, fuel taxes only partially cover road costs. Even if they did, fuel taxes hit more than just vehicles on roads (boats, lawnmowers, etc.) so it’s not that clear cut
Fuel taxes cover less than a third of road costs in the US. Gas taxes are really unpopular and generally have been allowed to dwindle away by inflation.
In the United States (the extent of my experience on the matter), the fuel taxes are normally understood to pay for roads, which is really the opposite of addressing the externalities (since building more lane-miles fuels more demand.)
To make matters worse, they don't really cover even that cost, in most (US American) locales.
Ordinary taxation is already a major source of funding for road maintenance and of course the massive externalities.
Fuel tax in most states is a flat rate that hence isn't automatically adjusted with inflation, and it's political suicide to increase it (just love that cheap gas, but tax those EV fuckers, they are not paying road tax!). It's pretty much a laughably low amount by now.
In the US, we tax roads by usage via fuel (gasoline and diesel) tax [^1]. It's a simple solution: the more miles you drive, the more fuel you use; the more fuel you use, the more tax you pay. Vehicles that use more fuel per mile driven tend to be larger and thus cause more wear on the roads.
It's not without its faults though. Fuel usage isn't directly related to cost of road maintenance, it's just a very rough approximation. Fuel usage has mattered less and less over the past couple of decades with hybrids and EVs – though this is addressed in some places by imposing an extra EV tax (since EV drivers would pay no fuel tax but would still cause wear on the roads).
> more cash is spent in social services paid by fuel taxes
That might be the case in Europe, but it's not true of the US. Here fuel taxes only cover about 50% of the cost of roads with the rest coming from the general fund.
Taxes on gas in Europe pay more than just the roads, they're regularly used for general govt expenses. You're right eventually the tax has to go somewhere else.
I don't have a source for this handy and I can't look at the moment, so I could be misinformed, but I'm pretty sure I've heard in many different places that the current fuel taxes in the US don't even come close to covering road maintenance costs.
I wonder if some kind of weight + mileage tax would work better?
Over here (Finland), tax revenue from fuel and vehicle taxes is 7 G€ per years, government expenditure on roads is in the order of 1 G€ per year. There is no relationship of vehicle/gas taxes and road maintenance; taxes are just general revenue.
And I think it's just the same in most countries: taxes are just taxes, general revenue; not earmarked money for some particular purpose.
(What baffles me is that the gas tax in U.S. is so low; that contributes to the situation where vehicles are often very large and consume ridiculously high amounts of fuel).
From 1990-2005 fuel taxes generated a surplus in the US. In virtually every other developed country, vehicle and fuel taxes are vastly higher than spending on roads.
Where is this bad news? I think fuel taxes should be higher in the US for many reasons. I think Europe should convert much of their passenger rail to freight for environmental reasons.
That's not the only externality; another one is wear-and-tear on roads. In most countries, fuel taxes are used in part to pay for road and highway maintenance [1]. Certainly Norway's extensive, mountainous highway system is not free to build and maintain, and imo all road users should pay their share to fund it. You could have a direct per-km tax enforced via some kind of GPS unit, but that has privacy implications. Traditionally the fuel tax was a reasonable proxy, since vehicles used fuel in rough proportion to the amount of road traversed.
The taxes on fuel need to do a lot of heavy lifting, pricing in the cost of road building and maintenance, the effect of road congestion and air pollution in cities, and the effect of increased global warming. I’m sceptical they cover those factors.
Although, it probably would be better to move more of the tax burden to car use in cities, and away from fuel. Driving a car in the countryside is much less damaging than in a city centre.
The entire idea behind fuel taxes (and why these taxes are not levied on off-road use such as farm fuel, like for a tractor or to run a threshing machine), was that fuel taxes are to pay for the roads and other infrastructure.
Typically for these kinds of articles, nowhere is the actual cost of maintaining the road system actually mentioned.
The reason is, that in many cases, the fuel taxes collected are far, far in excess of the money actually spent in maintaining the road and building new roads.
And most politicians love the slush-fund aspect of all the money that flows in, and the horse-trading that goes into determining how it is spent.
Also not mentioned and not included in the calculations: the thousands of dollars taken in on sales taxes, license fees, plate fees, etc. over the (let us say 15 year) lifetime of your average car.
Last time I checked the figures, at a Federal level at least, fuel taxes did cover the costs of maintaining the highway system. If the highway system needs more maintenance, increasing the fuel tax by a relatively small amount would likely cover it.
I'm generally not one to argue in favor of taxation, but fuel taxes are essentially user fees for the road system. Unless and until most cars use something as an energy source that's hard to tax in this way, it's a viable, and mostly fair way to pay for roads. There's even a significant correlation between a vehicle's fuel economy and how much damage it does to the road, as both are closely related to weight.
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