XPost: alt.california, alt.politics, alt.politics.republicans
XPost: talk.politics.guns
Steve Cummings <
jthomqx@gmail.com> wrote in news:slufsb$b7a$
199@news.dns-netz.com:
Those BEV cars really boosted revenue to maintain the roads!
Democrats are so fucking stupid.
COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — Evan Burroughs has spent eight years touting the
virtues of an Oregon pilot program charging motorists by the distance
their vehicle travels rather than the gas it guzzles, yet his own mother
still hasn't bought in.
Margaret Burroughs, 85, said she has no intention of inserting a
tracking device on her Nissan Murano to record the miles she drives to
get groceries or attend needlepoint meetings. She figures it's far less
hassle to just pay at the pump, as Americans have done for more than a
century.
“It’s probably a good thing, but on top of everybody else’s stress
today, it’s just one more thing,” she said of Oregon's
first-in-the-nation initiative, which is run by the state transportation department where her son serves as a survey analyst.
Burroughs’ reluctance exemplifies the myriad hurdles U.S. states face as
they experiment with road usage charging programs aimed at one day
replacing motor fuel taxes, whose purchasing power is less each year, in
part due to inflation, fuel efficiency and the rise of electric cars.
The federal government is about to pilot its own such program, funded by
$125 million from the infrastructure measure President Joe Biden signed
in November 2021.
So far, only three states — Oregon, Utah and Virginia — are generating
revenue from road usage charges, despite the looming threat of an
ever-widening gap between states’ gas tax proceeds and their
transportation budgets. Hawaii will soon become the fourth. Without
action, the gap could reach $67 billion by 2050 due to fuel efficiency
alone, Boston-based CDM Smith estimates.
Many states have implemented stopgap measures, such as imposing
additional taxes or registration fees on electric vehicles and, more
recently, adding per-kilowatt-hour taxes to electricity accessed at
public charging stations.
Last year, Colorado began adding a 27-cent tax to home deliveries from
Amazon and other online retailers to help fund transportation projects.
Some states also are testing electronic tolling systems.
But road usage charges — also known as mileage-based user fees,
distance-based fees or vehicle-miles-traveled taxes — are attracting the
bulk of the academic attention, research dollars and legislative
activity.
Doug Shinkle, transportation program director at the nonpartisan
National Conference of State Legislatures, predicts that after some 20
years of anticipation, more than a decade of pilot projects and years of voluntary participation, making programs mandatory is the next logical
step.
“The impetus at this point is less about collecting revenue than about establishing these systems, working out the kinks, getting the public comfortable with it, expanding awareness around it,” he said.
Electric car sales in the U.S. rose from just 0.1% of total car sales in
2011 to 4.6% in 2021, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
S&P Global Mobility forecasts they will make up 40% of the sales by
2030, while other projections are even rosier.
Patricia Hendren, executive director of the Eastern Transportation
Coalition, said figuring out how to account for multistate trips is particularly important in the eastern U.S., where states are smaller and
closer together than those in the West. Virginia’s program, launched in
2022, is already the largest in the nation and will provide valuable
lessons, she said.
Hendren's organization, a 17-state partnership that researches
transportation safety and technology innovations, participated in one of
the earliest pilot projects and eight others since. The biggest hurdle,
she said, is to inform the public about the diminishing returns from the
gas tax that has long paid for roads.
“This is about the relationship between the people who are using our
roads and bridges and how we’re paying for it,” Hendren said. “We’ve
been doing it one way for 100 years, and that way is not going to work anymore.”
Eric Paul Dennis, a transportation analyst at the Citizens Research
Council of Michigan, said the failure of states to convert years of
research into even one fully functional, mandatory program by now raises questions about whether road usage charging can really work.
“There’s no program design that I have seen that I think can be
implemented at scale in a way that is publicly acceptable,” he said.
“That doesn’t mean that a program can’t be designed to do so, but I feel
like if you can’t even conceive of the program architecture that seems
like something that would work, you probably shouldn’t put too much
faith in it.”
Indeed, a chicken-and-egg dispute over how to proceed in Washington
state has stymied road usage charging efforts there.
Lawmakers passed a bill in April that would have begun early steps
toward a program by allowing collection of motorists’ odometer readings
on a voluntary basis. Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee vetoed the measure,
though, arguing that Washington needs a program in place before starting
to collect citizens’ personal data.
States also must grapple with the social and environmental implications
of their plans for replacing the gas tax, said Asha Weinstein Agrawal,
director of the National Transportation Finance Center at San Jose State University’s Mineta Transportation Institute.
The institute has conducted national surveys every year since 2010 and
found growing support for mileage-based fees, special rates for
low-income drivers and rates tied to how much pollution a vehicle
generates, she said.
Weinstein Agrawal said public policy, and the way transportation is
funded, often fails to reflect states' growing emphasis on curbing
carbon emissions as a way to deal with climate change.
“To switch over to a system that makes it cheaper to drive a gas guzzler
and more expensive to drive a Prius," she said, “seems both symbolically problematic and to be sending, in the most literal way, the wrong
economic incentives to people.”
Evan Burroughs said his 85-year-old father, Hank, who drives an electric
car, avoids paying significant vehicle registration fees by
participating in Oregon's program, while Burroughs himself has paid an
extra dollar or two each month for his Subaru Outback.
“To me, that's worth it to be part of the experiment," he said, “and to
know I'm paying my fair share for the roads.”
___
This story was first published on June 25, 2023. It was updated on June
26, 2023, to correct a comment from Douglas Shinkle of the National
Conference of State Legislatures. He said mandatory road usage charging
is the next logical step, not that states need to make the charges
mandatory.
John
2 days ago
This is only the beginning. Once they have a device installed on your
car to measure miles, they'll be able to track your vehicle, measure
your speed, use it as evidence in court. And then the insurance
companies will want to get in on the windfall and charge insurance by
the mile and based on where and how you drive. Big Brother will be
watching.
James
2 days ago
Not to mention, there will likely be a component within this device that
can shut your car down automatically if you fail to pay parking tickets,
are speeding or fail to pay insurance or inspections. The list will go
on and on!!!
John
2 days ago
What do you think these "plug-in devices" and phone apps that insurances companies have been hawking for the last 10 years, "To save you money"?
It's literally that.
https://news.yahoo.com/fuel-taxes-plummet-states-weigh-042526446.html
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