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How will states pay for roads when gas taxes evaporate?

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Re: How will states pay for roads when gas taxes evaporate?

#11

How much worse will the roads become with electric vehicles that are traditionally quite a bit heavier than their ICE counterparts? Will it require more repairs/taxes?

Probably not, road damage is mostly from heavy duty vehicles (think semi trucks) or weather. See: https://www.insidescience.org/news/how-much-damage-do-heavy-.... A few x heavier car will damage them more, but probably still trivially compared to heavy duty vehicles.

Re: How will states pay for roads when gas taxes evaporate?

#13
Taxing the trucks hauling around freight containers? Their vehicles were always the ones tearing up the roads the most anyways, because they were heavier. Now electric cars are heavier and giving them a run for their money, but still.

Companies opt to move their stuff on the road instead of by train, even with financial incentives to use trains, because they don't want to have to wait for their materials to be loaded onto the train. Right now the roads are too cheap for corporations not to take advantage. If they are already willing to pay the premium for faster transit, why not milk them a little harder?

Re: How will states pay for roads when gas taxes evaporate?

#14
post #7

I can’t read the full thing due to the paywall, but having read the intro I would recommend states against adopting what Victoria did here in Aus - introduce a special EV tax. While the rest of the world is trying to incentivise the move away from fossil fuels any which way, Victoria decided that buying EVs was cheating your taxes and represented a loophole. So they slapped a special tax just on them. With EVs being…

The Victorian government, in my opinion, is a backwards looking state in every sense.

In any case, the High Court recently had something to say about it:

https://www.drive.com.au/news/high-court-rules-against-victo...

Re: How will states pay for roads when gas taxes evaporate?

#17

Maybe we can have fewer cars and fewer roads and just focus more on building sustainable cities that are more focused on people instead of vehicles?

You're downvoted for apparent irrelevance even though you're absolutely right. It's a shame that those of us who dislike car-centric design have no affordable options in the US.

Without a hint of irony, Musk likes to talk about engineers optimizing solutions to a problem that shouldn't exist. An EV is still a car, and still contributes to the impoverishment of our lives. Cars shed brake and tire dust. They necessitate huge scars across our cities, removing double-digit percentages of land from productive use with their 6-lane roads, and massive parking lots and structures, and ruin much of the rest of the land with proximity to noise and particulate pollution. They make (or made) suburbs economical, contributing to increasing loneliness and isolation, as well as raising the financial bar for participating in society. They've ruined what makes cities great, and without giving us anything in return except huge money and time sinks.

Re: How will states pay for roads when gas taxes evaporate?

#19

How much worse will the roads become with electric vehicles that are traditionally quite a bit heavier than their ICE counterparts? Will it require more repairs/taxes?

Not much? EVs have better weight distribution and axle loads are similar to the front axle of an ICE car.

The road wear goes up to the third power of weight so you really should be looking at semis for road wear.

Re: How will states pay for roads when gas taxes evaporate?

#20

Maybe we can have fewer cars and fewer roads and just focus more on building sustainable cities that are more focused on people instead of vehicles?

My vehicle enables my person to do so much more than I could do without it.

To focus on People, for me, would imply making vehicle transport easier and quicker. There's virtually nothing I'm interested in that's in walking distance (there are plenty of things in walkable distance - I'm just interested in none of them).

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