This isn't true. They only provide 20% of revenue in CA and between 20-30% across the country. Taxes on fuel have not been raised for decades. Currently, most road funding comes from non-road related taxes.
I made a longer post above with citations.
Sometimes even more. Of course that depends on exact car that is being compared, but as a rule of thumb, an all-electric vehicle would be significantly heavier due to battery weight, and as was pointed out:
> Road damage rises [...] to the fourth power of the axle weight [0].
Salient example is a Tesla model S, which have a curb weight of 2.1 metric tons in standard configuration [1], while comparable gasoline-powered sedan weights in at approximately 1.5 metric tons [2]. That means that applying formula above, "average", electric car causes 3.6 times more road wear than "average" CO2-belching one, just due to being 40% heavier while having same number of axles.
To make matters worse, many countries tax vehicles based on their weight (so to translate a fair share of road repair costs to the vehicle owner). And that makes subsidies (in the form of tax exemptions) to the electric vehicles even more important - otherwise electric cars would not be able to compete at all.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_axle_weight_rating
[1] http://www.teslamotors.com/support/model-s-specifications
[2] http://www.bmw.com/com/en/newvehicles/3series/sedan/2015/sho...
The comparison doesn't hold, the Model S is a full-sized sedan, the 3-series is a compact. The Model S is somewhere between the 5-Series and the 7-Series, closer to the 7-Series than the 5.
Either way, both EV and ICE car road wear is completely dwarfed by trucks.
Point about trucks stands of course, as you've pointed in the other comment. 3-4 orders of magnitude more road wear - that's crazy! I wonder how does that translates to truck road taxes.
[0] http://www.bmw.com/com/en/newvehicles/7series/sedan/2015/sho...
Large trucks cause 99% of road wear. Teslas will never be a siginificant factor.
* not of vehicle weight, but per-axis weight
Trucks are still big "winners" though - see masklinn's calculations here.
The gas tax indeed provides the largest single source of funding, but many roads are funded mostly by general revenue nowadays. I seem to recall that half of major highways and interstates fail to capture enough gas tax revenue to maintain themselves, with roads in general only getting about half of their funding in the form of the gas tax.
Well there's the inherent reason that it's a requirement for proper resources allocation in a capitalistic framework (although the requirement is less tax on their usage and more tax on their consumption/wear)
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).
It was too long, and I fear it might be boring. So, to summarize: due to historic accident, Americans like big cars. Moreover, no matter what cars they might prefer, ownership of a car is an economic necessity for most Americans-again, historic accident. Those Americans are also not very well off, at least by northern-Europe standards, so money for gas is a big line-item in the family budget. A regressive tax increase on fuel would be clearly felt && very unwelcome, even though many if not most could see the logic behind it.
That being said, I do think there are localized areas where we want to decrease usage. So the future probably involves a combination of tax-free electrical vehicles and substantially more toll roads/congestion-charged zones.
with regards to the article, charging should not be free in public spaces. that alone would cut down on some of the abuse. Electric cars need a very clear and obvious indicator for charge state as well - that is communicated back to the charger and visual to any who walk up. Likely a standard is going to be needed
Not at all. Axle load has a completely outsized impact on road wear. Civil engineers use a fourth power law to estimate road wear with respect to axle load: if you double the mileage you double road wear, but if you double the axle load (assuming constant axle count) the road wear is multiplied by 16.
Put in numbers, a Model S has an axle load of 1T (2T on 2 axles). A fully loaded 18-wheeler is limited to 36T (80000lbs) on 5 axles or a 7.2T average axle load. The road wear impact of the 18-wheeler compared to the Model S is 2.5 * 7.2^4 (2.5 times the number of axles and axle load ratio raised to the 4th power), or about 6700 times that of the Model S.
It's actually slightly higher than that as 18-wheelers have 4 7.7T axles and 1 5.5 axle rather than 5 7.2T axles, the estimate is closer to 7500. Your standard 2T sedan has to drive for 7500 miles to generate the road wear a loaded 18-wheeler generates every mile.
Assuming your 2T sedan lives for 150000 miles, it's had the same road wear impact as 20 miles of a loaded 18-wheeler.
When it comes to road wear and maintenance, mileage-based pricing and taxes are trucking subsidies.
Without the roads there would be no deliveries. No deliveries, no industry. No industry, no jobs. So of all the things to call it, a trucking subsidy seems a very loaded description.
But more to the point, actual trucking costs would increase the appeal of trains for long haul, while keeping trucks (possibly smaller) for shorter hops between train depots and distribution centers (aka stores).
What else would you call the artificial lowering of trucking and truck-hauled goods prices through passing a significant subset of trucking costs directly onto taxpayers instead of reflecting said costs in hauling prices?
> Without the roads there would be no deliveries. No deliveries, no industry. No industry, no jobs.
I'm not sure what comment you're replying to here, but it certainly isn't mine.
I personally think it's definitely a valuable subsidy.
For those who don't understand, gasoline taxes provide a large portion of highway maintenance revenue (often most). Electric cars have as much wear-and-tear on roads as gas cars, but avoid that tax right now. At some point we will need to figure out how to shift taxes from per-gallon to per-mile, or add an equivalent surcharge on electric chargers.
Since home chargers are just electrical outlets, there's no real way to tax just the "highway electricity" there. So we either have to increase income/property taxes across the board, or have a mileage tax. Most of HN would't like option (1) because then everyone who bikes/takes public transit is subsidizing all highway transit.
So yeah, it has to happen eventually.