Thread: New Vehicle tax idea

this is crap
Transportation chief eyes taxing miles driven - White House- msnbc.com

They've been talking about doing that here for some time. They'll be making a fortune if they do! B@stards.

I live in a bike friendly town with plenty of public transportation options. I let them drive me around. If I need my car I may just drive it to and from the park and ride to get my family on mass transit.

I rarely travel outside the state. The tax would not affect me that much.

Honestly though. What happens to federal roads once fuel efficient vehicles reduce the gasoline tax to 0?

Toll bridges and toll roads will become the norm. I certainly do not want that. It sucks having driven on several in the Eastern US.

You could eliminate the federal roads and make all roads the property of the state, but does the state have that much money to deal with the roads?

it'll never happen. Too easy to bypass such things and then play stupid when you get caught. Plus, it's a waste of money. Who pays for the tracking devices?

I'm also very concerned about people being able to know, instantaneously, where I am and monitor my movements. Creeps me right out.

Used to be you had to get yourself a devoted stalker to warrant that kind of attention.

I might add that this unfairly taxes those in a rural setting, who must drive further for essentials and have no public transit available to them.

That's a pretty odd idea. Difficult to administer as well as being anti-eco-friendly.

So much simpler to just tax fuel, that scales perfectly linearly with miles driven, is easy to collect and is at least eco-friendly on a base level.

Just be grateful you aren't in the UK. We pay nearly $5 per (U.S.) gallon. Around 70-80% of that is tax. And we pay a yearly road tax on the vehicle too.

well i don't think anybody is interested in perfectly fair. that would seem to me to necessitate that each road segment gets taxed separately, so the ones used most get most attention (and perhaps they could end up with lower tolls), while the ones that don't get much use may end up going to history because they can't pay for their maintenance.

eventually maintenance has to be paid in one way or another. fuel tax works, but it doesn't differentiate between different roads. I mean I can buy my fuel in one state and use exclusively the roads of the next one. Of course that becomes very important only when the tax-collecting and road maintaining entities are fragmented, since the surface/bulk ratio becomes rather large.

I'm not sure if this proposition is technically that hard to implement. Technology is pretty good these days. If cellphone carriers can provide communications to their customers (which basically means they track the exact location of each device so that by constructive interference they can provide enough bandwidth) it should be possible for such toll system to work as well.

Of course there are all these other concerns....

Originally Posted by Rajagra

So much simpler to just tax fuel, that scales perfectly linearly with miles driven

only if all vehicles get the same mileage.

Originally Posted by Rajagra

Just be grateful you aren't in the UK. We pay nearly $5 per (U.S.) gallon. Around 70-80% of that is tax. And we pay a yearly road tax on the vehicle too.

And what's the betting if they do eventually bring road pricing in, the road tax and fuel duties won't go down to compensate?

Gareth

I am wondering what they are planing on doing when say you drive on private property or take your vehicle off roading, do they count those miles too if so thats a load of crap, if not how would they know which miles are which?

It's not going to happen; not at the federal level anyway.

Obama nixes plan to tax motorists on mileage (Yahoo News)

~Rich