Featured 3 States Drop Gas Tax as Prices Soar

probably me

 

Yep, $100 for hybrid and $200 for EV in Ohio

Posted via the PriusChat mobile app.

 

the gobment giveth and the gobment taketh away - mostly taketh away.

 

Drop the gas tax and replace it with an increase in annual, vehicle registration fee ... just like our EVs.

Bob Wilson

 

Tax by miles and weight. Collect miles at the yearly inspection station. Weight from the manufacturer. Ought to be simple. With a minimum for collectables and people who don't drive much. Safety inspection at car purchase. But how to collect data on sale of car or car wrecked out of state?

 

When paying for annual registration (i.e., tags.)

Bob Wilson

 

how does that help?

 

1. It makes EV and ICE vehicles pay same rates for road access.
2. Encourages scrapping of 'unloved' vehicles.
3. Gives a steady tax base not connected to economy or gas costs for road budgets.
4. Covers trailers which today pay no direct gas tax.

Bob Wilson

 

oh, okay. i agree with that. i just thought you were trying to relate it to the thread title

 

Don't do it by weight, but by weight class.

Alternative Fuels Data Center: Maps and Data

Most passenger 'cars' will fall into that under 6000#. The various agencies don't differentiate that further, because cars in that class are all held to the same emission standards, and the difference in weight between light and heavy cars in the class isn't enough to reduce a road's lifespan, as most roads people are driving on are designed to withstand commercial truck weights. A Class 1 car is only around 0.25% of the load a Class 5 or 6 truck puts on a road.
https://pavementinteractive.org/reference-desk/design/design-parameters/equivalent-single-axle-load/

Full size SUVs, trucks, and vans will fall into the 8500#/10,000#. So the system will have those owners asking whether the 'car' is worth the extra expense over a smaller class with trailer.

Considering the care some people give their cars, safety inspections should be annually.

The out of state question is one I believe we don't need to answer in regards to mileage taxes. The question that commonly comes up is over miles driven out of state. In the ideal world, state mileage taxes should only be collected for miles driven in that state. Making that possible means GPS trackers in the car that increase the cost of collecting the tax, while introducing privacy issues.

Sometimes the solution isn't worth the cost.

For sales and wrecks, they will likely be replaced by another car. The registration fees for the replacement will somewhat make up for the lost mileage tax. The loss could be mitigated by collecting the mileage tax more often than annually. That would also make taking advantage of the loophole less attractive. More importantly, paying more often should be easier on some peoples' budgets

 

Well we took advantage in Maryland...we paid $3.80/gal on Saturday and $3.74 today.
Came home to Virginia with near full tank.

Apparently trucks also had the Md. sales tax holiday on diesel, because there was a long line of semis blocking our normal way into the gas station, which has a truck stop associated.

If Virginia does same, we can fill up in Va. next. Here's what sucks a little bit, Virginia now has a annual fee for cars over 25 MPG so I've already pre-paid some of those state taxes.

 

duplicate

 

Charging by mile instead of per gallon with possible additional registration fees for very efficient vehicles does not solve any real problems but creates many.

Charging by gallon is simple and efficient. Charging by mile likely means adding costs and likely adding potential spying by corporations and the government as you need to know what state those miles are in. There is some cheating of filling up in lower tax states but this is small.

California the state with the highest gas taxes has already had their dmv records stolen in the past. I do not trust that government to keep information private (I don't trust my government in Texas to do that either). The reason for california's gas taxes are so high are to reduce ghg emissions, and they have regulatory moves that make it more expensive to refine in that state and hard to import motor fuel. You could say if you don't live in a state they get no motor vehicle revenue and get rid of the privacy concerns, and simply have yearly inspections that check for tampering of mileage and charging, but that won't be good for many states. Many states do not have state inspections so they would have to add that. Not a solution to any real problem, but a solution to keep guzzlers on the road.

With unfriendly regimes controlling most of the world's oil, Americans should feel pain at the pump. The problem is not that federal gas taxes are too high (they haven't been raised even with inflation since 1993. If they had risen slowly to $2/gallon not only would we have more efficient cars on the road, but the federal government would be in a position to export more gasoline to other countries and drop the gas taxes to nothing for periods of times like these.

Many in the political class want to keep oil sanctions on venezuala and Iran, which seems to help Russia and Saudi Arabia. We should be doing an alternative fuel standard where vehicles can run on menthanol which you can make from biowaste or electricity and air, but also natural gas. This takes time, but would remove oil shocks from the US. Companies should be encouraged to invest in producing more gasoline that can be exported and reduce the worlds dependence on rogue regimes.

 

all governments should be doing things to discourage driving

 

why? Is it better is it a 25 yo SUV without good working pollution control drives 10,000 miles per year than someone with a Prius prime charges on wind or solar at home and drives 20,000 miles per year and uses 25% of the oil and produces 10% of the unhealthy pollution? What about people that can't afford to raise a family and live close to work? Wouldn't it be better to concentrate on goals such as less dependance on unfriendly countries, less unhealthy pollution, or less ghg than simply on distance driven.

Keying on distrace driven also encourages more expensive equipment in cars and higher taxes since taxes are more costly to collect.

 

1. Count the number of tires.
2. Read odometer
3. Multiply to calculate registration cost plus reader labor

Bob Wilson

 

I agree with you sentiment but might say it a different way - Government should encourage using public transportation by making it available, affordable and the preferred means of transportation. Two countries I had the pleasure to visit where this had taken place was England and Japan. In both countries it was unnecessary to rent a vehicle as the train and subway systems got you anywhere you wanted cheaper than driving.

In much of our country this just isn't possible - the population is much too widely dispersed for a common transportation system that is convenient to everyone. Much of our country was built and designed with cheap gas prices in mind and the population widely dispersed depending on individual transportation.

In larger cities and densely populated areas public transportation is more achievable. Even then a very difficult goal to achieve.

Example- look at California - areas of dense population- levels of pollution that are actually killing and sickening people- exorbitant gas prices and taxes- traffic jams so common people are used to them and road rage incidents don't even rate mentioning in the news- and people who adamantly hold on to driving vehicles rather than use public transportation.

Our addiction to car, personal transportation and selfish thinking are not an easy habits to break- example- I want to be somewhere and be there now-think of that person speeding, tailgating, driving recklessly, and than telling them from now on they have to take public transportation- what might their reaction be.

 

Bob I think this was in the thread earlier but weight class is much more important than mileage or number of tires when it comes to road damage. The rule of thumb formula for road damage is proportional to (weight/axle)^4 x axles or really the fourth power. A 40,000 lb truck with 8 axles would do 156 times the damage per mile of a 4000 lb Bev with 2 axles. Having more tires for the same weight actually lowers the road damage if that same truck had only 2 axles it would cause 10,000 times more road damage as the Bev or phev. A prius prime traveling 20,000 miles a year would cause only 1/8th the road damage as a 7000 lb suv traveling 10,000 miles a year. Of course contact patch size and shape of the tires makes a big difference too, but this gets the damage number in the ballpark. There are around 4 million class 8 trucks running around the united states and about 2.5 million plugs ins, those class 8 trucks travel a lot more miles. I doubt any increase in road damage at all can be actually found from plug-ins right now but sure adding $100-$200 in registration fees would not hurt. They will be adding to the road damage in the future.

Reading the odometer was estimated to cost between 5%-20% tax purposes. The low end would be in a state like texas that has annual safety checks of vehicles, and if the tax was paid at inspection those inspection stations would be able to lower the governments costs. Many states don't have annual inspections and I would guess a state like california would have to double their inspections to annual and add many non inspected vehicles so they would have much higher costs. States without inspections would be much higher. This is much cheaper than gps but still has many hidden added costs.

 

As long as there is uniform algorithm, I’m happy. Make the registration fee match the damage and I’m a happy camper.

Bob Wilson