San Francisco Bay Area considering Vehicle Miles Traveled tax

[GuyContinental]

@TwoWheelsDC 25926 wrote:

Very good point, I hadn’t thought of that. I suppose you could increase/decrease the tax based on fuel economy tiers or something. Either way, it’s going to be pretty complicated…but I find it encouraging that political leaders are at least trying new schemes to tackle the problem, even if it takes some trial and error to figure out.

Don’t get me wrong- the tax is a good idea but IMO this is a super-problematic and complicated way to go about it when you already have a mechanism available (i.e. the gas tax) with the right incentives built in. I’m not well-versed on the subject but the only reasons that readily come to mind for a miles-based system are the political impalatablity of a gas tax (even in CA) and the need to make the tax less regressive (you could simply exclude certain income levels from the tax).

Also, some Silicon Valley start-up is salivating over the chance to install, maintain and track devices on x-million cars.

[Terpfan]

@GuyContinental 25963 wrote:

Don’t get me wrong- the tax is a good idea but IMO this is a super-problematic and complicated way to go about it when you already have a mechanism available (i.e. the gas tax) with the right incentives built in. I’m not well-versed on the subject but the only reasons that readily come to mind for a miles-based system are the political impalatablity of a gas tax (even in CA) and the need to make the tax less regressive (you could simply exclude certain income levels from the tax).

Also, some Silicon Valley start-up is salivating over the chance to install, maintain and track devices on x-million cars.

The gas tax isn’t effective as it’s structured now and that’s the whole problem in my opinion. It wasn’t designed for high milage vehicles, to support MUPs that we want, and certainly not to subsidize mass transit. Fixing that though is a political problem. And political problems tend to become dicey when they involve large amounts of money, the word ‘tax’, and something effecting every America. Fun, fun. My big suggestion is do not give them any ideas toward bicycle related…I’ll even stop there because if you think it and say it, eventually some bafoon will turn it into law and we’ll be paying for something we shouldn’t or weren’t before.

[JorgeGortex]

OK, I have to call BS on this one. I am pro-bike, pro-green, but this is discriminatory towards those people that have to rely on cars to go places. I imagine my 82yo father who is on a fixed income fielding yet another tax just so that he can go to places to do the things that he enjoys doing… or needs to do. He will never take up riding a bike, he is a safe driver, he has never used the bus system in the area, and some of the places he regularly travels to are well outside of any of these modes o transport including taxi’s as well. Why should he have to take on yet another tax just to live his life? Or any of us for that matter?

And GPS tracking? No way. I am not the paranoid type, but this is just a little too much even for me. If I post to a social network my location that is one thing, but to have a system automatically tracking where I go is not cool.

If we spent as much time and money investing in alternate fuel technologies as we did coming up with new taxes, and chasing the dwindling petrochemical sources we have now, we might not have to worry about these discussions.

JG

ps- and frankly, I love my car, and I drive it almost everyday…same with my bike. They don’t have to be mutually exclusive.

[mstone]

@JorgeGortex 25981 wrote:

I imagine my 82yo father who is on a fixed income fielding yet another tax just so that he can go to places to do the things that he enjoys doing[…]Why should he have to take on yet another tax just to live his life? Or any of us for that matter?

Umm, because the roads don’t pay for themselves? As an option, he can pay no taxes, and enjoy his car by sitting in it while it’s parked in his driveway.

What is it with this fantasy notion–so popular these days–that people can get stuff without actually paying for it.

[pfunkallstar]

@GuyContinental 25962 wrote:

I kid you not- the Texas GOP Platform doc has that covered too (in the Privacy section):

“We further oppose any national ID program, including the Real ID Act and the use of Radio Frequency Identification Chips (RFID) on humans.”

But what about helper robots?! Should they be tagged?

[mstone]

@pfunkallstar 26067 wrote:

But what about helper robots?! Should they be tagged?

Are they government helper robots, or small business helper robots?

[dasgeh]

@acl 25874 wrote:

Regardless of whether I think the tax is a good idea (I don’t at first thought, but I might change my mind on consideration), why would you have to install a GPS? Just note the mileage once a year at inspection time, or at the time of sale if sold before the year is up. GPS is stupid.

You have to install GPS because where you put on miles matters. If it’s a state-only law, then the state probably couldn’t tax miles driven out of state. If it’s federal, you end up with the same problem if someone were to, say, drive to Canada. There may be a problem with taxing miles driven on private land as well.

I’m all for using taxes as a way to discourage driving, but the gas tax is regressive (e.g., people with fewer resources are less able to purchase cars that have better technology). There may be other, better ways to discourage driving, but many are specific to location — e.g. having the federal government not offer free parking would help a lot in downtown DC.

[DismalScientist]

@mstone 25866 wrote:

I’d be perfectly happy with that option, as long as it was bundled with the requirement that nothing but gas taxes or tolls could be used to pay for motor vehicle facilities. Us cyclists would somehow manage to get by on the windfall from the general fund money previously spent on cars.

Ummm. Do we not ride on roads?

[DaveK]

@DismalScientist 26103 wrote:

Ummm. Do we not ride on roads?

Ride on, yes. Damage, no.

[GuyContinental]

@DaveK 26107 wrote:

Ride on, yes. Damage, no.

Have you SEEN Dirt’s tires?

Also, I can point to several divots in Arlington pavement that look suspiciously like parts of my body

[KLizotte]

@JorgeGortex 25981 wrote:

I imagine my 82yo father who is on a fixed income fielding yet another tax just so that he can go to places to do the things that he enjoys doing… or needs to do. He will never take up riding a bike, he is a safe driver, he has never used the bus system in the area, and some of the places he regularly travels to are well outside of any of these modes o transport including taxi’s as well. Why should he have to take on yet another tax just to live his life? Or any of us for that matter?

JG

Actually, this past year the Highway Trust Fund needed to be bailed out by the General Fund for the first time because it ran out of money. The gas tax is not been indexed to inflation so is technically decreasing each year in real terms. Cars have become more fuel efficient, there are more electric/hybrid cars on the roads, user demand has gone up, trucks have gotten heavier, and all of the highway infrastructure that was built during the Einsenhower years is crumbling and in need of refurb. This has led to the Trust Fund deficit. Also, the auto taxes that car users pay do not cover negative externalities such as particulate and noise pollution, nor the cost of maintaining a military that is partially dedicated to maintaining our oil supplies from other countries. In short, the cost of driving is highly subidized; that is, users are not exposed in a direct way to the true cost of driving. Any time there is a disconnect between use and price a distortion is caused; economists refer to this as a market failure.

Also, the gas tax funds a portion of the costs associated with public transit because of the positive public externalities associated with public transit.

[DismalScientist]

@DaveK 26107 wrote:

Ride on, yes. Damage, no.

I imagine much damage is simply a function of time and not use. I notice that the area trails need to be repaved over time.

Damage should be a function of pressure per area of tire contact. A 200 lb bike/cyclist weighs 1/20th of a 4000 lb car. I would imagine the contact area of 2 bicycle tires might be around 1/20th of the contract area of 4 car tires. Of course then a traversing car would be covering 20 times the area of a traversing bicycle.

[mstone]

@KLizotte 26111 wrote:

Actually, this past year the Highway Trust Fund needed to be bailed out by the General Fund for the first time because it ran out of money.

The trust fund has required transfers from the general fund for years, to the tune of tens of billions of dollars. On the state level the gas tax covers even less of the funding, and most of the maintenance cost of the road system is financed at the state level.

@DismalScientist 26112 wrote:

I imagine much damage is simply a function of time and not use. I notice that the area trails need to be repaved over time.

Road damage is a non-linear function directly related to the weight of a vehicle; heavier vehicles do vastly more damage than lighter ones. The worst issue with the trails is tree roots buckling them, which is a function both of having trees much closer to bike trails than best practices suggest, and of having trails with a much shallower roadbed than you find on roads. This is much less of an issue with the parts of the W&OD that are built in the old rail bed than (e.g.) the Fairfax County Parkway MUP or other shallow asphalt paths. The flip side is that if we had any maintenance money at all, it wouldn’t cost that much to repave these things on a regular basis, given how little there is to do (compared to the every-couple-of-years grinding & repaving on roads with heavy vehicle traffic).

@DismalScientist 26103 wrote:

Ummm. Do we not ride on roads?

Sure we do. But if we had a multi-billion dollar funding stream, we could get some really nice dedicated infrastructure instead. Which will be nice, as the roads will be completely falling apart in this hypothetical due to a lack of maintenance once they’re restricted to using only gas tax revenue.

[DismalScientist]

@mstone 26135 wrote:

Sure we do. But if we had a multi-billion dollar funding stream, we could get some really nice dedicated infrastructure instead. Which will be nice, as the roads will be completely falling apart in this hypothetical due to a lack of maintenance once they’re restricted to using only gas tax revenue.

And what would be the source of this multi-billion dollar funding stream? Even with a multi-billion dollar funding stream, I would doubt that one could get near the coverage as the present day road system.

Furthermore, with the general behavior involved with the MUPs and bike-only paths (think the W&OD out west dominated by freddom), I would still rather ride on roads.

[mstone]

@DismalScientist 26137 wrote:

And what would be the source of this multi-billion dollar funding stream?

Well, what I wrote above is that I’d be perfectly happy if gas tax proceeds were used only for cars and not “bike paths” and other “waste” that makes the tea party froth, as long as only the gas tax were used for cars and we can have all the general fund money currently spent on subsidizing cars. If some wacko wants to start ranting about “their” tax money, see their crazy and double down.

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