BIKEPGH MESSAGE BOARD ARCHIVE

the example law cited in the article would only apply a mileage tax to hybrids and electric cars. depending on the tax rate and miles driven this may make it cheaper to drive an electric car in the city than an suv into work from the suburbs.

the biggest concern i have with this is the tracking of cars. i already have to send in my mileage when i renew my registration every year, it would be simple enough to add a tax system to this. i do not like it one bit the idea of having a GPS tracking device in any vehicle i am in. sure they assure us they won't use it to track us, but once they have the ability to they will have "legal" recourse to track you with a warrant. and in the post-patriot act world, they don't even need a warrant anymore.

it truly wouldn't matter how we pay, if we generated adequate funding. federal gas tax hasn't been raised in nearly two decades, and the fund the gas tax revenue goes to has been raided several times to fund non-infrastructure spending.

If the gas tax was raised by 10 cents - or even 6 cents to fill the trust fund - , we would not be having this useless, partisan debate.

Somebody is pushing this behind the scenes. I heard this from the honorable state representative from York (R) a couple of weeks ago, and then one of my (R) Facebook friends was all up in arms about this plan being mooted by (D)s and now the USA Today. Stuff doesn't just heat up this quickly on its own.

Someone, somewhere, is lobbying this pretty hard. Which brings me to question -- cui bono?

Answer:

(a) oil companies

(b) manufacturers of low-efficiency motor vehicles

(c) trucking firms

(d) the AAA

Any others?

(ps. Mick, my research says that the estimating software used by highway engineers uses the 4th power of the axle load in their wear formulas).

i do not like it one bit the idea of having a GPS tracking device in any vehicle i am in. sure they assure us they won't use it to track us, but once they have the ability to they will have "legal" recourse to track you with a warrant. and in the post-patriot act world, they don't even need a warrant anymore.

i'm not sure what would happen if the gps was already in the car, but an appeals court found a few months ago that law enforcement officials could attach a gps device to your automobile and track your movements without a warrant, provided the vehicle was accessible to them.

But it would be so much easier to get this vital location information if all cars came with them prefitted, and if the price were included in the purchase, not on some agency's budget.

But it would be so much easier to get this vital location information if all cars came with them prefitted, and if the price were included in the purchase, not on some agency's budget.

true, but it's unclear whether a warrant would be required in that case. my guess is that it would be, but it's not a decided matter, as far as i know.

Tracking vehicles is a concern I would also have with this proposal. I would be in favor of some sort of Federal flat tax.

In the State of Montana they use the yearly registration fee as a flat tax for highway funding. The yearly registration fee is based on the NADA value of the vehicle. The fee to register a $35,000 SUV is about $1100.

@ Lyle - Thanks for the 4th power stat.

@ Sloaps (Mr Civil Engineer) Is that in keeping with what you know?

Of those that Lyle lists ( a vile gang of villians, for sure!), I'd put my money on those that make SUVSs - very high profit vehicles. I don't watch TV much, but my impression is TV is brought to you by the people who want you to believe those ugly, unsafe, uneconomical vehicles are really cool and make your family secure, too!

"Most of the costs of using a highway — including pavement damage, congestion, accidents and noise — are tied more closely to the number of miles traveled than to the amount of fuel consumed," the CBO noted in a March report.

damage - very wrong.

congestion - eh, it is also correlated with the size of the vehicle and its handling characteristics, but we'll call this a wash

accidents - I question this. there are certainly more accidents in cities and parking lots where fuel economy is poor, than on highways, though more fatalities in the latter. Bigger, heavier vehicles do cause more fatalities and property damage than smaller ones.

noise - that's one of the least-worrisome externalities I can come up with. And again, heavier vehicles (especially tractor-trailers) are far noisier than hybrids and electric vehicles. If you want to tax noise, there's absolutely no reason to tax EVs.

Other unmentioned externalities: the defense budget (also including the Coast Guard), the State dept budget, impaired health due to particulates and pollutants, damaged waterways and forests... All tied much more closely to the amount of fuel consumed than to the number of miles driven.

Frustratingly, of the dozen or so links that the USAT has placed in their article, not one links to the CBO report they cite.

As to road wear, the formula I've been able to find is that road wear is estimated by engineers using the formula vehicle speed times axle weight to the FOURTH power.

So, the average car weighing in at about 2 ton is going to cause 160,000 times the damage of a 170lb cyclist+30lb bicycle traveling at the same speed.

I just read this which states that a 3% reduction in driving resulted in a 30% reduction in congestion.

noise - that's one of the least-worrisome externalities I can come up with. And again, heavier vehicles (especially tractor-trailers) are far noisier than hybrids and electric vehicles. If you want to tax noise, there's absolutely no reason to tax EVs.

Tires make noise too. As someone who lives near 376 I can say that vehicles travelling fast make a lot of freaking noise.

A gas tax makes less and less sense as increased mileage standards and electronic vehicles continue to come into play. An EV or hybrid may be good for emissions, but they still take up space and weigh a lot. I don't know what the solution is.

http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/121xx/doc12101/03-23-HighwayFunding.pdf

Looks like maybe the USA Today over-simplified their summary.

Looks like maybe the USA Today over-simplified their summary.

Quelle surprise!

Is there a reason you couldn't just use a periodic odometer reading to do the mileage tracking? Not that it's necessarily a good idea.

an appeals court found a few months ago that law enforcement officials could attach a gps device to your automobile and track your movements without a warrant, provided the vehicle was accessible to them. ... it's not a decided matter, as far as i know.

We had a big research project this term on exactly this issue. It remains undecided or rather, in what is known as a "circuit split." Long story short, some circuits have said that GPS tracking is not a "search" for Fourth Amendment purposes while others have said it is. Depending on what part of the country you're in, you could get a different result based on the exact same federal law. Screwed up, I know, but until the U.S. Supreme Court comes down one way or the other, it will be up in the air. The two "lead" cases are these:

- United States v. Garcia, 474 F.3d 994 (7th Cir. 2007) (allowing the warrantless GPS tracking)

- United States v. Maynard, 615 F.3d 544 (D.C. Cir. 2010) (denying the warrantless GPS tracking).

@ieverhart -- thanks for providing the information. I was thinking I ought to look this up since I have the same potential tracking/police state concerns with this that some of the other board members have alluded to. You saved me the research.

Q for you: How do you get the periodic odometer reading that you mentioned and know that it's right? Since this is going to cost people money out of their pocket in the form of taxes, don't they have every incentive to lie or game the system to avoid/evade them?

I'm just asking. Off the top of my head I don't see any way to do it.

Automobile odometers are difficult to alter, and I believe it is already a felony to do so, so I don't think there's a huge problem with evasion.

Mileage is already checked during the annual safety / emissions inspections in most states (but not all, yet). I'd rather see mandated annual inspections in those non-conforming states than a massive new tracking infrastructure.

VMT makes sense for a few classes of motor vehicles that operate on state and federal surface transportation networks. There exist several gas taxes: marine, general and commercial aviation, motor gasoline and diesel.

VMT will most likely be applied as an overlay, rather than a replacement. Think of the turnpike ezpass or a "roaming" charge for use of your mobile phone, applied as a congestion charge, bridge or limit access highway toll. I don't think the government will have the ability to roll out a GPS system that divides the revenue between the local and state governments based on your driving. We may have the technology, but privacy nuts and political hacks will reduce the system to nothing more than a really expensive odometer, me thinks...

Roll out of VMT would take decades. So, what do we do until then?

I'd respectfully disagree about odometers being difficult to alter. I'm sure it's a crime, and that some are harder than others to alter, but for many vehicles it's no harder than unplugging the speedometer cable or sending unit wire on the transmission. Of course, your speedometer won't work, but for many that would be a fair trade-off to dodge considerable road use taxes. People routinely do much more difficult things, with much stiffer penalties, to avoid taxes.

As for the merits of taxing road use based on miles traveled, I'm troubled by anything that removes an incentive to driving small, fuel-efficient vehicles.

Assuming you could track usage without constitutional problems and widespread tax fraud, perhaps what would be fair would be a mileage tax with higher rates per mile for heavier vehicles, just like PA's annual vehicle registration costs increase based on vehicle weight. That might preserve much of the financial benefit of driving a small, efficient vehicle.

...a mileage tax with higher rates per mile for heavier vehicles...

that's precisely what the turnpike does for vehicle classes 1 through 9.

i truly believe the cost to administer a program like that throughout pennsylvania would be greater than the majority of the electorate would allow.

The way I see it, gas taxes pay for road repair, VMT pays for transit, at least in PA. VMT can be better enforced by requiring an odo reading anytime you take your car in for any sort of service at a state-licensed shop, and requiring data sharing with insurance companies. I'm sure they would like to know if you're cheating on your odometer readings, too.

For those who are concerned with GPS tracking, do you have GPS enabled phones or use phones while traveling? If you do, the government can already pull that information if they want to

I only use my phone while wearing a tinfoil hat.

i don't own a cellphone because i value my privacy. what i don't understand is why anyone would not be concerned about privacy. since george bush was president we have lived in a country where habeas corpus has been suspended, warrants are unnecessary, and the government freely tortures who it will.

"The way I see it, gas taxes pay for road repair,"

Gas taxes were SUPPOSED to pay for road repair but it does not. Because the gas tax has not increased enough to keep pace with the costs of roads, most of the money for repairs comes from the general fund. Multiple attempts have been made to raise the gas tax but people hate paying more taxes and so the attempts have failed, requiring more money to be pulled from elsewhere in the budget.

I think a gas tax is a reasonable way of taxing and paying for roads. It has the advantage of being somewhat transparent, simply tacked onto the bill at the pump in a per-gallon basis. It is simply too low. There may come a day when there are enough electric cars on the road that their free use of the roads becomes a factor and the laws need to be changed but, as it stands now, gasoline is still king and they really just need to raise those taxes to the point where that actually can pay for roads.

Of course, that would mean doubling or tripling the gas tax so, politically, that will never happen.

Find me a developed country that can't/won't pull GPS data in instances of 'national security' I don't find it right what-so-ever, but it's a fact of life nowadays. I agree that something designed to enhance infrastructure for transit should in no way further this agenda though.

VMT, with classes, seems like one of the better options out there. Without classes, it definitely penalizes efficient cars.

Also, would bicycles be subject to said tax…? I know this has come up before, but if 'we' are going to fight for paying by the mile, 'we' travel the same miles as everyone else.

I wouldn't be opposed to it, but it's something to consider. I'd much rather pay my fare share, vs the amount that comes out of my taxes to pay for all the autos out there to abuse the asphalt.

I think a tax based on vehicle weight makes more sense and is harder to dodge than a VMT (assuming that turning your vehicle into a pressure vessel full of helium would hurt more than help).

Especially since wear is so much worse for heavier vehicles. Since a very heavy vehicle will do more damage to a given stretch of road than a light vehicle, and why not make the weight penalties proportionate to the damage expected due to weight?

Then again, heavier vehicles have heavier lobbying budgets too, so anything based on reality will never happen.

Oh, and japan has a tax structure based on engine size (with other taxes too, I assume) - that would be reasonable and difficult to dodge as well.

re: "I think a gas tax is a reasonable way of taxing and paying for roads. It has the advantage of being somewhat transparent, simply tacked onto the bill at the pump in a per-gallon basis."

That is an excellent point! It is a tax that you can adjust downward yourself if you don't like paying it by controlling your own usage. It's almost like the free market! whoo-hoo!

My sister in law was complaining about having to spend $90 to fill her tank the other day, "I have to drive for my job, I have to go here, and there, wah, wah...". So, knowing that you have to drive for your job, maybe you should have gone for, I dunno, a Honda Accord instead of a Mercedes ML350. F'kn people.

edmonds - I'm surrounded, both where I live and where I work, by people who "need" a truck (they go hunting ALL the time (once or twice a year), and NONE (all) of their friends have trucks, and it's IMPOSSIBLE (too hard) to rent a truck), and "can't afford" multiple cars, so they drive to work with their truck. And they of course can't live close to work, (not enough space, wrong school district, undesireables, etc).

I'm not saying that there aren't people who need trucks. I'm not saying there aren't hunters who use them often enough that it's reasonable by even the most hard core anti-truck person. I'm not saying that all commuting by truck is unjustifiable, I'm sure there are many reasons. Just that virtually all the people who surround me are as convincing as a mud puddle. As convincing as your SIL.

The rule can't argue the exception into the majority as an excuse.

So funny ejwme. Everyone is so helpless.

That is an excellent point! It is a tax that you can adjust downward yourself if you don't like paying it by controlling your own usage. It's almost like the free market! whoo-hoo!

So true.

And I forgot, when somebody in the family needs to bring home a grill or move some furniture or a snowblower, I usually get the call with my little 24 mpg AWD Honda element, that will do ANYthing. Rant.

That one time they had a bring home a 2x4 it was worth it.

i just don't understand why more people don't saw off the back end of a station wagon or minivan and install a truck bed.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/that_chrysler_guy/4858192774/

Bumpersticker: "Yes, this is my truck. No, I can't do you a favor."

I feel the need to tell on myself - I hear myself in those comments "but nobody else is hiring, I can't live where I work because I can't afford it, I can't bike the whole way because it's too far and takes too long, I can't quit and move where I want yet because of the finances..."

granted, my excuses ring hollow to ME.

“We have met the enemy and he is us.” Walt Kelly

I am currently lamenting the loss of my truck. I bought a subaru. It was the smallest car I could find that met my (admittedly limited frequency) hauling reuirements of a) kayak b) bicycle and c) large boxes (that I have to move on a regualr basis for a specific purpose.) Dismayed that I actually LOSE gas mileage with the new car over my 8 year old pickup -- from 28-30 in City driving for my truck to +/- 26 in the Subaru. I could justify it only by factoring in my combined bus/bike commute patterns and my use of the 80 mpg scooter for 6-7 months of the year.

Swalfoort - I drove s forester for a few years, never got better than 19mpg in it (hwy). It's the AWD that's the difference, but I was perpetually dissappointed, as kelly blue book indicated I should have been getting 20-25 mpg. I hope you find yours more satisfying, they are great cars.