"Obviously EVs currently account for a small fraction of road use right now, but they mostly drive on dense, urban infrastructure - the most expensive to build and maintain."

Is it the most expensive by $/length of road, or by $/(vehicle * travel distance)?

> The current compromise is to collect it once at a federal level and split the proceeds with the states. This has problems, but it's better than having every state track individual mileage on public roads (ew).

“Has problems” is an interesting way to gloss over we’ve got an administration that has openly declared war on any state he didn’t win and will no doubt withhold funds from the states he doesn't like, the same ones that will be providing the vast majority of the revenue in question.

I literally cannot think of a worse way to enforce this than letting the federal government collect the tax and then distribute it to the states as they see fit.

    - Gas tax goes towards more than just fixing road damage

> The federal gas tax is low and unchanged. States have their own gas taxes in addition that do go up and have done so a lot in the last several decades.

Why is this relevant? Aside from your “polemics”, I mean.

> Obviously EVs currently account for a small fraction of road use right now, but they mostly drive on dense, urban infrastructure - the most expensive to build and maintain.

I suppose if it’s a small fraction of that then this all makes perfect sense. What is the specific fraction they should be funding then, and why is the federal government the right group to collect it? Or are we just making excuses for politics we like?

> As EVs inevitably grow in popularity, this will have to be solved eventually anyway.

So now is a good time? Why?

I don't want to set the author's disdain aside at all. It's 100% justified.

This is really just a tax on leaving the stone age.

Especially given that my nissan leaf weights a little more than 1/2 of what an escalade weighs. It's purely just another disincentive to electrify, brought to you by the burn baby burn lobby.

The US has become the seed state of global idiocracy.

Most of the states already have an EV tax. For instance, WA charges $225/yr for registering an EV. The issue is unlike gas tax, it’s not based on actual usage. And the flat fee they’re charging is way higher than the gas tax anyone driving a gas car with avg fuel consumption would pay for driving the national average of annual mileage.

Offhand, the maintenance costs are something similar to a scalar that is the square of a vehicle's weight.

Rather than indirectly taxing via fuel it would be more proper to do so by said maintenance scalar (weight based) and the distance driven as the inputs. Presumably paid at the time of registration renewal or at vehicle inspections.

That sounds like a lot of infra change to setup, so there should be plenty of planning and cutover time.

States already charge EV registration fees for lost gas tax revenue.

The EV tax was only implemented because it's easy to implement both politically and practically, not because it's the best solution.

A better tax like others are suggesting based on mileage, weight, or usage (tolls) would have to apply to all road users, and require more rules and enforcement and be more difficult.

Why not tax tires?

Are EVs that widespread in the US already that you're at the stage where you need to move from incentivising EV purchases to normalising their taxation?

This is how Congress works, for better or worse. Bills get proposed all the time by any one of its five hundred or so members, it doesn't mean either one will pass. That's democracy.

That Duffy sent this letter to the governors: https://ops.fhwa.dot.gov/memorandum/Freedom_to_Drive_Initiat...

Asking them to maximise roadway capacity (that’s to say just one more lane bro) in order to solve congestion, at the explicit request to have other modes of transport minimised. “recover roadway capacity from other purposes to support driving” because that’ll solve congestion. Deeply, deeply unserious.

I've been paying my EV tax for 1.5 years now in NZ. It's about 2x more than hybrid cars pay thru tax. Just dropped $800 for the next 10k km. Also some sort of registration rebate has been removed so another $100 per year.

> $130/yr? No matter how heavy the vehicle or how many miles you drive?

It could be worse. In the "Big Beautiful Bill" they originally had a $250/yr EV tax in it, which then got bumped up to $500 by a Representative who is/was a car dealer owner, before finally being removed because they decided it would be too much effort to make the states collect it for them.

Some people don't want the government keeping track of what they're doing, unless the government has reason to believe they're doing something illegal. This sentiment is so strong to Americans that it is expressly stated as a reason for rebelling against British rule. Taxing consumables allows per-distance taxing without the tracking that comes from toll roads or mileage tracking.

Also, lots of publicly funded transportation infrastructure fees don't closely track usage. Many popular public transit systems charge a single fee for unlimited continuous usage or charge per day/month. There's other weird quirks, for example when going the San Francisco Bay area, I always plan my stops in a clockwise direction, because then I don't have to pay bridge tolls when traveling in that direction (north and east), but would in the opposite direction (south and west).

Gas has a nice linear relationship with road usage. (Farms can currently buy tax exempt gas and diesel explicitly for this reason).

A lot of states have experimented with mileage-based tracking for EVs but there is no realistic way to do it that's not super fiddly or privacy invasive.

I agree with your comment a lot. My ideal for road pricing is something like a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_miles_traveled_tax multiplied by weight (maybe squared, due to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law of road damage).

I do think that a lot of people think that public roads are "free" and cost nothing to build and maintain. It is really hard to make people think about where the labor, materials, and funding come from.

> If you could come up with a Constitutional way to tax only energy exports, that would be better still.

The only constitutional issue with taxing energy exports is gettin Congress to pass the law and POTUS to sign it.

The electorate is not so stupid that "it turns out people really don't want what I'm peddling so I'm just gonna reframe it and those idiots will be none the wiser" is likely to work.

Nevermind the fact that by moving it from gas to oil companies you're also then taxing "energy" more generally and it's gonna show up across the entire economy.

> travel less total miles on the road due to their nature

Kinda opposite really. If I wasn't driving much I'd get a big ass gas guzzler for cheap rather than drop 50k on an EV. Driving long legs in a gas car is pain in the ass too, IDK how people do it.

When it comes to any good or service, there are only two choices: the user pays, or other people pay. The status quo is that drivers pay a lot for roads through gasoline taxes and vehicle registration fees, but the rest of society (including non-drivers) pay through income taxes, sales taxes, and property taxes. Moreover, a lot of taxes paid for road construction/maintenance are not proportional to how much you drive; a driver doing double the miles in a year is paying less than twice of another driver.

Please explain your ideal scenario of who pays for roads. And if your answer is "someone else" (e.g. "taxes", "government", "corporations", "billionaires"), further explain why "someone else" can't use the same argument to make you pay.

You would pay little to no taxes if you completely removed yourself from society and lived deep in the wilderness, but I but you aren't going to do that. I wonder why that is?

We also subsidize fossil fuels at around US$800 B/year direct, and much more than that indirect (wars, pollution, warming etc). A 100% fossil tax is what we need to kick that habit.