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The obvious thing to do is just base the cost on your insurance and the fee to vehicle registration. But lets be real, the weight of the vehicle has an exponential effect on road wear so they should just charge heavier vehicles a registration premium regardless of fuel type
For those who don't understand the the degree to which this matters, behold, the fourth power law of road stress:
There should simply be an annual fee based on vehicle weight and distance driven
Keep the vehicle in your garage and only drive a handful of times? Low fee, drive a monster truck thousands and thousands of miles? Large fee.
This also solves the problem of electric vehicles not paying towards road maintenance, as they are heavy and would wear the roads more than a standard vehicle that uses gas.
The problem is distance driven has a linear effect. The weight has an exponential effect. If you drive a monster truck 10 miles a year and you drive a shitty commuter that weighs 1/5 the amount 3,650 miles a year, the monster truck is gonna damage the road more. If the fee is anything but a 4 power exponent from weight and linear with distance then you're punishing miles driven more than they are contributing to road wear.
In fact the only time distance matters is if its 0 then why even bother licensing a vehicle heavy enough to be worth surcharging? If most people drive their vehicles more than 10 miles a year but less than 10000, you'd want the fees to scale with normal use cases rather than some fringe use cases that encourage people to own vehicles they never use.
Edit: The way to do it is probably surcharge people for the weight of the vehicle + the weight of the gas the vehicles use in a year.
You can have tiers to solve that, like vehicles under 5000lbs pay $x per kilometer driven, vehicles between 5000lbs and 10,000lbs pay $y per kilometer driven, and vehicles over 10000lbs pay $z per kilometer driven.
Wouldn't be perfect but closer.
My preference would be to assign an equivalent single axle load to each vehicle based on make and model or avg trailer load capacity and then scale that linearly with mileage.
https://pavementinteractive.org/reference-desk/design/design-parameters/equivalent-single-axle-load/
The problem with your example is you could read it as cars cause effectively zero wear on roads, compared to a truck
Not obvious, there's tons of holes in that plan and I'll throw down a couple I thought of while I brush my teeth. I lived in California for years.
-Out of state plates are not included. Sooo many out of state vehicles
-This has an outsized impact on shipping and industry such as work vans, small business trucks (can be argued that it should be, but I'm not convinced that the cost should be borne by those areas vs the bajillion people that don't carpool to/from LA everyday)
-A heavy vehicle pays a premium at registration, but what if it's only driven a couple times a year? Vs a lighter vehicle that drives 40k miles in a year. Has to have some kind of use component to plan.
I'd argue that it's way more complicated than any sentence that starts with "the obvious thing to do..." Everyone wants a simple and fair solution buddy life is not that simple and California's traffic, transportation, road maintenance, and road based industry is about as complicated as it gets.
Agreed on the weird side affects.
My state charges an ev surcharge and since I do very little driving it costs more than the tax on what little gas I would use.
I mean, out of state plates shouldn't matter much. The residents of the state should be paying for the road maintenance, not people from out of state.
So the total cost of the roads should be bared by the residents, and their fees should be high enough to account for the damage done from out of state vehicles
I say this Soley because our of state vehicles don't need to be in California, and they don't need Californian roads, so why should they pay for them?
The residents of the state benefit from them being there because they are delivering goods to be sold in California to Californians, or to travel and spend tourist dollars in California providing jobs to locals, etc.
Residents should pay for the roads because the roads benefit the residents by allowing out of state traffic. It shouldn't solely be a straight charge to every vehicle that uses the roads.
I lived in California for 11 years and had out of state plates for the entire time, legally. Not even weird. There's so many ways and reasons that you can live in a state, or work in a state full time and legally be able to register your vehicle in another state.
Registration fees are simply not the way. There HAS to be some kind of equitable use tax or fee.
A gas tax seems pretty dang effective to me. It doesn't capture electric vehicles correctly, but honestly right now we WANT to encourage the use of electric vehicles so I don't think it's quite time to flip the table and try to implement a new system.
We're still in a transition period and we need to do everything possible to discourage gas powered vehicles, and taxing the shit out of consumer unleaded and diesel is an awesome way to do it. Honestly, anyone suggesting otherwise raises my hackles. There's not that many electric vehicles on the road in the USA, even in urban California.
I'm suspicious of any new laws that would reduce the costs of fossil fueled vehicles while offloading more costs to electric ones.
Does California require annual inspections? Here they record your mileage - I think it has some effect on allowable emissions. So we already have a way of collecting mileage
For every difficult problem there is a solution that is simple, easy, and wrong.
The fourth power law indicates that a heavier vehicle that is 5x heavier per axle does more damage to the road in one day than one day than a lighter vehicle (1x) would do in a year travelling the same route every day.
So no, its not disproportionate or unfair to fee vehicles by weight. Japanese kei trucks aren't even very big so there's market solutions that exists. Plus there's an argument to be made that if you're only using a truck once a year its more effecient to rent it than buy it.
As for simplicity, you're right no plan is going to easily be both fair and simple. Where I live there's weigh stations along the highway that weigh big trucks and these capture out of state trucks. I'm sure a registration fee can be collected there, too for out of state vehicles, even at a day rate. You can also offer parking fee discounts for registered vehicles.
If you boil down to "why do we care about this" generally the answers ARE easier to come up with.
I was skeptical about your claims about weight having such an outsized effect, but it looks like there's merit. Seems like it's a super complex area of study, and we have observational data that gives us rules of thumb that transportation and pavement engineers use to estimate pavement damages over time. Thanks for bringing that up, I've learned stuff today!
I still don't think it's as simple as taxing trucks though. Registration is part of the solution, but so is gas/sales/tire/oil disposal taxes, weigh stations, tolls, parking fines, crush charges, etc etc etc.
There's a lot of things that would need to happen in order to effectively capture and recompense road damage in California, if that were a goal of the state. Unfortunately I have very little faith that California can do it - for all the good things about California, effective governance or municipal problem solving is not really on the list from what I've seen. It's a shame, because they really have the resources, it's just all such a mess.
Its so hard to get through to most people on traffic engineering. Induced demand, for instance, is a nightmare to explain to anyone.
Traffic engineering is possibly so unintuitive they should teach it in high school so people understand the hell common sense and intuition create when they are wrong.
Every time some politician creates some well meaning but misguided attempt to fix a traffic or parking problem it creates an avelanche of unintended consequences.