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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.
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.
I'd argue that it's way more complicated than any sentence that starts with "the obvious thing to do..."
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 suppose that that's probably the most-reasonable way to incorporate EVs into paying for the roads, but that's going to suck for people who have an ICE vehicle registered in California but do most of their driving in other states, since they're basically paying tax twice, once to California in terms of the ownership tax, and then again to the other states in terms of fuel.
considers
Hmm.
How about instead retaining the existing gasoline tax without changes, but making the Road Charge tax apply to only EVs, since the issue (gas tax not functioning) is specific to EVs? Then if and when other states adopt some kind of change to deal with EVs, if it differs, can adopt that policy.
EDIT: I guess that might subsidize users of plugin hybrids who do a lot of short-range city driving.
I know people will quickly balk at this because people tend to balk at new taxes, tax changes, and anything happening in California.
But it's a good idea. Driving electric should not get you out of paying for roads.
The only way out of paying for roads should be not using them. And that bumps up demand for better public transit, which does substantially more to combat climate change than everyone driving electric cars.
Something needs to change. When these massive EVs (Hummers, cybertrucks, etc...) are worse for the environment and roads than other vehicles they should be paying proportionally to the damage they cause.
It's crazy to me that somehow we're transitioning to EV but at the same time have found a way to make them more dangerous.
worse for the environment and roads than other vehicles they should be paying proportionally to the damage they cause.
Which means the trucking industry should be paying a lot more.
Are large EVs actually worse for the environment compared to an equivalent sized ICE vehicle? I find that hard to believe.
Tires on EVs wear down faster than ICE vehicles.
The EU has regulations on tires to control pollution.
Meanwhile, the is dismantling the EPA...
The EVs are heavier, which causes more road wear than a similarly sized ICE and they will also produce more tire wear pollution for the same reason. Overall, they'd still be better than the ICE comparison for the environment due to no tail pipe emissions but a smaller EV would obviously be better.
This is also ignoring the environmental damage caused by mining the resources for the batteries, as well as ignoring that an old ICE engine will always be better for the environment than a new ICE or EV car. There is no such thing as a new car that is good for the environment… it’s all green washing.
Yes, any powered vehicles are bad for the environment. With that said, studies have shown that, even considering mining resources for batteries, an EV is much less detrimental for the environment that a similar ICE vehicle.
I hear you…. My main point is that new things are never as green as old things, but I have recently heard or read articles suggesting the impact of mining for metal and batteries is not fully accounted for in the studies….
I was mistaken with how much co2 they produce but here's an article about it https://www.inverse.com/input/tech/gmc-hummer-ev-carbon-dioxide-emissions-electric-truck
they should be paying proportionally to the damage they cause
Good news, electricity is already taxed. Driving larger EVs already costs more in taxes than driving smaller, more efficient EVs.
Yeah, but road wear is exponential. Driving a vehicle with twice the weight uses four times the public resources, but I don't think you want to tax electricity that high.
I'm of the opinion that large heavy vehicles should pay more to use the roads than smaller light vehicles. Beyond the $20 to charge a large EV SUV. How much road tax comes from electricity? Pay for what you use ya know?
Oregon does all commercial vehicles based on weight-mile-axle taxes. More weight, more axles, more miles, all increase the tax burden proportionally. Then you buy PUC credited diesel with no state gas tax. Works fine and can be extended to electric vehicles fine.
The issue I'll take with it is the filing and monitoring system they'll try to make private citizens do, which options are limited to either direct government GPS tracking (fuckkkk no) or an inefficient bureaucratic hellhole of odometer pictures (will cost additional tens of millions to administer). The Oregon system works fine because commercial vehicles are fairly strictly regulated, but that will break down with the general public.
Does Oregon do annual inspections? Pretty sure odometer readings are part of that. And since that data is already reported to the state, they can take that and tax appropriately.
We have no annual inspections, only limited emissions tests inside two major metro areas.
Electricity is already taxed.
We don't need more government tracking of our every move.
The electric tax doesn't go towards fixing roads, though. That's why it needs to change, otherwise the only people paying into that are non-electric car owners.
I totally agree that the government shouldn't have more of our data, so I looked up how the pilot program worked and honestly I'm not too mad about it. There are 3 options:
OBD-II device that reads your odometer and sends that in to be tracked. It has an OPTIONAL GPS which, if turned on, will make sure to only tax the miles driven in California (so it would not apply to miles while out of state). If turned off then all miles are taxed.
Car Telemetry that's already in newer cars that can phone home and send the numbers in (This is my lease favorite)
You simply take a picture of your odometer and submit it. No invasion of privacy and seeing where you're going. This is the one I like the best.
All of those are overhead-riddled runarounds that could be avoided entirely by the state simply allocating the tax dollars it's already collected in a different manner, which ought to be well within its capability to do.
Anyway, if all they cared about was your odometer reading they get that already when you renew your vehicle registration. They could just charge you then -- when you're already standing there with your checkbook anyway -- and not need to create and hire an entire new department to review people's potato pictures of their dashboards.
All of those are overhead-riddled runarounds that could be avoided entirely by the state simply allocating the tax dollars it's already collected in a different manner, which ought to be well within its capability to do.
Are you saying that problems could be fixed simply by better allocating existing taxes? That’s what it sounds like. Tax revenue collected from gasoline sales is bound to drop as less and less ICE vehicles are used. Something will have to compensate for that drop.
Well, one source I found with a cursory search indicates that California spent about $15.1 billion, with a B, on its police in 2023. So I can think of a good place to start.
Anyway, I was following on to the above poster's observation that electricity is already heavily taxed in CA. Just, none of that cash is allocated towards transportation (or at least in any significant manner insofar as I'm aware) I imagine because historically transportation and power consumption have not been intrinsically linked as they would become if electric vehicles become ubiquitous.
California already has the highest electricity rates in the country by a significant margin, and now they're also doing stuff like this, which makes you wonder just what the hell they expect to be doing with all that surcharge money if it's not modernizing their power distribution and soon-to-be electrically driven transportation infrastructure. In fact, incentivizing a switch to electric infrastructure including vehicles was supposed to be one of the stated intentions of that scheme, although it's dubious if things will actually shake out that way in reality.
One thing's for sure, the more they can structure their scheme so that it works via even collective contribution rather than making it appear to specifically punish individual drivers/owners, the much less pushback they're going to get on it.
All of those are overhead-riddled runarounds that could be avoided entirely by the state simply allocating the tax dollars it’s already collected in a different manner, which ought to be well within its capability to do.
The problem is that that's not linked to usage, which you want
you want consumption of a resource to be connected to paying for it. Otherwise, you get overuse of the resource; it'd create an artificial incentive to go out and drive more, because you're being subsidized by income tax payers or whatever.
The second paragraph I wrote, which everyone conveniently ignored with deliberate and apparently laser-guided precision, addresses exactly that.
I'll spell it out even more clearly since apparently nobody got it: The state already knows how much you drive your vehicle because they record your mileage every time you renew your tags. They just proceed to do fuck-all useful with that information. If somebody wanted to replace a fuel tax with a usage tax, that would be the blindingly obvious place to do it. Easily, effortlessly, and without the need for any gimcrack tracking arrangements, bolt-on hardware, privacy violations, snooping, or fuss.
But of course, the tracking and the snooping is, if not the actual point, at least a highly desirable bonus from the state's perspective.
I followed the link, then the link to the California Road charge web site. What I was looking for and didn't find in any place is: "How will the mileage be monitored and how will the fee be collected?" I think those are important questions before one could decide if this is a good plan.
I personally like the idea of taxing tires instead. Since the wear and tear on roads is in direct causation to weight, the faster a tire wears out (because of weight) the more damage to roads would be caused. This means that lighter cars, causing less damage, would replace their tires less frequently, meaning paying less tax.
However, large heavy trucks that do the most damage also would have to replace their tires more often and thereby shoulder more of the burden of road repair, which is appropriate because heavy vehicles are doing much more of the damage.
How do you deal with a California resident getting tires out-of-state?
Just spitballing, how about special markings on the tire. There's already the CARB system in place, that could be extended to marking tires as compliant and sold in California.
I mean, you can't make it illegal to purchase tires out-of-state. A driver could wear them down out of state, or just have a tire blow; they're gonna have to be able to get tires out-of-state, and distributors across the country probably aren't going to maintain special California-specific stocks.
I'm pretty sure that any system like this would have to permit purchasing the tire and then later assessing the tax one way or another, and it seems like that'd create some significant enforcement issues.
I’m pretty sure that any system like this would have to permit purchasing the tire and then later assessing the tax one way or another, and it seems like that’d create some significant enforcement issues.
That sounds like a good option. People already buy gas out-of-state bypassing the road tax. So the tire taxation doesn't have to be perfect to be equal or better to today's solution.
If a tire tax is to generate enough money for that purpose then it'll significantly increase the cost of tires. As a consequence, lower income earners will not replace their tires when they should, leading to more road accidents.
As a consequence, lower income earners will not replace their tires when they should, leading to more road accidents.
I'm not a California native, but a quick google search shows that California already has vehicle inspection requirements and if they fail, they are not legal to drive on California roads. Tire wear check could be added as one of those things check and fail it, if tires are in need of replacement.
I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt that many many people are driving around on tires that are way below minimum acceptable tread wear here in California. Some of them just don't understand. Some are incompetent. Some are poor.
When I recently got all 4 of my tires replaced I watched the tire techs warn several customers that the tread on their tires was too low and every single one of them said they couldn't afford new tires right now so rotate them and let them leave.
A tire tax would likely just increase the number of people trying to stretch a tire way past it's recommended minimum tread depth for safety in order to save money. This would have a negative effect on road safety in the long run.
Not to mention it would also just incentivise people to put on the hardest and longest lasting rubber they can find meaning that in cold or wet conditions they will have significantly worse performance again leading to more accidents.
The tire tax idea seems like a very bad idea.
Some are poor.
When I recently got all 4 of my tires replaced I watched the tire techs warn several customers that the tread on their tires was too low and every single one of them said they couldn’t afford new tires right now so rotate them and let them leave.
It's not just hitting the poor. Like, if it were, you'd only see the poor living paycheck-to-paycheck. But...that's not actually the situation. The bulk of it is going to be financial literacy, which at least when I went through school was not something covered at all. I think that financial literacy is seriously an area where the US doesn't do all that well.
The survey found most Americans (58%) are living paycheck to paycheck. Struggling to make ends meet, many are relying on credit cards to cover any shortfalls. Meanwhile, nearly one-quarter of those surveyed said credit card debt also contributed to their financial stress.
Living paycheck to paycheck means consumers need their next paycheck to meet their monthly obligations. How much of a cash cushion they have is hugely important in determining how far consumers are willing to push their paychecks every month — and how stressed out they might be if faced with an unexpected financial shock.
It’s not about being “poor.” And alternatively, not living paycheck to paycheck isn’t about being “rich” — even though most people prefer to define it in those stark terms.
Instead, we find that paycheck-to-paycheck living spans all income levels, including half of high earners (defined as those earning $100,000 or more each year) as of January 2025. Across all income groups, people report similar abilities to pay their monthly bills without a struggle but needing the next paycheck to stay on track. This implies that living paycheck to paycheck isn’t solely about financial hardship or an inability to meet basic needs, but how people choose to manage their monthly income.
Only time my car has been inspected has been a rare repair or during smog tests, and many are exempt.
Actually, yeah, it was 120,000 mile service. New clutch, water pump, timing belt, and synchro ring. Pretty much the only inspection. Hmmm, timing belt is coming up again...
EVs are especially heavy, too, and they eat tires much faster than ICE cars. Tire tax is 100% appropriate, and a brilliant idea.
Tire lifetime varies dramatically with the type of tire. I’ve had tires that lasted 10,000 miles and tires that lasted 40,000 miles on the same car and in similar driving conditions. That is a difficult variable to solve for.
Weight in kg x mileage recorded at safety inspection x some factor = tax
Seems like a straightforward calculation.
Tire wear is not as standard as you are implying. There are many factors in tire wear including the hardness of the rubber compound. Stickier tires for better steering and braking wear faster than, say, high mileage tires for hybrids to get the best MPG or electric range.
The tires on my hybrid are designed for more miles that my Honda that weighs half a ton less.
I thought tolls were supposed to pay for road repair. Cali simply cannot resist finding any way to extract money out of you. Shortly after the road use tax I am sure they will find a way to tax gas again
I’ve lived in Cali almost 15 years and only taken a toll road like 5-10 times total
Very few roads in California have tolls.