this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2024
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Electric Vehicles
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So, in principle I agree. However, drawing road maintenance funding from something other than a regressive tax isn't the same as subsidization. It similarly lowers the burden on some, but it's just shifting it to those both more able to shoulder the burden, and those more responsible for it. They're also the most able to find alternative modes of transport, since freight rail actually exists in a consistent way across the country, and last mile freight delivery is a continued use case for city roads even if we massively reduce our individual reliance on automobiles.
Secondly, it's worth noting that this isn't just automobile costs, but these reports also cover transportation in general. The cost of transportation is more of a burden for low income folks regardless of mode. Before we start considering denying relief or actively disincentivising one mode of transport, we need to ensure that an alternative actually exists. Without that step you're not reducing our reliance on cars, your just punishing poor people for society not caring about light rail or walkable cities.
My city has a pretty good bus system compared to most, and there are parts of town that are practically unreachable without a car, and actually unreachable in a safe fashion in the winter. As a quick reference, I looked up the bus route for getting to my doctor's office by 7am, which isn't unreasonable for some of the businesses near it.
For reference, the walking instructions involve a fair bit of time on a pedestrian hostile bit of road with a lot of trucks and no sidewalks. It's forecast to be roughly 9°F during that time and snowing.
It does only take an hour by bus if you can show up at eight instead.
All that to say, I'm 100% in favor of getting rid of cars. We just need a society where I can get to my doctor's office without one first.
And even then, trucks should still pay for maintenance.
I think all these policy nudges need to happen in tandem. We can update how we tax vehicle use while shifting that money to transit, and doing zoning reform. If we wait until there is a perfect bus route everywhere before charging something resembling market rate for clearly unsustainable vehicle use, nothing will ever change. We can use the funding to help low income folks specifically, sure. I'm approaching this more from a traffic violence and climate change angle though. The status quo isn't acceptable and already imposes tremendous burden on society.
I'd prefer a carbon fee and dividend as the main policy personally, but in the meantime I'll keep advocating for anything that incentivizes less driving. Maintenance to me has to be tied to use, and we can figure out how to do that fairly without making unlimited driving approach zero marginal costs. Things will get a whole lot worse for low income folks if we do nothing.
I don't think doing it at the same time works because it takes much longer to setup any form of mass transit, and far longer to make areas livable without a car. It's not about waiting until there's a perfect bus route, just making sure people have anything viable before we start pushing them to stop using what they have. Leave for work eight hours before you start, risk your life walking on the highway in the snow, or get fired just isn't a choice we can put on people, especially when we've tied food, medical and housing assistance to working literally any job that will hire you.
Tying it to vehicle weight and miles traveled and only for commercial vehicles is tied to usage. Cars just don't matter from a road wear perspective. The marginal cost of driving is the operating and maintenance costs for the vehicle.
Low income people are already good at budgeting those costs because travel consumes so much of their budget.
Of course cars matter for road maintenance. They're the reason we have so many roads and so many lanes in the first place. We wouldn't need near the infrastructure to support just commercial vehicles. We would have massive amounts of prime real estate if we didn't waste it all on parking lots and lanes. Your 8 hour bus anecdote isn't really relevant here - nothing will change overnight, but over time long car trips (especially in oversized vehicles) should cost more. People can adapt by buying lighter more efficient vehicles, and switch to other options as they become available. You think it's expensive now, just wait until another decade or two of climate change impacts happens.
Fear of imposing any marginal costs on low income folks is a pro car argument. Taking your argument further, why not get rid of all gas taxes and road fees and just go 100% on making cars as cheap to operate, all in the name of equality? Surely you can see this is wrong direction.
No, they really don't. We may have built infrastructure to accommodate the existence of cars, but if a truck can drive on it it needs to be designed to tolerate them. Once it's built for that, a pedestrian and a car are closer in terms of road wear that a car and a truck.
Roads that see less freight traffic need maintenance radically less often. Placing the responsibility for ongoing maintenance on the entity that's doing the damage makes sense.
I don't see how "we don't have adequate public transportation to rely on it" is irrelevant. People need to get places to work and live, and the people most impacted by a regressive gas tax are already not taking long trips. You don't change their behavior by taking money out of their pocket, you just make them hungry.
Today, where we live, the vehicles that we would rather people use weigh quite a bit more, but use far less gas and have significantly lower carbon emissions. Shifting to a pure millage based road maintenance fee system signals that all else being equal, gas and electric are equally desirable. A pure weight system makes gas preferable. Removing the maintenance burden from the people contributing the least to it lets other incentives push people in the right direction, while pushing the main force of road wear to use trains more, which is feasible in the medium term because we already have freight rail that can supplant most intercity trucking.
Current plans are to tax and fee the financial benefits of electric vehicles away while shielding businesses from paying their fair share of road costs.
Yes, that it what I would like to do for non-commercial vehicles. I am firmly opposed to regressive taxes.
Disproportionately burdening low income people doesn't advance the cause of there being less cars on the road. If taken too far, it hurts that goal because money they could use moving to a walkable neighborhood or at least getting a more efficient vehicle is instead being used paying the penalty for not doing those things.
In the timeframe that we're going to start having problems with road maintenance funding we're not going to be able to meaningfully change peoples transportation habits beyond "middle class has more EVs and works from home more". The best we can do is at least not reverse that trend.
It's moot though, since our current trajectory will likely be to lower the gas tax (popular with low income voters), add a tax on EVs (popular with people who dislike the environmentally conscious or middle class and want to punish them), and to make up the difference by shifting budget from education to road maintenance. Probably see some bills to outlaw EVs due to lithiums environmental impact while also removing emissions standards entirely.
I don't see how driving all consumer road usage fees and gas taxes to zero will do anything other than create more demand for roads, cars, and VMT. It's a very shortsighted policy. You've now made it even more difficult to get support for public transit and zoning reform while exacerbating maintenance shortfalls. Cheap fuel has created the problem, and even cheaper fuel wont solve it. This is the exact opposite of what we should be doing, and all it does is create a very short term benefit.
Because it doesn't remove the incentive to switch to a more fuel efficient vehicle or use more efficient modes of transportation. It removes one incentive that disproportionately leans on the people least able to change their transportation: it's an ineffective incentive.
Worse than being ineffective, raising fuel prices without comensuratelty easing transition to other modes of transport drives people to do things like "vote for politicians who promise to lower gas prices", invariably by increasing supply.
Shifting the financing of road maintenance to freight doesn't reduce the funding, it just changes where it comes from. Additionally, you can increase the freight fees more than you decreased the gas tax. Although there's more personal vehicle use than freight, road freight still accounts for roughly 30% of emissions, and we have economical and clean alternatives in a wide variety of cases.
This isn't something you do in isolation.
There's a limit to how much you can suppress driving through price controls without doing harm people won't tolerate, and diminishing returns on how effective it is.
How expensive does gas have to be for you to take an eight hour, 11 mile, bus ride? For you to walk three hours on the highway in a cold weather emergency at four in the morning? Do you just stop going to the doctor instead at that point?
People like progressive policies that benefit them, and they dislike ones that hurt them. Taxing road wear instead of road usage benefits most people, lets you push trucks off the road, and still lets you look into other policies that benefit people while being more environmentally sound.
These are such egregious examples I can't take you seriously. Also this is factually incorrect:
Gas is not a perfectly inelastic good, so higher gas prices literally do result in people buying more efficient cars and using alternatives. It's just doesn't happen overnight.
You are advocating for an even more car dependent vision for society under the guise of progressivism by driving vehicle mileage costs down as much as possible. Just stop and go see how actual modern societies handle this, instead of how petrostates do.
Why don't you tell me, since you seem to disagree with my "build mass transit before people can't get to work", and "let people build higher density housing near necessities".
All the "modern societies" I can think of opted to invest like that rather than exacerbating regressive tax schemes.
I never disagreed that higher gas prices gave an incentive. I disagree that that's the only incentive, or the best incentive. A regressive tax disproportionately impacts the people least likely to effect change. It doesn't matter how high prices get, the person making minimum wage can't afford a more efficient car.
High fuel prices are literally part of why someone who actively wants to flood the market with gas and penalize EVs was elected. If the effects of your solution are worse than the experience of the problem, people will attack the solution.
Pushing freight off the road still reduces gas consumption. A grant program to build bus routes to a minimum level of timeliness, service area and access would give people a viable option to actually not use cars in our existing cities.
Raising registration costs on low efficiency vehicles would let you push people away from them in a way people can budget for, while also making it possible to waive the fee for people who can't afford it.
You'll have to be more specific about which of my examples is too egregious for you. I think I only gave examples based on the actual weather and bus system where I live, and the actual business district where my doctors office is. Metropolitan area of about 500k.
Please don't tell me what I'm advocating for. You might disagree with me on what the impact of my plan would be, but that doesn't mean that I'm not actually wanting us to get to the same place you do.