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Doesn't weight also influence things like particulate emissions from ground friction? Maybe vehicle taxation in the future should consider weight?

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Here in Norway they recently introduced weight as a component of the one-off registration tax for new vehicles[1].

For vehicles over 500kg it's about $1 per kg, so not a huge deal but it's something.

[1]: https://www.skatteetaten.no/person/avgifter/bil/importere/hv...

Maybe they should tax tires (perhaps by the amount and type of wear products). The more tires you wear through, the more tax you pay.

Yes, but heavy vehicles also cause wear to roads. I like your idea though because the tax depends on use.

I'm assuming the amount of road damage is proportional to the tire wear. You could probably have different scales depending on the characteristics of the tire in question. Metal saw blades vs. soft slicks.

This is a hilariously perverse incentive for governments, since worse roads now mean better revenue and saving the cost of maintenance.

I'll add it to the list.

Governments don't work like corporations at all, so this "perverse incentive" is, frankly, nonsense.

Governments can get replaced by an electorate that aren't happy with, say, the state of the roads. In fact, you'll usually see a lot of potholes magically get filled in around local election time.

Also, the revenue raised by vehicle taxes are usually completely blown away by the costs of maintaining infrastructure, dealing with accidents, enforcing laws, etc. The above reason is why governments tolerate all this expense. If they were a corporation, huge amounts of work would have gone into getting rid of cars to reduce the expense line they cause.

You can rerubber tires though. It is done alot on truck tires.

Unless the tax is low people will just apply rubber.

Is that a thing most people do at home? Otherwise it could also be taxed easily.

No, you can’t vulcanize tires at home, unless you want to produce road alligators.

You need a proper workshop with a vulcanization oven. I don't think it is practical to diy.

Seems easier to tax mileage and nominal tire wear than tax actual tires still, I think.

Taxing mileage is not easy. Especially weighting it by tire wear (weight of vehicle etc.

Although we must also consider the location of the pollution. Particulate pollution in an empty desert has different consequences than the same in a school district.

In states with annual (or other periodic) safety inspection, taxing mileage is super-easy.

Taxes on these things are usually regressive so no thanks...

VMT is strongly correlated with income, so people with higher incomes would pay more tire taxes.

I am homeless and on disability and I live in a minivan. I drive a lot because I have to. The percent I would have to pay in taxes of my income would be far higher than someone who is rich. That is what a regressive tax means.

With taxation, we usually use "progressive" and "regressive" relative to a baseline of proportional to income: "A progressive tax is a tax in which the tax rate increases as the taxable amount increases."

So it isn't enough to say that VMT is correlated with income: if it goes up with income but decreasing as income increases a tax would be regressive, and if the reverse it would be progressive.

I think you'd have to do the math. VMT is very correlated with income and many low-income people have none. Higher income people choose bigger cars with expensive tires.

Have a look at https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policy/23cpr/chap3.cfm While none of the figures there have exactly what we want, they do suggest that VMT goes up less than linearly with income. For example, 3-23 and 3-27 show distance per vehicle and distance per driver going up way slower than income (but rich people have more vehicles and more rich people are drivers). Overall, richer people spend a much lower fraction of their income on transportation, and that's been stable for decades: https://www.bts.dot.gov/data-spotlight/household-cost-transp...

The trend goes in the right direction. If you are absolutely dedicated to making this strictly progressive, despite the clear externalities of driving justifying a "sin tax" approach, you could exempt from any proposed tax the market price of a 195/55R15 tire or other index of basic tire price.

Consider the following three taxation systems:

A: 20% up to $10k, then 15% up to $100k, then 10% on income above that

B: 15% on all income

C: 10% up to $10k, then 15% up to $100k, then 20% on income above that

Using the standard terms, A is regressive, B is flat, and C is progressive. But using your terms the "trend goes in the right direction" for all three.

I'm not attached to tire taxes being progressive; my objection here is about diluting the meaning of progressive and regressive.

(My preferred approach here, as in lots of places, is https://www.jefftk.com/p/pricing-benefiting-everyone : tax the thing without worrying about the tax being regressive, and pair it with a strongly progressive equal-per per-person transfer.)

That's the system I prefer as well! Why are we debating this? I only engage with this argument because bad-faith car addicts often try to block any kind of reform by saying it harms the poor. But as you say on your page, redistributing the revenues of these things per-capita is naturally progressive, and that doesn't need to be means-tested because income taxes are already progressive and the refunds would be income.

We're debating this because you countered "Taxes on these things are usually regressive so no thanks" with "VMT is strongly correlated with income, so people with higher incomes would pay more tire taxes" which sounded like you thought it was a claim that the proposed tax would not actually be regressive.

(This isn't a disagreement on policy, but me being pedantic about terms.)

Sin taxes tend to be regressive.

Lorries, SUVs, etc. are not driven by the extreme poor travelling to work, so taxes can be staged in a way to be less regressive on this front. They can also be targeted in a way to reduce negative impacts, e.g. reduced rates for buses or rates for different pollutant levels of tyres/brakes.

> The more tires you wear through, the more tax you pay.

People wont replace tires if you make them more expensive, which might result in more accidents, costing the taxpayers more in the long run.

Road damage is proportional to the fourth power of axle weight, so this might be a good idea; most of the damage is from a small fraction of heavy vehicles, mostly lorries.

For dummies like me:

The load on the road from one axle (2 wheels) is 10 times greater for a truck than for a car. However, the fourth power law says that the stress on (damage to) the road is this ratio raised to the fourth power.

The road stress ratio of truck to car is 10,000 to 1.

Most particulate pollution comes from tires and brakes, EVs are heavier and have more torque/power than most ICE vehicles so ye sit matters

A lot of countries already tax vehicles on weight

EVs probably produce more tire particulates but definitely make less brake dust, since most of the braking is regenerative. Not sure how that balances out in the grand scheme of things but it’s not a clear cut thing.

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