Trump's DOT pick wants EV owners to pay to use roads | Hacker News Reader

Trump's DOT pick wants EV owners to pay to use roads

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7 pointsrntn22 comments

The current government of New Zealand put something like that called a Road User Charge or RUC (https://www.nzta.govt.nz/vehicles/road-user-charges/ruc-for-...) in place in 2024. As an EV owner, I don't mind paying it but having to buy an RUC license for every 1,000 km that I drive, and having to display a paper license on my windscreen, isn't the best solution. I'd prefer a more efficient way of doing that.

Currently road maintenance in most places is funded by gas taxes which is more or less fair because if you drive more with a larger car you pay more.

Aside from posturing, the EV transition would end gas sales, thus ending this mechanism for funding roads. A per mile tax seems like a fair replacement.

Unfortunately common sense vanishes when everything is a chance to demonstrate which tribe you're a member of.

What you're really arguing for is toll roads. The quibble is over how to collect the toll.

When I think "toll road" I think limited access highway, like the NYS Thruway. We've got to pay for other kinds of roads too.

You could put a GPS tracker in the car but a lot of people won't go for that. Efforts to put more telematics in cars such as

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dedicated_short-range_communic...

have gone nowhere because nobody can find an agreeable solution for security, privacy, how to pay for the infrastructure, etc.

I meant you're making it manifest that all roads are toll roads.

I like your GPS-based toll system idea. Different roads could have different toll rates that are displayed on your device, including a meter for how much you owe, and all jurisdictions can get their money. Fueled up in one state and drove through an intervening state en route to another? They can get their money. Heck, you can do it on a county level. You can fluctuate the toll rate to effect congestion pricing.

There's a lot you can do with this idea!

RUCs existed well before EVs were a thing. They apply to diesel vehicles (as unlike petrol, diesel doesn't have a road tax on it). EVs were temporarily exempted from RUCs (partly as an incentive, and partly because RUCs on light vehicles are a lot higher than what an equivalent fuel-efficient vehicle will pay in road tax through petrol usage). The current government removed this exemption (without adjusting the RUC rates to a sensible level for EVs), causing BEVs to pay significantly more road tax than an equivalent fuel-efficient non-EV does and removing their advantage of lower running costs (which has massively hurt the EV market). They "justified" this with their vague plans to move petrol vehicles to RUCs at some point in the future.

As an EV owner I also want to pay for roads. I just don't really want to pay as much an a Hummer EV, or much more than a gas guzzling truck.

Semi-trucks have an outsized impact. I recall some reporting years ago that claimed our roads would last significantly longer were it not for the commercial trucks

The impact of a vehicle upon a road's health scales by the fourth power of the axle load. Heavy vehicles have an absolutely massive impact on roads to the point that compact cars should be paying negligible road usage fees in comparison.

Taxes on gas were the ultimate, but still very imperfect, toll until electric came along. Nothing will be a perfect here. The best I can think of would be a higher base anual registration fees and a requirement to report annual mileage. A minimum mileage is covered by registration and anything over should be charged extra. The problems with this approach though are likely many. First, getting one big bill at the end of the year is always less palatable than getting a small one every time you fill up so people are likely to complain, loudly. Second, enforcement will likely be tough. Even with those two problems I think it generally addresses the issues and is the simplest solution.

As a side note though, while this is a real concern and we should be considering it, the fact that this is coming up now is likely more about politics than it is about adjusting taxing based on changes in consumption. I can just hear the bad talking points being spread everywhere now: 'EVs are destroying our roads and not paying their fair share and should be banned!'

The road usage fee should be (miles driven) * (weight) * (fee rate).

And owners already go in once a year to a mechanic for a state vehicle inspection, the mileage can be reported then. We don't need complicated workarounds for gas tax alternatives.

> And owners already go in once a year to a mechanic for a state vehicle inspection

No we don't. That's not universal for all states nor all jurisdictions within a state. If you already have an annual vehicle inspection, then what you're advocating for is easy. If you don't, then you've created a huge problem.

I don't think it creates a huge problem. Are there states where you are not getting an inspection of registration renewal at least every two years? Report your millage accrued, pay then or on a plan (because right now, most people pay-as-you-go for the roads via gas tax, lump sum is not going to be reasonable for a large number of them)

It's certainly a solvable problem

Report your mileage accrued. Yeah right. You're supposed to report your purchase price when you transfer your title, too so you pay the sales tax. People lie all the time.

If they lie, they end up paying with penalties when the title is transferred to the next owner.

Which now complicates title transfer and potentially creates a buyer-beware situation. Road construction and maintenance can be paid for out of the state budget, a major point the adoption of the gas tax was to capture money from the out-of-jurisdiction drivers who were using your roadways: particularly shipping and freight companies. These proposed solutions aren't addressing that problem.

I don't understand the physics, but supposedly the wear on the road is proportional to the fourth power of the weight. I'm not sure if that's the main cost to be accounted for though.

>owners already go in once a year to a mechanic for a state vehicle inspection

...for some states in some areas of the state:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_inspection_in_the_Unit...

That's shocking. Every state I've ever lived in just happened to be one of the few that required it.

maybe instead of inspection, we consider registration

Is there a similar map for vehicle registration / renew frequency?

We also don't need a uniform solution across all states, as evident in the map you have already linked to

I agree that weight should be a factor, but it needs to be nonlinear. Very light vehicles do not damage roads, while heavier vehicles cause disproportionately more damage. A car causes some minimal amount of damage that adds up over time, but a car twice as heavy causes more than twice as much damage and thus should pay more than twice as much per mile. And because cargo trucks weigh significantly more when laden than when empty, it needs to be based on either the weight when laden or on the actual weight at the time.

A better formula would be (mileage) * (((highest axle load)^4) * no. of axles) * (per mile fee), which would incentivise loads being evenly spread over as many axles as practically possible. This would be a huge boon to road health and longevity.

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