
California Considers Placing a Mileage Tax on Drivers (2017) - prostoalex
http://cbslocal.com/2017/12/12/california-considers-mileage-tax/?fbclid=IwAR2ubmpAAMVGu6u297ASnq1NlDzTmQYNyoq_i6lcBEHD5vqcAcCZJAFBAX4#.W9Hjg4lZy9M.facebook
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tankerdude
As we have seen, the heavier vehicles do disproportionately more damage than a
lighter vehicle. If you road repair, tax by a formula of weight and mileage if
you must.

Having a driver if a hummer pay the same taxes based upon miles driven versus
a a VW bug really doesn’t make sense when we know the stress put in the road
by the hummer is substantially more.

Lastly, for LA, having a disincentive to have an emissions free car while
driving just gets the air quality even worse.

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dannyw
For context, a loaded truck does more than 10,000x the amount of damage as a
normal car. The damage is the 4th power of the axel.

If tolls and road usage taxes were fair and proportionate, you should be
paying a $0.01 toll while trucks should be paying $100.

Source: AASHO Road Test

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wtvanhest
Road damage is part of the equation (repair costs), the other part is
congestion (capital costs for additional capacity).

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pacificmint
> Someone who has [...] a dramatically more fuel efficient vehicle is paying
> much less than you are.

Isn't that a feature, not a bug?

Don't we want to incentivize people to get more fuel efficient cars?

I mean sure, if one day the majority of the cars are electric, we'll have to
adjust how they are taxed, but for now why don't we leave the incentive for
people that buy a fuel efficient or electric car.

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Gibbon1
When you dig deeper you find companies that manufacture vehicle tracking
devices are behind these proposals. What they want is states to create a
captive market for their tracking devices. I'm also suspicious that the oil
industry is also behind this.

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beatgammit
We already have vehicle mileage tracking devices: odometers.

Just have vehicles report their mileage each year when they renew their
registration and base the registration tax on that and a multiplier based on
vehicle type. To keep people honest, randomly inspect the VIN and mileage at
renewal time with big fines for lying.

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Gibbon1
Few years ago read a transportation studies guy that also mentioned that most
people think their gas taxes pay for the roads. Really that only pays for a
bit less than half. General taxes and bonds pay for much of it.

My feeling is if you wanted to reduce the number of cars it would be better to
just impose an excise tax on new car sales. Why tax gasoline over 15 years
when you can get all the revenue up front via an excise tax.

Assume 30mpg, expected life 200,000 miles, that's 6666 gallons of gasoline. At
$0.7382/gallon that's $4920.

Seriously why not just impose a $5000 excise tax and be done with it.

[https://frontiergroup.org/reports/fg/who-pays-
roads](https://frontiergroup.org/reports/fg/who-pays-roads)

On the other hand saw someone else mention their city used license plate
readers to look at who was using their urban streets and turns out about 80%
of the users weren't locals. That poses a big conundrum. Particularly in
California where urban commercial property tax revenue is limited by Prop13. I
think where I'm going with this is one shouldn't get too attached to the idea
that things be 'fair' because that's simply impossible.

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dirktheman
I'm actually quite content with the system we have here in The Netherlands.
Road tax varies by:

\- weight of the car (lighter cars pay a lot less than heavier vehicles)

\- type of fuel (CNG is taxed more than than regular gas, diesel even more so.
The prices of CNG and diesel are lower though, so if you drive a lot than CNG
or diesel are cheaper to run overall)

\- Hybrids/EVs don't pay road tax (for now...)

There's also a variable tax on new vehicles which is based on the
environmental footprint of the vehicle.

All this is pretty fair: if you're driving more you pay more tax, if you have
an old, heavy or polluting vehicle you also pay more tax. Fair enough (there
are even exepmtions for classic cars).Californians are spoiled though... in
The Netherlands, regular gas is $7.20 per gallon.

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tmoravec
Diesel cars are taxed more. Yet diesel itself is subsidized. So there is a
huge transfer of money where the payers and recipients are the same, only
allowing plenty of money get lost in the friction (it's not the common folks
who profit).

Driving old vehicles is taxed more. So people who can only afford old vehicles
are paying subsidies to those who can buy a new Tesla. This is possibly the
single most asocial rule in the world, and I'm honestly shocked that we have
this in Europe that's otherwise reasonably socially aware.

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dirktheman
But older vehicles aren't taxed more...? You don't pay the BPM (new car tax)
and the road tax for a 1000kg car from 1990 is exactly the same as a new
1000kg car.

Also, the way the diesel scheme works is that there's a treshold so that it's
only cheaper to drive diesels when you drive a lot of miles. Also, the heavier
the car, the more miles you'd have to drive. But I'm sure you know this. And
where exactly is 'money lost in the friction' here? Diesel prices are known,
and tax brackets are pretty clear too.

I agree that we shouldn't subsidize $100k+ Teslas, but I'm all for rewarding
people to drive cleaner vehicles. And calling it the single most asocial rule
in the world... well, that's kind of a hyperbole, don't you think?

Related: I used to drive a 1986 Subaru Justy which ran 1:20 on regular fuel
and costs next to nothing to insure and maintain. Cheapest form of motorized
transport I ever had!

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geoalchimista
That's absurd. What if the driver is someone who cannot afford the high rent
price at the city center and commutes 20 mi every day from a cheap suburb to
work?

I'd be fine if the ultra-progressive SF politicians could just mind their own
business and not to dictate other cities and towns in the state on how to
govern.

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trhway
>someone who cannot afford the high rent price at the city center and commutes
20 mi every day from a cheap suburb to work

this are the ones paying the gas tax right now (while i for example have Prius
Plugin and my gas spending is at least 3x times lesser than it was before).
Replacing gas tax with mileage tax would bring Tesla and plugin owners back
into the tax paying fold.

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jedberg
I'd be totally fine with this, assuming that:

1) Some gas tax was removed at the same time

2) The tax took into account the weight of your vehicle and

3) There was some way to report out of state driving.

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Arainach
Be careful what you wish for - Washington's proposal for #3 is "require a GPS
tracker in your vehicle to keep track of your position at all times".

[https://www.king5.com/article/news/washington-state-
official...](https://www.king5.com/article/news/washington-state-officials-
prepare-pay-per-mile-pilot-program/281-473915863)

~~~
RickS
From the article text, it sounds like one of four options is a smartphone
application for tracking mileage. This is significantly different from the
idea of a dedicated piece of hardware, which I read your comment to imply.

While I agree this would be a perverse outcome, it is not obvious that such a
thing would be "required" at all, let alone "at all times".

Here's hoping that the option never comes to pass, if for no other reason than
its being trivially easy to spoof.

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Arainach
The first proposal (an "odometer") is a dedicated GPS tracking hardware
device. [http://mynorthwest.com/1058673/washingtons-pay-per-mile-
prog...](http://mynorthwest.com/1058673/washingtons-pay-per-mile-program-six-
months-in/)?

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rococode
Not sure this is the right solution, but the problem that has necessitated
this seems to be a valid one. As we move towards electric vehicles, gas tax
revenue will decrease and things that are currently funded by that money, like
road maintenance and construction, will have to find money elsewhere.

I'm curious, what other options do y'all think are feasible? I suppose budgets
could just be shuffled around a bit but at the end of the day that's still a
chunk of money that will no longer be available.

This article is old but it seems that the idea is still being considered. A
bill was recently passed to extend the life of the committee that's been
investigating it:
[https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...](https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=201720180SB1328)

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Jach
Tolls are increasingly popular. But one thing I don't see discussed much is to
reduce the cost of road maintenance and construction, thereby lowering the
need to collect as much tax.

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mschuster91
Oh great, yet _another_ measure that will disproportionally affect the poor
the most.

Rich people either have enough money to not care about this tax, or can afford
homes close to their place of work, while poor people have to endure long
commutes to get to work.

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raldi
Actually, the poor drive the least. Subsidies on driving disproportionately
benefit the well-off.

Done right, a tax like this would be revenue-neutral, and enacted alongside a
reduction in some regressive tax, like sales tax. The winners are poor people
and people who don't drive. The losers, well-off people who drive.

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closeparen
That’s absurd. You really think it’s the rich commuting 2+ hours each way from
the Central Valley far out of public transit range, and the poor paying
$5000/mo for walkable urban high rises?

San Francisco’s amenities can only exist because subsidized car infrastructure
makes it possible to get here from affordable places, however painfully. Your
walkable grocery store’s shelves don’t get stocked without highways and
sprawl. The walkabale radius around any BART stop is thoroughly into tech-
workers-only price ranges by now (or truly terrifying).

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raldi
You're afflicted right now by one of those beliefs that is simultaneously
obvious, intuitive, and completely false.

See
[http://www.ppic.org/content/pubs/report/R_704LRR.pdf](http://www.ppic.org/content/pubs/report/R_704LRR.pdf)
for instance: "[In the Bay Area,] Low-income workers walk, carpool, and use
public transit at higher rates than their more affluent counterparts".

And on page 86 you can see that 70% of high-income folks drive alone to work.
Amongst poor people (their term), it's 51%. Meanwhile, 5% of high-income
residents of the Bay Area take the bus to work. Amongst poor people, 12%.

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closeparen
That's from 2004. The contemporary story of gentrification is higher-income
workers choosing the urban core, and lower-income workers getting pushed to
the suburban periphery where adequate transit coverage is less likely.

The relevant quantity here is vehicle mileage, not mode share. I expected
lower-income workers to drive much longer distances (whereas the rich would
have more car trips but trivial distances). So I'm more interested in "Other
research suggests that low-income workers travel shorter distances than other
workers" which is genuinely surprising. I wonder how that's fared over time.

[0] Page ix

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lyqwyd
This is not new. They’ve been eying this tax for quite some time. It’s due to
the difficulty in fighting over the gas tax. It is extremely flawed, but
politically expedient. At some point it may make sense due to electric
vehicles and autonomous vehicles, but the day that it makes true sense, not
just political, is still far in the future.

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raldi
Mods, can we get a (2017) on this?

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d--b
The state has a hard time finding money for fixing roads because of Priuses?

I am not sure that this adds up...

If they’re looking for money, just raise the taxes that make more sense to
raise (least painful, most money), not add a tax that affect those who drive
most in crappy cars (and really who don’t give a damn about road state in LA
in the first place)

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makewavesnotwar
This is a fine idea if you use the money to subsidize free public
transportation in the form of buses, trains and bike-shares and education on
how to use them. Heck, go ahead and tax gasoline at 100% while you're at it.

The problem is disincentives like this only work if the market has a better
option than simply finding a way to correct the cost.

There are plenty of people who can't afford to drive already but still do
because they "have to". You have to take the stupid arguments off the table or
make the better options stupidly obvious before you can expect people to start
to respond rationally.

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kwhitefoot
Just replacing one regressive tax with another even more regressive tax.

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newnewpdro
I don't carry a smartphone largely because it's a surveillance device outside
of my control, and no it's not ok for you to put one on my car without a
warrant. Scott Wiener can kindly go stick his head back where it belongs.

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jedberg
They don't have to surveil you. They just look at your reported milage when
you register your car.

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newnewpdro
There's already incentive to disable odometers for vehicle resale value, if
you start taxing owners for miles traveled it only increases this incentive.

I've had colleagues throughout the years who pulled fuses or on even older
vehicles simply disconnected mechanical speedometer cables to prevent
accumulation of miles.

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jedberg
> There's already incentive to disable odometers for vehicle resale value

And yet almost no one does it. And even if people do do it, that's not a
reason not to use that method.

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newnewpdro
“The reality is that if you have a smartphone your data of where you are
traveling is already in existence,” Wiener said.

Wiener bringing this up in context clearly puts the surveillance option on the
table.

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rdlecler1
The irony is that rich people are more likely to live closer to work because
they can afford it and at the same time are a force limiting new development.

