Robert wrote: I'm sorry, am I missing something? Why would someone driving a high-mileage (I assume in this context that you mean high fuel economy) motor vehicle not be paying something resembling a fair share relative to a Hummer or Chevy Subdivision?? Hummer weighs more, therefore uses more fuel, therefore pays higher tax as some partial compensation for causing more wear on the roads.
Robert, what you wrote is only loosely correct, although it is logical. The different amount of road damage done by a 2,000 pound subcompact and an 8,000 pound huge SUV is very small. The real difference comes into effect when you start moving up to large commercial trucks. Semis, garbage trucks and other heavy vehicles do disproportionate amounts of damage to roads. One estimate (http://archive.gao.gov/f0302/109884.pdf) says that an 80,000 pound semi damages the road as much as 9,600 4,000 pound cars. So although the semi weighs only 20 times more, it is doing exponentially greater amounts of road damage. Similarly, a 2011 Toyota Prius and a 2010 Ford Ranger pickup weigh within 100 pounds of one another, and would have the same impact on road damage. However, the Prius gets more than double the mileage of the Ranger. So if we are looking at paying for road damage, the Prius driver is paying less than half as much as the Ranger driver even though they are damaging the road the same amount. This obviously doesn't take into account other externalities such as air pollution. A mileage-based tax with a few different weight categories for vehicles will be considerably fairer in assessing driving costs than the straight fuel tax we currently use. Getting people to accept tracking devices for this (despite the fact that they are already tracked everywhere with their cell phones) will be quite the uphill battle though. Kevin -- *Kevin Luecke** *Lead Planner, Bicycle Federation of Wisconsin www.bfw.org | 608-251-4456
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