Actually, where vehicle miles traveled (VMT) taxes are being piloted, many of the things you highlight as shortfalls are included. Typically a VMT tax varies based on your vehicle class, with larger, heavier and therefore less-efficient vehicles paying more per mile. So for example, drivers of light trucks might pay slightly more per mile than drivers of standard passenger vehicles, and both would pay dramatically less than drivers of heavy trucks, which do the vast majority of the damage to our roadways. If GPS is used for tracking mileage (which it eventually will be), time of day and the streets used can also be priced dynamically. For example: driving on East Wash at 8:15am might cost significantly more than driving the same section at 3:00am.
The purpose of a tax like this is for funding transportation infrastructure - not necessarily environmental benefits. A carbon tax would take care of many of the issues that you highlight, but wouldn't necessarily help with infrastructure funding (by which I mean to include maintenance, not just building more and more) and is currently dead in the water in the US anyway. A VMT tax is a true usage fee - the more you drive on the roads, the more you pay for their upkeep. This used to roughly work with the gas tax, but as has been pointed out, more efficient vehicles have upset this balance. Now owners of Priuses (Prii?) pay less per mile for using the streets than the owner of a small compact car, even though the Prius may weigh 33% more than the compact. Owners of a Nissan Leaf pay *nothing* for road maintenance and improvement through the gas tax (although in Wisconsin they pay a significant chunk through property taxes, but that is another issue...) I am all for people switching to smaller and more efficient vehicles, but we need a new system to fund the infrastructure we have as people make this switch. I would guess that within a decade we will have a GPS-based VMT tax (or use fee, to make it more palatable). With trials underway in Washington and Ohio, it is only a matter of time.... Kevin -------------------------------------------------------------------- From: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Cc: Date: Thu, 27 Sep 2012 14:09:36 -0400 Subject: Re: [Bikies] Progressive Taxation Studied By WI DOT I didn't catch who made the original post, but I'm baffled by the choice of subject line referring to "progressive taxation" for a regressive tax that treats all odometer miles (except for those of Illinoisans and others out of state) as equivalent, regardless of the efficiency of the MV, regardless of the weight of the vehicle, regardless of time of day, and more. If you were to make an analogy to other types of taxation, this kind of proposal would be more like the sales tax than the income tax. At least the motor fuel tax does a somewhat reasonable job of capturing part of the differences in social burden--the bigger and/or less efficient the vehicle and the more you use it, the more you pay. That's what's really important. A mile isn't a mile isn't a mile in terms of impact. What's important is what you're driving for that mile, how much fossil fuel you are using for that mile, what time you are driving that mile, where you are driving that mile.... (I say "somewhat reasonable" because the motor fuel tax addresses the efficiency and vehicle size, but not the when and where that is reflected in road building demand.) [And this isn't entirely a self-interested opinion. I don't drive a compact car (but neither do I drive a van, truck, or SubUrban assault Vehicle) and I am not obsessively stingy about the number of miles I drive (but still far lower average annual miles than the previous owner of either my previous or current vehicle, and below the state average).] Now go have a lunch! -- *Kevin Luecke [email protected]*
_______________________________________________ Bikies mailing list [email protected] http://lists.danenet.org/listinfo.cgi/bikies-danenet.org
