I take issue with the original author's assertion that the fuel tax is "an extremely fair and anonymous way to collect road maintenance dollars from road users."
If road maintenance means snow clearing, original building and other factors not related to wear, that statement might be true. However, if it also includes road repairs and replacement due to surface wear, it is FAR from true. I have a friend that used to do traffic counts to determine road wear for the highway department. They didn't even count cars and light trucks to accurately determine road wear. All they have to count is the multi-axle trucks. They drive the road wear so much more than any of the light vehicles. Simply count the trucks and they could predict the road wear characteristics. Mike > How do we collectively pay for construction and maintenance of "free" > highways and other roads? Fuel taxes. In light of the inability to collect > fuel > taxes from electric car drivers, the State of Washington has passed a law > requiring a yearly $100 fee to own an electric car. The fee goes into effect > early in 2013, and has criticism from an electric vehicle advocacy group. > > The existing fuel tax system is an extremely fair and anonymous way to > collect road maintenance dollars from road users. The amount of fees paid by > each individual is directly related to how much they use the road system. > The fee is anonymously collected at the gasoline pump, which means the > fuel tax can't be used by the government as a sneaky way to track all our > movements. The flaw is that because the fee is on the sale of fuel, owners of > cars that consume a fuel delivered through an alternative mechanism do not > pay any fees for road use. > _______________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org For EV drag racing discussion, please use NEDRA (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA)
