On Tuesday, March 4, 2003, at 02:54 PM, Eva Young wrote:
I think Terrell made some good arguments for Senator Day's plan to charge for the use of the 394 HOV lane. Then there was some discussion of toll roads. It seems to me one major issue with implementing toll roads is coming up with a way to add the toll booths -- that's alot of extra lanes at those areas -- and lots of land needed for that. Are there other ways of charging for road use that can avoid this physical need for toll booths?
Good points Eva- but there's probably no need to send everyone through toll booths or force vehicle tracking on them. Road wear is largely a result of vehicle weight, in fact the heaviest vehicles disproportionately damage our roads. Some of these vehicles also put on over 10 times the annual mileage on our roads than we do with our personal vehicles. Further, a lot of the costs of building roads- 12 foot wide lanes, long entrance ramps, and wide turns- are required only for heavy trucks and should be paid for by them.
Let me give some examples- the average Minnesotan runs a 2 ton vehicle on our highways about 10,000 miles a year, putting about 20,000 ton miles of wear on our highways a year. For this priveledge we pay about $100 a year in registration fees and about $200 in fuel taxes. So were paying about a penny and a half per ton mile to use our highways. Now consider a 40 ton tractor trailer rig owned by a national if not international company that puts on 200,000 miles a year= 8,000,000 ton miles per year. If this heavy truck were licenced in Minnesota it'd pay about $2000 in registration fees, but they usually licence in the cheapest state so they pay maybe half that. They will also buy much of their fuel in the state with the lowest taxes and pay maybe $12,000 a year in fuel taxes, So our high mileage heavy truck is paying only $13,000 a year, but if taxed as the same rate as our personal vehicles it would be paying nearly 10 times that- about $120,000 a year. And this assumes they're actually paying taxes to Minnesota for the mileage they're driving here- they're supposed to but the system is largely self reporting and audits are rare.
So their is no need to charge the average motorist additional tolls- instead we need to make the over the road big rigs pay their fair share.
Dyna Sluyter, Minneapolis
Eva Young Near North Minneapolis [EMAIL PROTECTED] Blog is up: http://lloydletta.blogspot.com
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