Repealing the Gas Tax might actually promote better urban environments
Yes I know how that sounds, but hear me out:
Two things have been happening in DC lately, one, talk of a temporary removal of the gas tax because of the Iran sh!tshow. And two, a proposal that would add a $135-$150 additional fee on hybrids and EVs to help fund federal road maintenance. As an EV owner I have already called my rep and told them how dumb the overpriced fee is, when a vehicle that gets 25 mpg will only pay $72 in federal highway tax over 10k miles driven. The amount simply penalizes EVs and hybrids. Call your reps on this one, it's dumb.
https://carbuzz.com/highways-funding-electric-vehicle-fees/
Admittedly, EVs and hybrids should pay some road tax, because, well, they are cars, and they wear down the roads like any other car. But how much should they pay? And how do you meter that?
For people who might be unaware, the 4th Power Law is something in civil engineering that basically says the stress induced on a road is the axle weight to the 4th power. Rather than increasing linearly, a vehicle that is twice as heavy will actually increase road stress not by double, but by 16x.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law
Now what I told my rep is that if you want to tax EVs, that's fair, but then we need a whole overhaul of the federal highway tax system, where the tax you pay is simply a calculation based on vehicle weight, and miles driven. At first I thought it should just be a linear thing, but then I remembered how weight actually exponentially increases road stress, and realized that a tax system like that would not only be equitable for everyone, making sure everyone pays for the damage they do to roads, it would heavily deincentivze heavy vehicles, and would likely help push people to opt for smaller cars, or go car free all together
Lets say you pay $0.00000001 per mile driven, multiplied by 2500lbs as a base reference number. You pay $0.000025 in federal highway tax annually. So basically $0.
Any heavier than that though, and you pay the same rate, times 2000 lbs, any additional weight your vehicle is *raised to the 4th power*
A 2010 corolla weighs about 2800 lbs. 300^4 = 8100000000 * $0.00000001 = $81. Not too bad.
What if I want to drive my F150 though? That weighs about 5000 lbs.
2500^4 = 3.90625×10¹³ x $0.00000001 = $390625. Absolute absurd, and unrealistic for anyone.
Doing it like this obviously wouldn't work at all, as any small increase in weight would balloon the tax on a vehicle to absurd levels, and this back of the napkin thought process for sure doesn't take into account the many other factors like weather, and many other costs of road maintenance like snow removal
But I think an exponential cost increase for a road tax would make sense if it was done well, and with a good understanding of the engineering of road maintenance. Such a tax scheme would make large vehicles very uneconomical to own (more so than they already are) and it might be an elegant solution that would get many large vehicles off the road.
What do you all think?