The State of Washington — The Evergreen State @kbin.social jocose @kbin.social 1y ago

Washington is considering replace gas tax with controversial pay-per-mile program

www.kiro7.com ‘That’s insane!’: Washington could soon replace gas tax with controversial pay-per-mile program

Plug in or gas up, it doesn’t matter. The more you drive the more you pay.

9 comments

That makes sense to some degree, given that the taxes were meant for maintenance of roads. However the per mile tax should also be a sliding value based on vehicle weight as that increases damage to the road. So a light car going a few miles wouldn't be taxed as heavily as a truck going a long distance since it wouldn't damage the roads the same way. Though at the point you've thrown out any incentive for more fuel efficient ICE powerplants.
- farmers and others also may drive quite a lot in vehicles on their own properties without ever touching a road. If it's purely for roads and not, say, including a carbon tax or something, that seems rather unfair.
  
  Existing gas taxes also affect them in this way then. They pay for the gas tax used and they're not driving on public roads, so that seems to be a wash.
“The commission’s study found that 54%, roughly half of respondents had security concerns. Roughly 88% of participating drivers opted to self-report mileage instead of using a GPS monitoring system.”

I feel like this part of the article needed some serious exploration that isn’t there. Is there a chance in this proposition that they would track mileage with a GPS system? Because that is a much bigger deal if so.
- I'd find it to be an invasion of privacy to have my mileage tracked, but on the other hand, people will underreport their miles if it's up to self-reporting. The only way to do this properly is to not have self-reporting.
  
  You could have the odometer read yearly by a certified person. In UT they do this for registration renewals and you can have it done at pretty much any gas station or dealership.
  
  I think that would be infinitely better than affixing an electronic tracking device from the government to all private vehicles.
First everyone bitches about how EVs don’t pay gas taxes to help cover road costs (which are mostly covered by other taxes anyway). Then they bitch when a more equitable tax option is suggested.

Just can’t win, eh?

9 comments