https://twitter.com/johnrobertsFox/status/1422996114593259521
Personally don't think this is the right path at all and is going to effect rural, poor and anyone without proper public transit (soooo a ton of people) unfairly. I understand the idea behind it but there are so many better ways to deal with the driving problem they've created.
This is for a pilot program to replace the gas tax. The gas tax is already a mileage tax by proxy, for the most part.
There are better ways to do this, like modulating it by vehicle weight to accurately reflect cost of upkeep to roads, but if you want to still have roads when electric cars start to have serious numbers, if you're not talking about a mileage tax then you live in a fantasy world.
Speak on it, hell yeah
I mean, big rigs paying for their fair share of road maintenance would kill the road freight industry overnight. Semis cause like 36x the stress to roads as an average sedan or something equally bonkers.
There will be pain somewhere, is all I'm saying, and it will inevitably be felt most by the poor, no matter the implementation details.
The US General Accounting Office did a study on this in 1978. (Excessive Truck Weight: An Expensive Burden We Can No Longer Support CED-79-94)
They determined that a fully loaded 80,000 pound 18 wheeler did 160,000 times more damage than a 4,000 pound car (which already is a oversize piece of shit).
:rocz-yes:
Time for trains.
The big rig actually does over 400x the road damage of a regular car
How much less fuel efficient are they already?
Or does diesel get less/no gas tax?
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Okay but giving people the stick for damaging roads without giving them the carrot of mass transit is just sadistic.
How do you think we're going to deal with water shortages?
Climate change necessarily demands a reduction in "quality of life" for the first world.
And there is literally no way to serve the massively spread out rural and suburban American population with mass transit. It is not feasible.
You do not get to continue to live in an exurb and commute into the city in the era of climate change, even if you're poor. I'm sorry. The least sustainable lifestyles will feel the pain the most, that is unavoidable. We should not be investing money into sustaining unsustainable lifestyles. The answer to "the exurban and rural poor will suffer under increased driving costs" is not to expand mass transit to cover the farming town. That is lighting money (and the planet) on fire. The answer is to make land usage in cities (where sustainable living is possible due to economies of scale) more intensive.
There's no housing in the city. There's no jobs in the burbs. You've got to fix that problem before you start punishing people for getting priced out of the city. If you pass this tax before fixing that issue like Biden is doing that doesn't move us towards sustainability, it just turns the ratchet.
Every mile you drive a car is already turning the ratchet. The ratchet is already turning. We really have no time to delay taking any action on climate change.