If you give people in California public transportation, they would use it almost as much as New York in a year.
this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2025
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San Francisco has something like four entirely separate public transport systems with all different rail gauges within IIRC a couple hundred meters of each other (cable cars, VTA, CalTrain, BART). That's before even getting to the road-based stuff, which includes electric trolleys, and water-based stuff
The obvious thing to do is just base the cost on your insurance and the fee to vehicle registration. But lets be real, the weight of the vehicle has an exponential effect on road wear so they should just charge heavier vehicles a registration premium regardless of fuel type
For those who don't understand the the degree to which this matters, behold, the fourth power law of road stress:
There should simply be an annual fee based on vehicle weight and distance driven
Keep the vehicle in your garage and only drive a handful of times? Low fee, drive a monster truck thousands and thousands of miles? Large fee.
This also solves the problem of electric vehicles not paying towards road maintenance, as they are heavy and would wear the roads more than a standard vehicle that uses gas.
The problem is distance driven has a linear effect. The weight has an exponential effect. If you drive a monster truck 10 miles a year and you drive a shitty commuter that weighs 1/5 the amount 3,650 miles a year, the monster truck is gonna damage the road more. If the fee is anything but a 4 power exponent from weight and linear with distance then you're punishing miles driven more than they are contributing to road wear.
In fact the only time distance matters is if its 0 then why even bother licensing a vehicle heavy enough to be worth surcharging? If most people drive their vehicles more than 10 miles a year but less than 10000, you'd want the fees to scale with normal use cases rather than some fringe use cases that encourage people to own vehicles they never use.
Edit: The way to do it is probably surcharge people for the weight of the vehicle + the weight of the gas the vehicles use in a year.
You can have tiers to solve that, like vehicles under 5000lbs pay $x per kilometer driven, vehicles between 5000lbs and 10,000lbs pay $y per kilometer driven, and vehicles over 10000lbs pay $z per kilometer driven.
Wouldn't be perfect but closer.
My preference would be to assign an equivalent single axle load to each vehicle based on make and model or avg trailer load capacity and then scale that linearly with mileage.
https://pavementinteractive.org/reference-desk/design/design-parameters/equivalent-single-axle-load/
Not obvious, there's tons of holes in that plan and I'll throw down a couple I thought of while I brush my teeth. I lived in California for years.
-Out of state plates are not included. Sooo many out of state vehicles
-This has an outsized impact on shipping and industry such as work vans, small business trucks (can be argued that it should be, but I'm not convinced that the cost should be borne by those areas vs the bajillion people that don't carpool to/from LA everyday)
-A heavy vehicle pays a premium at registration, but what if it's only driven a couple times a year? Vs a lighter vehicle that drives 40k miles in a year. Has to have some kind of use component to plan.
I'd argue that it's way more complicated than any sentence that starts with "the obvious thing to do..." Everyone wants a simple and fair solution buddy life is not that simple and California's traffic, transportation, road maintenance, and road based industry is about as complicated as it gets.
Does California require annual inspections? Here they record your mileage - I think it has some effect on allowable emissions. So we already have a way of collecting mileage
I'd argue that it's way more complicated than any sentence that starts with "the obvious thing to do..."
For every difficult problem there is a solution that is simple, easy, and wrong.
Agreed on the weird side affects.
My state charges an ev surcharge and since I do very little driving it costs more than the tax on what little gas I would use.
I mean, out of state plates shouldn't matter much. The residents of the state should be paying for the road maintenance, not people from out of state.
So the total cost of the roads should be bared by the residents, and their fees should be high enough to account for the damage done from out of state vehicles
I say this Soley because our of state vehicles don't need to be in California, and they don't need Californian roads, so why should they pay for them?
The residents of the state benefit from them being there because they are delivering goods to be sold in California to Californians, or to travel and spend tourist dollars in California providing jobs to locals, etc.
Residents should pay for the roads because the roads benefit the residents by allowing out of state traffic. It shouldn't solely be a straight charge to every vehicle that uses the roads.
I lived in California for 11 years and had out of state plates for the entire time, legally. Not even weird. There's so many ways and reasons that you can live in a state, or work in a state full time and legally be able to register your vehicle in another state.
Registration fees are simply not the way. There HAS to be some kind of equitable use tax or fee.
A gas tax seems pretty dang effective to me. It doesn't capture electric vehicles correctly, but honestly right now we WANT to encourage the use of electric vehicles so I don't think it's quite time to flip the table and try to implement a new system.
We're still in a transition period and we need to do everything possible to discourage gas powered vehicles, and taxing the shit out of consumer unleaded and diesel is an awesome way to do it. Honestly, anyone suggesting otherwise raises my hackles. There's not that many electric vehicles on the road in the USA, even in urban California.
I'm suspicious of any new laws that would reduce the costs of fossil fueled vehicles while offloading more costs to electric ones.
The fourth power law indicates that a heavier vehicle that is 5x heavier per axle does more damage to the road in one day than one day than a lighter vehicle (1x) would do in a year travelling the same route every day.
So no, its not disproportionate or unfair to fee vehicles by weight. Japanese kei trucks aren't even very big so there's market solutions that exists. Plus there's an argument to be made that if you're only using a truck once a year its more effecient to rent it than buy it.
As for simplicity, you're right no plan is going to easily be both fair and simple. Where I live there's weigh stations along the highway that weigh big trucks and these capture out of state trucks. I'm sure a registration fee can be collected there, too for out of state vehicles, even at a day rate. You can also offer parking fee discounts for registered vehicles.
If you boil down to "why do we care about this" generally the answers ARE easier to come up with.
I was skeptical about your claims about weight having such an outsized effect, but it looks like there's merit. Seems like it's a super complex area of study, and we have observational data that gives us rules of thumb that transportation and pavement engineers use to estimate pavement damages over time. Thanks for bringing that up, I've learned stuff today!
I still don't think it's as simple as taxing trucks though. Registration is part of the solution, but so is gas/sales/tire/oil disposal taxes, weigh stations, tolls, parking fines, crush charges, etc etc etc.
There's a lot of things that would need to happen in order to effectively capture and recompense road damage in California, if that were a goal of the state. Unfortunately I have very little faith that California can do it - for all the good things about California, effective governance or municipal problem solving is not really on the list from what I've seen. It's a shame, because they really have the resources, it's just all such a mess.
Its so hard to get through to most people on traffic engineering. Induced demand, for instance, is a nightmare to explain to anyone.
Traffic engineering is possibly so unintuitive they should teach it in high school so people understand the hell common sense and intuition create when they are wrong.
Every time some politician creates some well meaning but misguided attempt to fix a traffic or parking problem it creates an avelanche of unintended consequences.
The problem with your example is you could read it as cars cause effectively zero wear on roads, compared to a truck
I know people will quickly balk at this because people tend to balk at new taxes, tax changes, and anything happening in California.
But it's a good idea. Driving electric should not get you out of paying for roads.
The only way out of paying for roads should be not using them. And that bumps up demand for better public transit, which does substantially more to combat climate change than everyone driving electric cars.
Something needs to change. When these massive EVs (Hummers, cybertrucks, etc...) are worse for the environment and roads than other vehicles they should be paying proportionally to the damage they cause.
It's crazy to me that somehow we're transitioning to EV but at the same time have found a way to make them more dangerous.
worse for the environment and roads than other vehicles they should be paying proportionally to the damage they cause.
Which means the trucking industry should be paying a lot more.
Are large EVs actually worse for the environment compared to an equivalent sized ICE vehicle? I find that hard to believe.
Tires on EVs wear down faster than ICE vehicles.
The EU has regulations on tires to control pollution.
Meanwhile, the is dismantling the EPA...
The EVs are heavier, which causes more road wear than a similarly sized ICE and they will also produce more tire wear pollution for the same reason. Overall, they'd still be better than the ICE comparison for the environment due to no tail pipe emissions but a smaller EV would obviously be better.
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Why not both? They should keep a pigouvian tax on oil.
Many mentions of factoring weight in this thread, I believe should also consider size of vehicle, how much space the vehicle occupies on the road. Some combination of miles, weight and size.
For those asking how tracked, a prior trial used a device plugged into OBD port like some insurance companies use. That trial generated monthly billing for miles driven in state. Tracked not just miles driven, but also where the vehicle was driven. This is done so miles driven out of state are excluded from the road charge. Not perfect as miles driven inside national park (Federal not state maintained) were included in the billing. Hopefully that big was fixed.
I like concept but the very real privacy issues, uh, not so much
Haha fuck that, you really wanna collect even more information for the gestapo administration?
Oregon does all commercial vehicles based on weight-mile-axle taxes. More weight, more axles, more miles, all increase the tax burden proportionally. Then you buy PUC credited diesel with no state gas tax. Works fine and can be extended to electric vehicles fine.
The issue I'll take with it is the filing and monitoring system they'll try to make private citizens do, which options are limited to either direct government GPS tracking (fuckkkk no) or an inefficient bureaucratic hellhole of odometer pictures (will cost additional tens of millions to administer). The Oregon system works fine because commercial vehicles are fairly strictly regulated, but that will break down with the general public.
Does Oregon do annual inspections? Pretty sure odometer readings are part of that. And since that data is already reported to the state, they can take that and tax appropriately.
We have no annual inspections, only limited emissions tests inside two major metro areas.
I suppose that that's probably the most-reasonable way to incorporate EVs into paying for the roads, but that's going to suck for people who have an ICE vehicle registered in California but do most of their driving in other states, since they're basically paying tax twice, once to California in terms of the ownership tax, and then again to the other states in terms of fuel.
considers
Hmm.
How about instead retaining the existing gasoline tax without changes, but making the Road Charge tax apply to only EVs, since the issue (gas tax not functioning) is specific to EVs? Then if and when other states adopt some kind of change to deal with EVs, if it differs, can adopt that policy.
EDIT: I guess that might subsidize users of plugin hybrids who do a lot of short-range city driving.
There are some states that already do that and it’s invariably unfair
Let’s be unfair the other direction: keep the gas tax and add a registration tax for all vehicles. Then EVs don’t get out of paying for road wear and we’re still incenting the transition to EVs
I followed the link, then the link to the California Road charge web site. What I was looking for and didn't find in any place is: "How will the mileage be monitored and how will the fee be collected?" I think those are important questions before one could decide if this is a good plan.
I personally like the idea of taxing tires instead. Since the wear and tear on roads is in direct causation to weight, the faster a tire wears out (because of weight) the more damage to roads would be caused. This means that lighter cars, causing less damage, would replace their tires less frequently, meaning paying less tax.
However, large heavy trucks that do the most damage also would have to replace their tires more often and thereby shoulder more of the burden of road repair, which is appropriate because heavy vehicles are doing much more of the damage.
If a tire tax is to generate enough money for that purpose then it'll significantly increase the cost of tires. As a consequence, lower income earners will not replace their tires when they should, leading to more road accidents.
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Tire lifetime varies dramatically with the type of tire. I’ve had tires that lasted 10,000 miles and tires that lasted 40,000 miles on the same car and in similar driving conditions. That is a difficult variable to solve for.
Weight in kg x mileage recorded at safety inspection x some factor = tax
Seems like a straightforward calculation.
EVs are especially heavy, too, and they eat tires much faster than ICE cars. Tire tax is 100% appropriate, and a brilliant idea.
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Electricity is already taxed.
We don't need more government tracking of our every move.
The electric tax doesn't go towards fixing roads, though. That's why it needs to change, otherwise the only people paying into that are non-electric car owners.
I totally agree that the government shouldn't have more of our data, so I looked up how the pilot program worked and honestly I'm not too mad about it. There are 3 options:
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OBD-II device that reads your odometer and sends that in to be tracked. It has an OPTIONAL GPS which, if turned on, will make sure to only tax the miles driven in California (so it would not apply to miles while out of state). If turned off then all miles are taxed.
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Car Telemetry that's already in newer cars that can phone home and send the numbers in (This is my lease favorite)
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You simply take a picture of your odometer and submit it. No invasion of privacy and seeing where you're going. This is the one I like the best.
All of those are overhead-riddled runarounds that could be avoided entirely by the state simply allocating the tax dollars it's already collected in a different manner, which ought to be well within its capability to do.
Anyway, if all they cared about was your odometer reading they get that already when you renew your vehicle registration. They could just charge you then -- when you're already standing there with your checkbook anyway -- and not need to create and hire an entire new department to review people's potato pictures of their dashboards.
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I thought tolls were supposed to pay for road repair. Cali simply cannot resist finding any way to extract money out of you. Shortly after the road use tax I am sure they will find a way to tax gas again
Very few roads in California have tolls.
This I did not know. I learned my something new today. I can’t move 100 ft without hitting a toll in Florida lol.
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I'll vote for it.
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