Oh great, yet another measure that will disproportionally affect the poor the most.
Rich people either have enough money to not care about this tax, or can afford homes close to their place of work, while poor people have to endure long commutes to get to work.
Graduated income tax. Simplify the tax code, make the curve steeper, get rid of sales and usage taxes unless there is truly no benefit (like tobacco). (In my opinion)
Why would you peanalise productive people through income tax? Why do you want to discourage working? Only way to rescue is to get paid less, not something we want to encourage.
Why not tax land value instead, easy to reduce by making better use of the land, which is something we want to encourage.
Taxing gas is still important to reclaim some of the externalities that burning it causes. Same with taxing alcohol which leads to societal problems.
Do you have evidence that increasing taxes on people earning more than, say, $1M per year "discourages working?"
I also support taxing land value, but I don't think it's a replacement for graduated income tax. I mentioned tobacco, and alcohol is obviously similar. But with gas, there are poorer people who simply cannot opt out of using gas. Maybe we should apply more tax to companies that produce or sell gas instead?
I assume it we would get rid of some of the gas tax in exchange, in which case this would be a wash for the poor. I also assume it would be a tax based not only on miles but the value of the car, such that cheaper/lighter cars would get taxed less, which would help defray costs to the poor.
But you're right, in the end the tax would necessarily be regressive, which pretty much every usage based tax is.
This. I'm for increasing taxes to Denmark levels but these schemes make income inequality worse, not better. And the fact that this will most hurt commuters, who are already struggling given crazy housing prices, is especially sad.
On the other hand, commuters will think twice before accepting a job offer that requires a multiple-hour commute.
That will increase the pressure on local governments to provide adequate public transportation.
It will also increase the pressure on private markets to couple office tower developments with apartment high-rises versus the current models for most US cities - all offices downtown, all residences in suburbs.
It will increase pressure on employers to provide more diverse and distributed options versus "everybody be in the main office tower by 8 a.m.".
Suburban sprawl is exactly as required by law, from the mutually exclusive land uses right down to the paint on the strip-mall parking lots. Market forces would love to build walkable mixed-use districts. A proud tradition of highly effective grassroots activism makes sure that they don't. You may find this talk [0], or the speaker's book Suburban Nation, enlightening. It's not at all the case that market forces need to be adjusted here. It's public policy which is broken.
Actually, the poor drive the least. Subsidies on driving disproportionately benefit the well-off.
Done right, a tax like this would be revenue-neutral, and enacted alongside a reduction in some regressive tax, like sales tax. The winners are poor people and people who don't drive. The losers, well-off people who drive.
That’s absurd. You really think it’s the rich commuting 2+ hours each way from the Central Valley far out of public transit range, and the poor paying $5000/mo for walkable urban high rises?
San Francisco’s amenities can only exist because subsidized car infrastructure makes it possible to get here from affordable places, however painfully. Your walkable grocery store’s shelves don’t get stocked without highways and sprawl. The walkabale radius around any BART stop is thoroughly into tech-workers-only price ranges by now (or truly terrifying).
And on page 86 you can see that 70% of high-income folks drive alone to work. Amongst poor people (their term), it's 51%. Meanwhile, 5% of high-income residents of the Bay Area take the bus to work. Amongst poor people, 12%.
That's from 2004. The contemporary story of gentrification is higher-income workers choosing the urban core, and lower-income workers getting pushed to the suburban periphery where adequate transit coverage is less likely.
The relevant quantity here is vehicle mileage, not mode share. I expected lower-income workers to drive much longer distances (whereas the rich would have more car trips but trivial distances). So I'm more interested in "Other research suggests that low-income workers travel shorter distances than other workers" which is genuinely surprising. I wonder how that's fared over time.
> Oh great, yet another measure that will disproportionally affect the poor the most.
Transferring some portion of road maintenance funding from the gas tax (which the rich buy their way into lower per-mile charges for by paying more up front for hybrid and electric vehicles) to a mileage tax doesn't disproportionately affect the poor, at least not in terms of adverse effects.
I don't carry a smartphone largely because it's a surveillance device outside of my control, and no it's not ok for you to put one on my car without a warrant. Scott Wiener can kindly go stick his head back where it belongs.
From the article text, it sounds like one of four options is a smartphone application for tracking mileage. This is significantly different from the idea of a dedicated piece of hardware, which I read your comment to imply.
While I agree this would be a perverse outcome, it is not obvious that such a thing would be "required" at all, let alone "at all times".
Here's hoping that the option never comes to pass, if for no other reason than its being trivially easy to spoof.
Weight of the vehicle is a bad measure. It just leads to bigger cars and effectively worse mileage as can be seen in Europe where weight is factored in. Weight is a bad predictor of what use you get out of a car
Yeah I think the gp didn't quite get that weight would be multiplier on your mileage not a divisor. A 6,000 lb bmw does a lot more road damage than a 1,900 lb lotus.
At 1 cent per mile, someone driving a 2400lb nissan versa doing an above average 15,000 miles a year would cost $150
However someone driving a 3500lb Merc e-class for below average 10,000 miles a year would have to pay 4.5c/mile or $450
Buy an F150 or Tesla S class at 4500lb for 10,000 miles a year, you'd pay 12c/mile, or $1200.
Then add say 40 cents a gallon to gas tax (in the UK gas tax + sales tax on that gas tax is 314c per gallon) to combat the effects of burning gas, and you get a cost per mile of
nissan versa (31mpg) -- 2.3c/mile
Merc e-class (25mpg) -- 6c/mile
F150 (22mpg) -- 13.8c/mile
Tesla S class - 12c/mile
With UK gas tax
nissan versa (31mpg) -- 11c/mile
Merc e-class (25mpg) -- 17c/mile
F150 (22mpg) -- 26c/mile
Tesla S class - 12c/mile
Not sure this is the right solution, but the problem that has necessitated this seems to be a valid one. As we move towards electric vehicles, gas tax revenue will decrease and things that are currently funded by that money, like road maintenance and construction, will have to find money elsewhere.
I'm curious, what other options do y'all think are feasible? I suppose budgets could just be shuffled around a bit but at the end of the day that's still a chunk of money that will no longer be available.
Tolls are increasingly popular. But one thing I don't see discussed much is to reduce the cost of road maintenance and construction, thereby lowering the need to collect as much tax.
As we have seen, the heavier vehicles do disproportionately more damage than a lighter vehicle. If you road repair, tax by a formula of weight and mileage if you must.
Having a driver if a hummer pay the same taxes based upon miles driven versus a a VW bug really doesn’t make sense when we know the stress put in the road by the hummer is substantially more.
Lastly, for LA, having a disincentive to have an emissions free car while driving just gets the air quality even worse.
This is not new. They’ve been eying this tax for quite some time. It’s due to the difficulty in fighting over the gas tax. It is extremely flawed, but politically expedient. At some point it may make sense due to electric vehicles and autonomous vehicles, but the day that it makes true sense, not just political, is still far in the future.
> Someone who has [...] a dramatically more fuel efficient vehicle is paying much less than you are.
Isn't that a feature, not a bug?
Don't we want to incentivize people to get more fuel efficient cars?
I mean sure, if one day the majority of the cars are electric, we'll have to adjust how they are taxed, but for now why don't we leave the incentive for people that buy a fuel efficient or electric car.
When you dig deeper you find companies that manufacture vehicle tracking devices are behind these proposals. What they want is states to create a captive market for their tracking devices. I'm also suspicious that the oil industry is also behind this.
We already have vehicle mileage tracking devices: odometers.
Just have vehicles report their mileage each year when they renew their registration and base the registration tax on that and a multiplier based on vehicle type. To keep people honest, randomly inspect the VIN and mileage at renewal time with big fines for lying.
That's absurd. What if the driver is someone who cannot afford the high rent price at the city center and commutes 20 mi every day from a cheap suburb to work?
I'd be fine if the ultra-progressive SF politicians could just mind their own business and not to dictate other cities and towns in the state on how to govern.
>someone who cannot afford the high rent price at the city center and commutes 20 mi every day from a cheap suburb to work
this are the ones paying the gas tax right now (while i for example have Prius Plugin and my gas spending is at least 3x times lesser than it was before). Replacing gas tax with mileage tax would bring Tesla and plugin owners back into the tax paying fold.
The state has a hard time finding money for fixing roads because of Priuses?
I am not sure that this adds up...
If they’re looking for money, just raise the taxes that make more sense to raise (least painful, most money), not add a tax that affect those who drive most in crappy cars (and really who don’t give a damn about road state in LA in the first place)
I'm actually quite content with the system we have here in The Netherlands. Road tax varies by:
- weight of the car (lighter cars pay a lot less than heavier vehicles)
- type of fuel (CNG is taxed more than than regular gas, diesel even more so. The prices of CNG and diesel are lower though, so if you drive a lot than CNG or diesel are cheaper to run overall)
- Hybrids/EVs don't pay road tax (for now...)
There's also a variable tax on new vehicles which is based on the environmental footprint of the vehicle.
All this is pretty fair: if you're driving more you pay more tax, if you have an old, heavy or polluting vehicle you also pay more tax. Fair enough (there are even exepmtions for classic cars).Californians are spoiled though... in The Netherlands, regular gas is $7.20 per gallon.
They don't pay road tax for now, should have clarified that. It's used as an incentive to get people to buy cleaner vehicles. They will probably pay road tax after 2022.
Diesel cars are taxed more. Yet diesel itself is subsidized. So there is a huge transfer of money where the payers and recipients are the same, only allowing plenty of money get lost in the friction (it's not the common folks who profit).
Driving old vehicles is taxed more. So people who can only afford old vehicles are paying subsidies to those who can buy a new Tesla. This is possibly the single most asocial rule in the world, and I'm honestly shocked that we have this in Europe that's otherwise reasonably socially aware.
But older vehicles aren't taxed more...? You don't pay the BPM (new car tax) and the road tax for a 1000kg car from 1990 is exactly the same as a new 1000kg car.
Also, the way the diesel scheme works is that there's a treshold so that it's only cheaper to drive diesels when you drive a lot of miles. Also, the heavier the car, the more miles you'd have to drive. But I'm sure you know this. And where exactly is 'money lost in the friction' here? Diesel prices are known, and tax brackets are pretty clear too.
I agree that we shouldn't subsidize $100k+ Teslas, but I'm all for rewarding people to drive cleaner vehicles. And calling it the single most asocial rule in the world... well, that's kind of a hyperbole, don't you think?
Related: I used to drive a 1986 Subaru Justy which ran 1:20 on regular fuel and costs next to nothing to insure and maintain. Cheapest form of motorized transport I ever had!
The irony is that rich people are more likely to live closer to work because they can afford it and at the same time are a force limiting new development.
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[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 91.5 ms ] threadRich people either have enough money to not care about this tax, or can afford homes close to their place of work, while poor people have to endure long commutes to get to work.
Why not tax land value instead, easy to reduce by making better use of the land, which is something we want to encourage.
Taxing gas is still important to reclaim some of the externalities that burning it causes. Same with taxing alcohol which leads to societal problems.
I also support taxing land value, but I don't think it's a replacement for graduated income tax. I mentioned tobacco, and alcohol is obviously similar. But with gas, there are poorer people who simply cannot opt out of using gas. Maybe we should apply more tax to companies that produce or sell gas instead?
But you're right, in the end the tax would necessarily be regressive, which pretty much every usage based tax is.
That will increase the pressure on local governments to provide adequate public transportation.
It will also increase the pressure on private markets to couple office tower developments with apartment high-rises versus the current models for most US cities - all offices downtown, all residences in suburbs.
It will increase pressure on employers to provide more diverse and distributed options versus "everybody be in the main office tower by 8 a.m.".
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMvwHDFVpCE
Done right, a tax like this would be revenue-neutral, and enacted alongside a reduction in some regressive tax, like sales tax. The winners are poor people and people who don't drive. The losers, well-off people who drive.
San Francisco’s amenities can only exist because subsidized car infrastructure makes it possible to get here from affordable places, however painfully. Your walkable grocery store’s shelves don’t get stocked without highways and sprawl. The walkabale radius around any BART stop is thoroughly into tech-workers-only price ranges by now (or truly terrifying).
See http://www.ppic.org/content/pubs/report/R_704LRR.pdf for instance: "[In the Bay Area,] Low-income workers walk, carpool, and use public transit at higher rates than their more affluent counterparts".
And on page 86 you can see that 70% of high-income folks drive alone to work. Amongst poor people (their term), it's 51%. Meanwhile, 5% of high-income residents of the Bay Area take the bus to work. Amongst poor people, 12%.
The relevant quantity here is vehicle mileage, not mode share. I expected lower-income workers to drive much longer distances (whereas the rich would have more car trips but trivial distances). So I'm more interested in "Other research suggests that low-income workers travel shorter distances than other workers" which is genuinely surprising. I wonder how that's fared over time.
[0] Page ix
Transferring some portion of road maintenance funding from the gas tax (which the rich buy their way into lower per-mile charges for by paying more up front for hybrid and electric vehicles) to a mileage tax doesn't disproportionately affect the poor, at least not in terms of adverse effects.
1) Some gas tax was removed at the same time
2) The tax took into account the weight of your vehicle and
3) There was some way to report out of state driving.
https://www.king5.com/article/news/washington-state-official...
While I agree this would be a perverse outcome, it is not obvious that such a thing would be "required" at all, let alone "at all times".
Here's hoping that the option never comes to pass, if for no other reason than its being trivially easy to spoof.
Road damage is proportional to axel weight to the fourth power. A 1 ton axel should pay 16 times as much for road repair as a 0.5 ton axel.
However someone driving a 3500lb Merc e-class for below average 10,000 miles a year would have to pay 4.5c/mile or $450
Buy an F150 or Tesla S class at 4500lb for 10,000 miles a year, you'd pay 12c/mile, or $1200.
Then add say 40 cents a gallon to gas tax (in the UK gas tax + sales tax on that gas tax is 314c per gallon) to combat the effects of burning gas, and you get a cost per mile of
With UK gas taxI'm curious, what other options do y'all think are feasible? I suppose budgets could just be shuffled around a bit but at the end of the day that's still a chunk of money that will no longer be available.
This article is old but it seems that the idea is still being considered. A bill was recently passed to extend the life of the committee that's been investigating it: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...
Having a driver if a hummer pay the same taxes based upon miles driven versus a a VW bug really doesn’t make sense when we know the stress put in the road by the hummer is substantially more.
Lastly, for LA, having a disincentive to have an emissions free car while driving just gets the air quality even worse.
If tolls and road usage taxes were fair and proportionate, you should be paying a $0.01 toll while trucks should be paying $100.
Source: AASHO Road Test
See for instance: https://streets.mn/2016/07/07/chart-of-the-day-vehicle-weigh...
Isn't that a feature, not a bug?
Don't we want to incentivize people to get more fuel efficient cars?
I mean sure, if one day the majority of the cars are electric, we'll have to adjust how they are taxed, but for now why don't we leave the incentive for people that buy a fuel efficient or electric car.
Just have vehicles report their mileage each year when they renew their registration and base the registration tax on that and a multiplier based on vehicle type. To keep people honest, randomly inspect the VIN and mileage at renewal time with big fines for lying.
I'd be fine if the ultra-progressive SF politicians could just mind their own business and not to dictate other cities and towns in the state on how to govern.
this are the ones paying the gas tax right now (while i for example have Prius Plugin and my gas spending is at least 3x times lesser than it was before). Replacing gas tax with mileage tax would bring Tesla and plugin owners back into the tax paying fold.
I am not sure that this adds up...
If they’re looking for money, just raise the taxes that make more sense to raise (least painful, most money), not add a tax that affect those who drive most in crappy cars (and really who don’t give a damn about road state in LA in the first place)
- weight of the car (lighter cars pay a lot less than heavier vehicles)
- type of fuel (CNG is taxed more than than regular gas, diesel even more so. The prices of CNG and diesel are lower though, so if you drive a lot than CNG or diesel are cheaper to run overall)
- Hybrids/EVs don't pay road tax (for now...)
There's also a variable tax on new vehicles which is based on the environmental footprint of the vehicle.
All this is pretty fair: if you're driving more you pay more tax, if you have an old, heavy or polluting vehicle you also pay more tax. Fair enough (there are even exepmtions for classic cars).Californians are spoiled though... in The Netherlands, regular gas is $7.20 per gallon.
Driving old vehicles is taxed more. So people who can only afford old vehicles are paying subsidies to those who can buy a new Tesla. This is possibly the single most asocial rule in the world, and I'm honestly shocked that we have this in Europe that's otherwise reasonably socially aware.
Also, the way the diesel scheme works is that there's a treshold so that it's only cheaper to drive diesels when you drive a lot of miles. Also, the heavier the car, the more miles you'd have to drive. But I'm sure you know this. And where exactly is 'money lost in the friction' here? Diesel prices are known, and tax brackets are pretty clear too.
I agree that we shouldn't subsidize $100k+ Teslas, but I'm all for rewarding people to drive cleaner vehicles. And calling it the single most asocial rule in the world... well, that's kind of a hyperbole, don't you think?
Related: I used to drive a 1986 Subaru Justy which ran 1:20 on regular fuel and costs next to nothing to insure and maintain. Cheapest form of motorized transport I ever had!