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Not just gas taxes.
How much revenue is generated from parking? Paying for parking, parking fines, traffic infractions?
What happens when that goes away?
At my peak, I was paying $21 a day to park my car downtown to go to work. I’ve been working from home for 5 years now.
Take electric cars out of the equation, when self drive cars become the standard, eliminating the need for parking, and preventing the need for traffic and parking infractions, where will the money come from?
I could see cities blocking off the downtown core with toll gates. You want to go in or out? Pay a fee. London already does this as a means of traffic control.
What the hell are all the tolls for‽
Repayment for roads previously built. Though, tolls typically outlast that purpose.
Mileage tax like commercial vehicles under IFTA.
This is the solution. The bite is that politicians know it is incredibly unpopular, and in America penalizes rural voters who have to drive farther. Ideally, it would be assessed annually when you renew registration and amortized out as monthly payment (or possibly an option to pay a lump sum). Based on your cars mileage for the last year, so it would be a post paid tax. However here in Texas, we just got rid of inspections that verify your mileage, so it would be left to self reporting, which is notoriously unreliable.
People already pay it in gas prices. Best plan would be to remove it from gas now and at the same time get the mileage tax set up. That way drivers who majority drive has vehicles will be happy their gas prices went down. That of course relies on gas companies not immediately raising profits and keeping the price the same.
Cutting the spending somewhere else? Reducing the size of government?
… taxes. Regular, existing, mundane taxes.
Any direct connection between a source of state revenue and a target of state spending is arbitrary and weird.
The point of a gas tax is to have the people who use and degrade the roads pay for the repair.
We want to discourage car driving, so the tax should be related to how much you drive a car. Otherwise, you are making people using more sustainable forms of transportation subsidize driving
In India we have road tax. Many years ago they realised people don’t pay it every year and it was hard to track with the size of the population I suppose so they just charge you 10 years worth of road tax upfront when you buy a car and no other road tax payments after that.
Of course, our roads mostly suck although it’s a bit better nowadays and most of the road construction money finds a home in many pockets along the way before finally reaching a road.
