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US Contemplating 'Vehicle Miles Traveled' Tax
dawgs72 writes "This week the Congressional Budget Office released a report saying that taxing people based on how many miles they drive is a possible option for raising new revenues, and that these taxes could be used to offset the costs of highway maintenance. The proposed tax would be enforced through the use of electronic metering devices installed on all vehicles. The mileage tax is being considered instead of an increase in the gas tax in order to tax hybrids, EVs, and conventional automobiles equally."
It's called an odometer.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
You can't. It's a size issue. this idea of everyone living in a city is absurd.
Sure you can - It just takes city planners with vision. Look at these pictures from my city (Vancouver, Canada). I have lots of friends raising families in the city, with parks, schools, supermarkets nearby and all walkable.
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2734/4112965898_7112701b00.jpg
http://static-p4.fotolia.com/jpg/00/08/70/45/400_F_8704550_q9V0W99I76eCkun4RbXmAi8sjTieGEix.jpg
The buildings you see in those pictures are all residential.
> Because my "sprawling" 1280 sq ft. home in the suburbs (where I ride the bus 20 miles each way) costs me $723/month whereas rent would be over $1000/month and a mortgage would be well in excess of $1000/month in the city?
Where is this? Idaho?
Here in New York rent or mortgage is certainly over $3,000/mo.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
Are you fucking kidding me?
Perhaps if your friends are super rich they can afford to live in vancouver city proper. MOST people with kids live in the suburbs, unless they live in their parents old house or some other stroke of luck. There was even an article on it in the tyee recently: Vancouvers Downtown Chases out kids
Not to mention the fact that EVERYONE drives in the lower mainland.. EVERYONE.. Taking the transit is simply not an option as its between 3.75 to 5.00 each way from any suburb. Which is MORE than it costs for gasoline on the same trip, even with gas being 1.31/L currently. Source
Vancouver is HORRIBLY designed. We have very poor density compared to many other urban centres, with sprawling "vancouver special" houses which are built wide, not tall due to regulations. You have these choke points of bridges which clog up and waste tonnes of time every day. Even in my 7km commute to downtown (read BARELY in the suburbs), generally takes an 30-45 minutes in rush hour. And thats using plenty of shortcuts.
Now these condos you mentioned, from your image it looks to be olympic village. Want to know what it costs to live there? Go take a look: Olympic Village Pricing. You will see that it costs 500k -1M for a 2 bedroom 800sqft apartment in your "city planners with vision" utopia. How the fuck is that affordable for a family???
Sure if you think its a good idea to raise a family in an 800sqft shoebox with only concord pacifics Ãvisionà of "shared green space" (2 acres for like 10k people to relax in) Source. But honestly, i think you are rich, terribly deluded, dont have kids over 4 years old, or simply misinformed.
The bottom line is that you are wrong to use vancouver as a good model of anything sustainable or affordable. Vancouver, where you cant get a 1200sqft house for under 850k. Vancouver, where there is a whole site making fun of the fact that you cant tell million dollar houses from crack house.
Vancouver has a LONG way to go before it is hospitable to families or even pedestrians! When was the last time you walked to surrey from downtown? To burnaby? To richmond?
As a potential lottery winner, I totally support tax cuts for the wealthy
Yes. Extremely insightful.
And the reason trucks damage roads is the way they are taxed. Trucks are taxed per axle, thus by loading up each axle to the weight limit they pay the least tax. But high axle loads in trucks is the cause of the majority of road wear. If instead trucks were taxed based on axle weight, they would have more axles to carry the same load and significantly reduce road wear. We should turn all those 18 wheelers in to 56 wheelers, and roads would last a lot longer.
The axle load versus wear effect has been well known for at least a quarter of a century. We could fix it by making a two line change in the tax code, thus realigning the incentives. Why doesn't this happen? Because all the truckers have to replace a lot of expensive infrastructure. So the way to make this happen is to phase it in -- all new trailers pay the tax the new way, all old trailers can pay the old tax for 10 years if they were manufactured before a certain date. Ten years is a long time? *pffft*, if we had done this when the problem was first documented we would have been converted over more than a decade ago.