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We already have vehicle mileage tracking devices: odometers. Just have vehicles report their mileage each year when they renew their registration and base the

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.

Gibbon1 8y ago
Few years ago read a transportation studies guy that also mentioned that most people think their gas taxes pay for the roads. Really that only pays for a bit less than half. General taxes and bonds pay for much of it. My feeling is if you wanted to reduce the number of cars it would be better to just impose an excise tax on new car sales. Why tax gasoline over 15 years when you can get all the revenue up front via an excise tax. Assume 30mpg, expected life 200,000 miles, that's 6666 gallons of gasoline. At $0.7382/gallon that's $4920. Seriously why not just impose a $5000 excise tax and be done with it. https://frontiergroup.org/reports/fg/who-pays-roads https://frontiergroup.org/reports/fg/who-pays-roads On the other hand saw someone else mention their city used license plate readers to look at who was using their urban streets and turns out about 80% of the users weren't locals. That poses a big conundrum. Particularly in California where urban commercial property tax revenue is limited by Prop13. I think where I'm going with this is one shouldn't get too attached to the idea that things be 'fair' because that's simply impossible.