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How good are American roads?

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193 points chmaynard | 4 comments | 20 Nov 24 14:45 UTC | HN request time: 0.624s | source
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bloomingeek ◴[20 Nov 24 17:42 UTC] No.42196373[source]▶
The arm-pit state of Oklahoma, where I live, is considering a "mile tax" to support the maintenance of our road system. Of course we know it's also to offset EV vehicles gas tax loss. (which EV owners already have) Our roads are terrible and don't usually get repaired until they're almost dangerous.

This tax will hurt fixed income and poorer people the most. As Thomas Jefferson said: “The government you elect is the government you deserve.” My state is so red, it's scarlet.

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1. olyjohn ◴[20 Nov 24 19:18 UTC] No.42197188[source]▶
Every state has been getting lobbied to do this for at least the last 10 years. These bills come through the legislatures every year, and I think it will keep coming until finally one of them passes. There are manufacturers of the GPS trackers pushing for it, and companies who want to have the state-granted monopoly to manage the tracking and billing. They are frothing at the mouth to get this passed and make a ton of money billing every single person.
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2. 0xffff2 ◴[20 Nov 24 21:10 UTC] No.42198146[source]▶
Why wouldn't you just use a yearly odometer inspection by the DMV? Even if the legislature wanted to enact such a tax, why involve GPS and third party companies?
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3. bloomingeek ◴[21 Nov 24 02:15 UTC] No.42200390[source]▶
My guess is they don't want DMV employees checking odometers, because they won't trust the vehicle owners and the possibility of odometer tampering, if they can still do that.
4. cpitman ◴[21 Nov 24 04:06 UTC] No.42200992[source]▶
That would still leave the problem if determining what state they were driving in, or allocating all the revenue to their state of residence even when they drive in other states as well.

How this works in trucking is interesting. Whenever a truck fills up its tank, the driver pays the gas tax in that state. They then track how many miles they drive in each state, and then quarterly have to "correct" their gas tax by paying the states where they drive more miles than they paid taxes for and get refunded by states where they fueled but didn't drive as many miles. Trucks these days have automated systems for tracking all this.

If you are interested, this is part of IFTA, the International Fuel Tax Agreement.