As more drivers turn to zero-emissions vehicles, which don't have to pay anything at the pump, California's gas tax could soon be a thing of the past. But it would be replaced by something else.
I was skeptical about your claims about weight having such an outsized effect, but it looks like there’s merit. Seems like it’s a super complex area of study, and we have observational data that gives us rules of thumb that transportation and pavement engineers use to estimate pavement damages over time. Thanks for bringing that up, I’ve learned stuff today!
I still don’t think it’s as simple as taxing trucks though. Registration is part of the solution, but so is gas/sales/tire/oil disposal taxes, weigh stations, tolls, parking fines, crush charges, etc etc etc.
There’s a lot of things that would need to happen in order to effectively capture and recompense road damage in California, if that were a goal of the state. Unfortunately I have very little faith that California can do it - for all the good things about California, effective governance or municipal problem solving is not really on the list from what I’ve seen. It’s a shame, because they really have the resources, it’s just all such a mess.
Its so hard to get through to most people on traffic engineering. Induced demand, for instance, is a nightmare to explain to anyone.
Traffic engineering is possibly so unintuitive they should teach it in high school so people understand the hell common sense and intuition create when they are wrong.
Every time some politician creates some well meaning but misguided attempt to fix a traffic or parking problem it creates an avelanche of unintended consequences.
I was skeptical about your claims about weight having such an outsized effect, but it looks like there’s merit. Seems like it’s a super complex area of study, and we have observational data that gives us rules of thumb that transportation and pavement engineers use to estimate pavement damages over time. Thanks for bringing that up, I’ve learned stuff today!
I still don’t think it’s as simple as taxing trucks though. Registration is part of the solution, but so is gas/sales/tire/oil disposal taxes, weigh stations, tolls, parking fines, crush charges, etc etc etc.
There’s a lot of things that would need to happen in order to effectively capture and recompense road damage in California, if that were a goal of the state. Unfortunately I have very little faith that California can do it - for all the good things about California, effective governance or municipal problem solving is not really on the list from what I’ve seen. It’s a shame, because they really have the resources, it’s just all such a mess.
Its so hard to get through to most people on traffic engineering. Induced demand, for instance, is a nightmare to explain to anyone.
Traffic engineering is possibly so unintuitive they should teach it in high school so people understand the hell common sense and intuition create when they are wrong.
Every time some politician creates some well meaning but misguided attempt to fix a traffic or parking problem it creates an avelanche of unintended consequences.