While we’re on the subject of the Vehicle Miles Driven tax (see previous post), I would add one modification: Drivers should pay for road maintenance not only on the basis of how many miles they drive but their vehicle’s weight.
Why should the owner of a Mini Cooper (2,679 pounds curb weight) pay the same as the owner of an H3 Hummer (4,700 pounds curb weight)? With only 57 percent of a Hummer’s heft, the Mini Cooper contributes correspondingly less to the degradation of streets and roads. If the car creates fewer potholes, its owner should pay a lower road maintence fee.
One more thought: Some cars emit more pollution than others. Automobile pollution imposes costs on society, particularly through an increase in low-level ozone and nitrogen deposition in rivers, streams and waterways. (Among the automobile’s sins, include carbon dioxide emissions, implicated in global warming, if you want to.) One way to encourage people to operate low-pollution vehicles would be to add a “pollution tax” based on Vehicle Miles Driven, as adjusted by pollution emissions. Revenues from that tax could be used to fund programs to offset, or otherwise clean up, the pollution. Of course, such a fund would have to be set up in a way to ensure that politicians couldn’t raid it for other purposes.
To assess how such a funding mechanism would impact Virginians geographically, visit http://www.autochoice.org/ and type in your zip code. There, you’ll see that in Virginia’s 7th Congressional District, where I live, 53 percent of the vehicles are light trucks and SUVs. By contrast, in the 8th district, which includes Arlington, only 42 percent of the vehicles are light trucks.
My region of the state would get hit harder, but I can’t let that stand in the way of an economically rational system of road funding. (For the record, my family owns one car and one SUV.) Most people, I believe, would be willing to accept a system that operates according to the objectice principles that I have laid out. If they don’t, it’s only because politicians have convinced them that “government” can somehow spend more money on roads and that “someone else” will pay for it. Eventually, though, even the dimmest bulb will figure out that “someone else” is, in fact, them.
(Hat check to the blogger Groveton to pointing me to the Autochoice.org website.)
