The U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) will need to spend big money if they are going to bring the nation’s infrastructure into the 21st century. While the need for money is clear, when it will come from isn’t. We know at least that higher fuel taxes are likely out of the question as the nation and the world transitions toward electric vehicles.
According to statements from the White House, infrastructure is a priority for the current administration. That’s true for the previous administration, and the one before that. In fact, infrastructure has been a popular topic on the presidential campaign trail for decades now.
The campaign is over and infrastructure is still a major talking point. President Biden’s “Build Back Better” initiative ties the issue to economic recovery, the fight against COVID-19, and even speaks of it as a matter of national security.
“We’ve got to take the opportunity to transform our deteriorating infrastructure into a 21st-century system that creates more of those opportunities and accelerates equitable growth, and critically increases the global competitiveness of our country at a moment when there’s no time to lose,” said DOT Secretary Pete Buttigieg on a virtual address to the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO).
An additional fuel tax isn’t considered a viable option. Electric vehicles are coming to the U.S. and the rest of the world. Car manufacturers like Volvo are announcing that they won’t offer gas cars even as an option. Every car sold by Volvo will be electric by 2030.
A common idea to replace a fuel tax in the era of electric vehicles is a vehicle mile tax. Buttigieg didn’t rule the idea out entirely. He did note that officials are worried that levying a vehicle mile tax could hit lower income, rural Americans hard. Anyone who drives a long distance for their commute – as is more common in lower income rural areas – would end up paying more than their suburban and urban, higher-paid counterparts.
So how will the DOT pay for the big plans Build Back Better has? There’s a lot that’s unknown. According to Buttigieg, there’s at least one thing that is known – “What we do know is that we’ve got to come up with revenue.”
Source: truckinginfo, theverge
Remove all fuel taxes and set up electronic user fees or toll stops/paypass.
Oh don’t worry they’ll figure out a way to screw trucking companies and their driver’s. Nc and Sc both has been pulling trucks like crazy these past few weeks trying to make money.
Why doesn’t the thought ever enter their mines as “We need to find ways to cut spending!”
You beat me to it David!!! Exactly!!! How about ALL the money COLLECTED in taxes for roads,,,,,,,,,ACTUALLY GOES TOWARD ROADS, Not bike paths, parks and city pet projects.
That would make too much sense and hurt their greedy pockets
Go to the rich in our country. The top 1%. They’ve had tax breaks long enough and use our infrastructure too. Time to help us middle class and lower class. Time to pay up!
Aside from the political fallout (the drying up of campaign funding for any politician who tried this, for example), this would only result in wealth being shipped overseas. If taxes are high, here, then rich people’s money gets invested over there. If there is no cheap place to hide your money, then they build an island and make a new country to hide their money in.
If we don’t want it here, there is always someone somewhere who does, and rich people can afford to move.
I’ll never buy an electric vehicle.
Yes you will. One day, you’ll test drive one, and you’ll love it’s peppiness and how fast it is. Only reason why you’ve said you won’t buy one is because you’ve politicized the idea of owning one.
Until you have to replace the battery or drive in sub-freezing weather. The chemical reaction rate doubles for every 10 degree F drop in temperature.
My Prius runs just fine in cold weather. They don’t use lead-acid batteries, any more, in modern electric vehicles.
You’re right. They use lithium batteries that destroy the environment.
You’re right, they use rare earth materials from………
CHINA!
(mainly China at least)
I agree with both of you David and Robert, this country needs to stop giving our money away and I also don’t want no damn electric car.
We r to busy taking care of other countries instead of taking care of our own. I was always told everything starts at home, but I guess that saying doesn’t apply to the u.s!
You’ll get one eventually, because out of curiosity, you’ll test drive one, and you’ll love how quick and responsive it is. You’ll also love how low maintenance it is. No oil changes (the gear case does need it’s fluid changed around 500,000 miles), no unreliable engines (due to fuel economy regulations), no spark plugs, ect. Only reason for you not wanting one, is because you’ve politicized the owning of one.
They will tax the electric bill which will be through the roof already. Green New Deal? That’s a crooked deal for us!
If they tax electricity, people will generate it themselves, with solar panels or even generators, if necessary. The latter wars with the idea of getting people off of carbon fuels.
Expect the mileage tax. Taxes have never been designed to take the burden off of the working poor or middle class; it’s always the non-working poor and the rich that escape. People who don’t work won’t be affected by a mileage tax, and the rich will travel exempt, by travelling overseas.
How long did the government argue against real estate taxes as a “wealth tax”, that would most hurt working people who spend most of their lives building equity in their home as the vast majority of the wealth that they have (while being taxed on equity still owned by their lender/s), before local jurisdictions went ahead and imposed them, anyway – with the highest tax rates being assessed in the communities with the lowest property values, no less?! Much hand-wringing will occur, but they’ll do it anyway.
If you think electricity is expensive now….Wait until electric cars start suckin off the grid.
It takes about 15 minutes per mile to charge up my Prius, at around 800 watts drawn from the grid. As electric furnaces and heat exchangers become mandated in buildings, that will be a much bigger deal, but honestly; solar panels produce around 10 watts per square foot in daylight, and cost about $3 per square foot, nowadays. Grid reliability would benefit greatly from distributed power production, over centralized mega power plants, but that’s a side benefit. It’s too damed east to charge up cars during the day – the problem will be figuring out who pays the cost, and how.
Today, if you rent your home, installing solar panels is basically giving away money to your landlord, who gets to keep them when you move out. If you work during the day, will your employer be required to install charging stations in the employee parking lot? And solar panels to support those charging stations, to avoid paying high grid energy rates? When someone’s batteries run too low on the road, what kind of roadside assistance will be required, to charge them back up?
It isn’t hard to come up with (arguably even clean) power production, to support electric vehicles, but the logistics of getting those vehicles charged – and who bears the cost burden – remain barriers. Will every new electric car come with a towable 10-foot by 10-foot solar array charging “carport”? Will these things be parked all over the streets of major cities, try to charge up people’s commuter cars in the shade of skyscrapers, while the drivers are inside at work?
It’s hard to imagine the logistics and economic models that convert us from fuels to electric vehicles. Hydrogen-powered cars might work, if technology could produce a safe way to transport hyrogen in a high-density form, and the exhaust from burning hydrogen is mostly water – no carbon. And hydrogen could be produced from water using electricty from, say, solar sources at home, while the sun is shining. If someone managed to run out, fuel could be distributed from tanks at fuel stations and on tow trucks, as it is with carbon-based fuels… But gaseous, low-pressure hydrogen does not offer much energy for the bulk involved – and pressurized hydrogen can be dangerously flammable and explosive. Keeping hydrogen liquid would require refrigeration that dwarfs what is required to preserve COVID vaccines, which has already turned into a massive logistical problem, and spills of liquid hydrogen would be much more dangerous than gasoline.
Chemists are looking for ways to capture hydrogen is stable, denser forms by combining it loosely with other materials and then freeing it from those materials at the time of use, but good practical solutions have not yet been found. Betcha whoever comes up with a good one makes a ton of money off the patent…
Correction: $3 per watt – not per square foot. That equates to about $30 per square foot. The difference is significant, but does not invalidate the point – solar power is getting relatively cheap to produce from even the roof of your house (which is otherwise wasted sunlight). It’s not cheaper than carbon but if grid rates climb precipitously, solar is potentially a way to level the rate curve before it gets too far out of control.
(I really hope that my previous comment comes out of moderation, soon, or this one isn’t going to make much sense to anyone…)
Not to mention the blackouts associated with that. The wind can’t blow strong enough and the sun can’t shine bright enough
Not suggesting that you run your alarm clock on it (though you could, with batteries, given the low power draw of an alarm clock) – but you can generate energy when the sun is out, store it as hydrogen fuel (or batteries, though that’s been a cost barrier), and use it when you need it.
Consider home air conditioning. You need it most when the sun is at its brightest – and the panels themselves offer a shade solution to help keep your home cool, before you ever turn anything on. Air conditioning is a high-energy-use problem that solar can solve inherently, with no need for power storage at all. Solar is not a bad idea; just not the best idea for every situation. Maybe we can’t shut off all of the fuel-based power plants – but maybe we don’t need to run all of them at 100% capacity, all summer, either. The tree-huggers might like to eliminate fossil fuels, but even a small reduction in fossil fuel use makes a significant difference, that is worth pursuing. Cut oil consumption by 40%, like we did last year during the initial COVID lockdowns, and suddenly oil producers are trying to pay people to take their crude oil, so that they don’t have to pay for storage. How cool would it be to have the gas station pay you to fill your tank? (Yeah, don’t get excited – never gonna happen…)
At 10 watts per square foot, a 1000 square foot home (a comparatively small home) with solar panels across the roof, would likely generate 10,000 watts for at least 6-8 hours each day – using sunlight that is essentially otherwise wasted. (Solar panels do not typically require bright sunlight to produce – just daylight – although brighter is better.) At around 10 cents per kilowatt hour, that’s about $7 of power each day, and it costs $30k or so to install – and you can expect it to last 30 years or so before you have to invest enough into maintenance that it’s worthwhile to replace it. That’s the main argument against it – it costs too much. (Although it arguably only costs too much up front. Over 30 years, at an average $7 per day, it actually produces $76,650 in electric value, for about $30k in initial investment.) Traditional power generation is much cheaper, even before you get into energy storage – but if you’re buying a $30,000 electric car, and doing so bumps your electric bill up to $1 per kilowatt hour… Well, that sharp uptick in electric costs make solar look a lot more economical, for the purpose of electric transportation, and people will figure out the math. Yes, electric cars may make electric rates rise, but my point is that locally-generated power – whether from windmills in yards, solar panels on roofs, or generators in basements – will ultimately put a cap on how high electric rates can go before people start avoiding high rates by supplementing their power needs by generating power locally, themselves.
If they wouldn’t have Stolen the money from the Highway Trust Years age and Bought votes wit it they would have the Money. In political terms they will say it was Re Appropriated. Lying Politicians.
Every administration says this. No one does it.
Remember those “shovel ready jobs”?
Perhaps the reason that this is newsworthy, is that taxes are likely to be levied, even if the work is unlikely to take place. Eyes up! Hands on wallets! Don’t let ’em get into your pocket just because you fell out of your seat in that pothole!
Good observation! The problem is that we can’t keep them out of our wallets! They take what they want when they want it. They shut down businesses and imprison the owners who try to open them back up. And have the Sheep wearing masks and liking it! This is a snowball rolling down hill to hell!
“Liking it” might be a bridge too far. If wearing a mask for the ten minutes a day that I’m around other people and not actually eating, makes those people feel safe, or at least makes them not give me a hard time about it; it’s not that great of a sacrifice.
I’d hate to have a public contact job, where I have to wear the thing all day, and also risk exposure to all those people who can’t even be bothered to wear it for ten minutes a day for my safety…
The masks or face covering worn by a majority of the Population aren’t doing a damn thing. Except keeping your mouth shut. Just sit down and shut because a government bureaucrat told you too. The new education system has created a bunch people that can’t think for themselves.
Thin out the dot burocrats
Best suggestion so far. Not very practical, but it does give me warm fuzzies to know I’m not the only one that it has occurred to…
Re-direct some of those mega-millions of “Covid Relief” dollars headed for Pakistan to propagandize them in Critical [Gender] Theory.
If we did that, some snowflake somewhere would demand that we teach them how to be gay, transgender, and gender-neutral.
Let ’em figure that stuff out on their own…
Follow the money: whomever is making campaign contributions or making large donations (bribes) to the nonprofits and politicians writing these laws will get favorable treatment.
Electric isn’t the only “next big thing”.
Fuel cell tech is coming up too.
Sucking hydrogen gas out of old, abandoned oil wells is being pursued as well as changing hydrogen gas to a safer to manage solid.
Hydrogen fuel cells make electricity and they power very high efficiency modern electric motors, lots more efficient than fuel burners.
Back to fixing these rough roads (I drive a no suspension tri-axle dump truck), I want to see everybody pay their fair share including scooters & buses. Maybe tag readers or chipped license plates ?
People would find ways to disable the electronic taxation system – rf shielding on the chip, or fake plates that look real but lack chips…
It will be a mileage tax. It will unfairly tax trucks and people who have to commute to work, but it’s the thing that they reliably can do that collects the money that they want to misappropriate.
30% of electricity comes from coal there isn’t a plan to replace making electricity producing, but there is a plan to cut coal. The batteries in electric vehicles use some high end metals cobalt etc. Nobody has a plan except to extract more taxes and squeeze the turnip.
Convert the trucking industry into rail. Raise taxes on vehicle registration. Put that money into ubiquitous public rail. Problem solved. Once people see the real cost of cars and trucks up front, they’ll be begging to switch to rail, which is cheaper and more efficient. We spend over 380 billion dollars per year on road infrastructure alone. Then, there is the cost of ownership of an automobile as well (maintenance, insurance, pollution, noise, deaths, etc). Does anyone seriously think gas and registration tax covers that?