Trump proposes increasing gasoline tax by 25 cents/gallon

[Cutlass]

Most taxes and fees fall most heavily on the poor, unless they are deliberately designed or offset somehow. That doesn't mean that they aren't the right way to go. Only that there needs to be an offset designed in.

 

[Lexicus]

The point is it costs more to fly at Xmas due to demand, and the price signal from that means people defer less important travel and only do important travel.

Does it really though? And would a road toll have an analogous effect? The only information an increase in the price of subway service where I live conveys is that the people running my city are spineless cowards afraid to tax the rich for public services. A toll for me to bike to work on the roads would convey the same information.

 

[El_Machinae]

Most taxes and fees fall most heavily on the poor, unless they are deliberately designed or offset somehow. That doesn't mean that they aren't the right way to go. Only that there needs to be an offset designed in.

Well, prices fall most heavily on the poor, kinda by definition. I've just seen that the average armchair economist will be able to muss out how peak pricing would be of benefit in reducing congestion and helping 'more efficiently' allocate transportation, etc. Then you just have to watch to notice whether they also mention that "and the poorest people would just shift the time they choose to travel to the work-zone, so that they're traveling at non-peak times".

Anybody already has this freedom, a reasonable number of the rich people I know actually already choose to travel at non-peak times, so it's important to watch the glee in the eyes of your conversation mate when they notice that it's the janitors who have changed their driving habits, and the managers who now get to drive freely at reasonable hours.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

But people driving gasoline-fueled cars don't damage roads. Diesel-fueled 18 wheelers do.

A tax on commerce, who can afford it, is preferable to a tax on the smallfolk.

I want to agree that this is a good point. 18-wheelers do disproportionate damage. Electric cars skirt the tax. Taxing the gasoline isn't the perfect solution. But I think it really does need to be in the toolkit.

Disproportionate is an epic understatement.

https://streets.mn/2016/07/07/chart-of-the-day-vehicle-weight-vs-road-damage-levels/

 

[El_Machinae]

Liked post. Do we have a more authoritative source for sharing? I wanna.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

I just googled how much damage do tractor trailers do relative to cars and there was lots of stuff at the top, I just went with the one with an infographic.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Finding 4.
An increase in axle weight generally causes a more than proportional increase in pavement damage. The relationship appears to approximate an exponential function, and various studies have assumed the power of the exponent to be about 4 as a rule. Estimates of the exponent’s power vary substantially, however.
https://ctr.utexas.edu/wp-content/uploads/pubs/2122_1.pdf

So the damage scales somewhere between the 2nd and 4th power of the axle weight.

 

[El_Machinae]

Very good, yes, starting at about page ten, that report is very useful. Thanks. I can use it to forward to people elsewhere.

A Rav 4 is about 2 gallons per 100 miles (highway), trucks are what? 16 gallons per 100 miles?

There's no way that a gasoline tax would properly catch that. You'd need a separate licensing system, where the truck buys tags that allows them onto certain roads. Very tough to do those tags, since their cost would have to be proportionate to how much time they spent in a district.

 

[Cutlass]

Of course, every physical item a poor person buys travels by truck to get to them. So that's a tax on them as well.

 

[El_Machinae]

As you say, tax incidence. Some people say "the customer pays all taxes", which is also true. Well, true-ish. I didn't point out that tax incidence would cause people's wages to go up to compensate for their need to drive to their work. I wasn't sure the discussion could handle it.

Again, it's better to have costs priced in, by nearly all theory. If your people are poor, give them money. Everything else is a lower-utility political compromise.

 

[civvver]

Very good, yes, starting at about page ten, that report is very useful. Thanks. I can use it to forward to people elsewhere.

A Rav 4 is about 2 gallons per 100 miles (highway), trucks are what? 16 gallons per 100 miles?

There's no way that a gasoline tax would properly catch that. You'd need a separate licensing system, where the truck buys tags that allows them onto certain roads. Very tough to do those tags, since their cost would have to be proportionate to how much time they spent in a district.

Rav 4 isn't close to that, it's like 30 mpg highway or 3.3 gallons per 100.

 

[El_Machinae]

Sure, but the difference in damage is two orders of magnitude

 

[Farm Boy]

And difference in things transported even more? Barges do burn a lot of fuel per mile traveled, and they take all this lock and dam stuff...

 

[Cutlass]

And difference in things transported even more? Barges do burn a lot of fuel per mile traveled, and they take all this lock and dam stuff...

Barges are an order of magnitude at least less costly than road travel.

 

[El_Machinae]

And difference in things transported even more? Barges do burn a lot of fuel per mile traveled, and they take all this lock and dam stuff...

Well, I was talking about roads. We need a carbon tax, and this is completely independent of the need to pay for roads. And we need one really badly, there are currently infrastructure loans being taken out that assume away an increase in the pricing of carbon.

Locks strike me as a place where actual tolling can take place rather easily. It's even a question whether governments would want to run them on a profitable basis. As I said, I prefer income taxes on profits and not consumption taxes, but it's an awfully low-hanging fruit. It more depends on whether you're a transit point on a thoroughfare or a destination/exit point for goods and services. If the first, you'd want to profit from your lock. If the second, maybe not.

 

[Farm Boy]

I was unclear. Obviously semis wear the road a lot harder per pass than does a yuppie in a prius. But the 18 wheeler is also probably being a lot more productive in that it is probably carrying a lot more of something a lot more useful, even to the yuppie. I was wondering at the difference in orders of magnitude between wear and also in usefulness. Like barges, which burn an awful lot of fuel, but move so much stuff that they're terribly efficient. Even if there's some pretty heavy duty infrastructure to put in place to make them work.

 

[Zelig]

"Productive" is probably hard to measure well in that context. Like how does the productivity of soccer mom driving her kids to soccer in a Prius compare to the productivity of a semi full of soccer equipment for the local soccer store?

 

[Farm Boy]

Good question. But we can start with the baseline of soccer mom > yuppie as simple definition because.

You could also go with things like food. Or if you want to be weird, an Amazon truck moving things in bulk to be ferretted around by smaller trucks to avoid inflicting the presence and mobility of the yuppie upon the greater community.