As others have mentioned, taxing efficient cars doesn't seem to make much sense. Maybe tax actual miles traveled instead? That would solve the problem of increasing efficiency and also decrease the value of loitering and cruising in-between pick-ups.
I'm real curious as to how taxing miles travelled would work, especially if you travel between states. Would you have to keep track of how many miles you drove in State A and State B, and how would you pay State B if you lived in State A? Since we'd need to replace the federal fuel tax as well, would the federal government require states to hold yearly odometer inspections, or would you have to fill out a form on your yearly taxes stating how far you drove? I supposed that these questions could be solved by utilizing GPS, but I'm not sure I like the idea of the government tracking the movements of my vehicle.
In Norway the use of GPS has been discussed for a few years, and as far I understand the newest solutions being discussed have been approved by the data privacy watchdog, which generally tends to be very negative to government surveillance.
There are many options there, at the cost of making audits/complaints harder, such as e.g. only keeping GPS traces for a very short time (or not at all), and gradually overwrite more and more details, such as coordinates, reducing time precision, and finally consolidate to amounts owed. Those settings could be left under the control of the car owner as well, or let you dump a signed record of the precise data if you as the owner suspect inaccuracies and want to collect evidence, and then allow you to wipe the details from the device and only leave aggregate numbers.
The point is if the device is tamper-proof enough, you don't need it to record your movements, you just need it to monitor your movements and location with sufficient precision to decide what amounts should be added to running totals of tax.
Of course there is a risk some governments will decide they'd really like more detailed records.
There are experiments with this sort of system in my state in the US. In our case, the car owner signs up with a private firm that does the data collection and only reports the total distance driven to the government, not the actual locations.
I would assume that there is some law which requires the detailed data to be deleted, but I'm not sure about that.
I'm real curious as to how taxing miles travelled would work, especially if you travel between states.
Trucks have been doing it for years with transponders in the cabs. That's how when a semi fills up with fuel in one state and ends its trip in another state the state in between still gets some fuel tax to pay for road maintenance.
It would make sense to use a differentiated sales tax for car for hire services. That'd be proportional with usage. It would also tax people who don't have a car and externalize car taxes and maintainance costs by using these services. EU countries already do ths for things like food, books, accomodation and restaurant services. Usually the sales tax is smaller for these sectors.
If you want usage fees to be proportionate, I think you'd need to tax according to the maintenance costs caused by the vehicle per mile (eighteen wheelers cause vastly more road wear than cars). That's really all you need, except perhaps for some fixed cost per mile for the size of the vehicle, to tax congestion.
Yes, I mentioned that is already beginning to happen.
> But given CA's environmental goals, this would be counterproductive.
That is irrelevant, we are reaching a point where taxation on road miles driven vs. fueled used becomes unavoidable. What will wind up happening is that efficient and clean energy vehicles will still need to be taxed to account for usage, while less efficient vehicles will be taxed even more (to discourage use).
Why should less efficient vehicles be taxed more? If they are already paying more for fuel, doesn’t that already “tax” them more? It seems like such a tax is regressive — rich people can buy new efficient cars more easily than poor people.
> Why should less efficient vehicles be taxed more?
Internalizing the environmental externalities of operating them.
> If they are already paying more for fuel, doesn’t that already “tax” them more?
Fuel taxes are a mechanism for the additional (that is, beyond road usage, in the context of the grandparent post) taxes on inefficient vehicles.
> It seems like such a tax is regressive — rich people can buy new efficient cars more easily than poor people.
That's actually a reason you might want a method other than exclusively fuel taxes to implement the additional taxation (which may be via, say, a means tested tax subsidy for purchase of more efficient cars, rather than directly another extra tax on inefficient ones), because fuel taxes are operations taxes but don't directly effect purchases (they may be taken into account, but the poor who feel they need a car will often buy what they can afford up front even if it is not fully rational because real people tend to fall short of rationality in some predictable ways, and discounting deferred costs is a big one.)
> Why should less efficient vehicles be taxed more?
Taxation serves two purposes: (a) to fund roads, and (b) to discourage society damaging behavior. For (a), we need to tax all vehicles, for (b), we need to tax some vehicles more than others.
> It seems like such a tax is regressive — rich people can buy new efficient cars more easily than poor people.
True. Perhaps the efficiency tax can be built into the initial new car purchase while the use tax is ongoing (those old cars will eventually fall apart or fail an emissions test anyways and be taken off the road). Anyways, these things can be worked out.
Many countries (Norway would be an example) have special taxes on cars that takes into account a variety of metrics around pollution, weight and engine capacity, as well as price. Overall car taxes in Norway are among the highest in the world, to the extent that it massively skews which car models people buy.
Here's the Norwegian tax authorities form for calculating taxes. While not all the descriptive text is available in English it seems most of the form is:
The problem is that Uber/Lyft drivers "cruise" when the demand is slack rather than park.
So, for certain areas and times (generally about a hour before when that area is about to go from slack to busy), your street becomes a never-ending stream of ridesharing cars--generally doing stupid traffic maneuvers when they finally get summoned.
> The problem is that Uber/Lyft drivers "cruise" when the demand is slack rather than park
Isn't the whole point that the apps limit cruising time? I recall a study that claimdd the average traditional taxi cruises for half an hour on average between each trip. Are there plans to tax traditional cabs by an amount commensurate with their cruising time? If not, this legislation seems more like protectionism for traditional cabs.
> Are there plans to tax traditional cabs by an amount commensurate with their cruising time?
Traditional taxis already pay a steep annual franchise fee to the city (even after it was cut down on recent years, probably in part because less-taxed rideshares reduced the level of franchise fee that was supportable).
Franchise fees also benefits the taxi companies. It constrains the supply to taxis, thus shielding the taxi companies from potential competition. They're paying for protection from competition.
> Franchise fees also benefits the taxi companies.
In the presence of a substitute service not subject to them, they do not.
Actually, since there seems to be both a non-automatic approval process and a franchise fee, they don't really even without such competition; the approval process shields them from competition, the franchise fee is a pure cost. (Of course, there is a linkage between the two, but as long as the process is in place, incumbent taxi firms benefit from minimizing the fee.)
