I have a suggestion to make sure that electric vehicles contribute to the upkeep of the roadway system.
re: Electric cars, a proposed use tax for upkeep of roads.
The reason for this tax is to fund the upkeep and to reimburse the government for the usage of the roadways. Conventional gasoline-powered vehicles pay for the roads with gasoline taxes, both state and federal. The money is collected at the pump when gasoline is purchased. Since electric cars do not use gasoline, but still use the same roadways, they should be taxed on their projected annual usage of the roadways. A guess-timate of this usage is approximately 12,500 miles per year. Some folks drive more, some less, but an average would be in that ballpark. A calculation of the tax would assume that gasoline-powered cars get 15 miles per gallon, and thus pay tax of $.35 per 15 miles. To put all the figures into the equation:
(12500/15) X .35 = $250.00
This tax could be flat-rated, or, to ensure fairness, send the electric vehicles to the MARTA station annually to check the actual mileage, and calculate the tax. This method would be preferable, since actual usage would be taxed instead of guessed. To ensure that the mileage is accurate, a tamper-proof seal could be dated and placed on the odometer of the electric vehicle. An added advantage to this method is that the vehicles could be monitored for their required safety equipment. The problem of not having a working odometer could be solved by simply using the equation above to tax the vehicle, adding a stiff penalty to encourage compliance and keeping the vehicle in good repair. (To ensure that the owner/operator of the vehicle doesn't cheat or disconnect the odometer)
I came back to read this a few days later, and I realized that cars these days have onboard computers. The mileage could be downloaded from the computer. That would be much more accurate than the odometer readings, which have been known in the past to have been tampered with.
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