Road Usage Tax - WA State

[soulreapersteve]

Earlier this summer, I recall reading about this being tested in some parts of Oregon. Looks like the idea is being pitched here in WA state, even though a couple of years away.

All I can say is, for people who love driving, this is horrible.

Well fellow Washingtonians, comments?

http://www.king5.com/story/news/loca...sion/77013926/

[Djratrap]

Let's punish those who have to drive considerable distances to work as well as punish those commuters who can't use the bus. Good one WA state...

[15limited]

Seems to me like there would be way too many factors to account for to make this even remotely fair for in or out of state drivers. Obviously revune for the state is the main goal, sounds like commuters will pick up the slack on this one.

15' BRZ Limited 6MT Ice Silver Metalic

[Freeman]

Interesting. Wonder how this would effect me... The FRS sits in the garage 99% of the time and I drive the company car.

[ipsum]

They discussed the possible options for implementing this today on the radio. No perfect solution so far:
- odometer readouts when renewing registration (issue for those who drive outside the state often)
- GPS tracker installed in a car to count miles travelled within WA (obvious privacy concerns here)
- smartphone app that i used for tracking location - no clear details here, but of course there are concerns of people hacking the app/smartphone to dodge paying the road tax

They said pay-by-mile is inevitable as the state doesn't collect enough money from the gas tax - the cars are getting more efficient every year. Likely the solution will be a combination of the above + an option to buy "unlimited miles" pass for a rather high flat rate.

Not very exciting news.

[Freeman]

Yeah whatever happened to the tax revenue from the legal pot sales? I'm 20 mins from Idaho. Scary thought that moving to another state is a valid option

[Toyarzee]

With such a high tax rate on gas in many states, I'm largely curious how the greater fuel efficiency argument has actually cut into their bottom line. I call total BS... when states want to revise their operating contributions from citizens, I'm surprised they have to lean that much harder to satisfy spending needs when surely there are a great number of other unrelated and costly policies that could be revised.

Gl over there guys... and hope any future experiments tank hard

[ipsum]

What cracked me up was the fact that the "committee" discussing the pay-per-mile options is not comprised of elected officials. It's just random dudes.

Oh, and tentative price per mile is 2.5 cents. So, $250 for 10,000 miles.
At least they'd drop the 44 cent-per-gallon gas tax, which is the highest in the US already (but apparently not enough).

The host on the radio show said that before we start increasing the gas taxes and implementing pay-per-mile, how about we make the spending more efficient? There was a report recently that thrashed the WSDOT spending when building roads... and tunnels, of course, haha.

[gtslow]

I suspect this would be the easiest target in history for an Eyman initiative.

[Bakchoii]

Well, that means I'm not staying in Washington for long.

[Akari]

Honestly, I don't have a huge issue with it. The fact is our roads overall need attention, and as a car enthusiast I would love to see some of them better maintained. I know we all hate forking out additional money, but this isn't a problem that gets solved without it.

[mav1178]

Let's ask the hypothetical question:

If majority of state-level gas taxes are used to maintain state highways, what do you do about electric vehicles?

Same on a national level.

We can ignore hybrids for sake of argument.

As much as this idea sounds stupid, keep in mind this is the result of kicking the can down the road for decades...

-alex

[mav1178]

Originally Posted by Toyarzee

Gl over there guys... and hope any future experiments tank hard

Let's just keep pushing our problems down the road so the next generation can fix it, right?

[Toyarzee]

A valid point.

Maybe since people were willing to pay large dealer markups for hybrids and electric vehicles when they first started gaining traction, I suspect it wouldn't be that out of line to include an electric vehicle road usage tax on the purchase price instead?... either that or enforce a toll on certain public roads or something... just too many moving parts for an actual road usage tax to be effectively useful and fair. My next question leads to whether or not these hypothetical funds generated would actually be entirely used to pay for road upkeep and construction without any improper spending.

This is all without considering the fact that the tax on gas has increased at a greater rate than the adoption of electric and hybrid vehicles, displacing that supposed tax deficiency on all the other regular vehicles; also keep in mind there are other supplemental taxes in place such as the "gas guzzler" excise tax on low mpg vehicles.