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horsawlarway
recursive
I read somewhere that road damage caused by vehicles is not linear with weight. Heavy vehicles do much more damage. I can't cite a source, but I recall an exponent between 3 and 4 on the leading term. With that in mind, everything but heavy freight is basically negligible. And then it's generally for businesses where privacy isn't so much of an issue.
adrianN
Wikipedia says damage is proportional to axle weight to the 4th power: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_weight#cite_ref-13
chrismorgan
I remember my dad telling me that when I was in my late teens. That it’s the fourth power startled me.
To give an idea of what this means:
For a 50 tonne semi-trailer with five axles, (⁵⁰⁄₅)⁴ = 10,000 units of damage.
2 tonne vehicle with two axles, 1 unit of damage.
That one truck, only 25 times as heavy as a pretty heavy car, is doing 10,000 times as much damage to the road.
Thus indeed if you have basically any heavy freight at all on a road, the rest is negligible.
JohnJamesRambo
That is insane. I will remember this for life now.
cs02rm0
Road damage isn't the only issue with weight though.
There's safety, exhaust emissions, tyre and brake particles, noise, etc. I'm sure some of them don't have a linear relationship either.
One of the biggest upsides to taxing vehicle weight could be to counter purchasing decisions that have shifted to larger vehicles that no longer comfortably fit in parking spaces but ride better over ridiculous speed bumps and give drivers literally the opportunity to look down on others.
Taxing vehicle weight also doesn't have the privacy implications that taxing miles driven beyond fuel consumption does. It's always struck me as one of the more sensible aspects to tax.
Add lightness, as I believe Colin Chapman put it.
jb775
This entire thread is flawed in two fundamental ways:
1) The primary concern here is per capita road damage. If that's agreed, why is the conversation not about improving the resiliency of roads?
2) Why would the adoption of new technology automatically subject you to draconian taxes that have nothing to do with that new technology? I understand infrastructure needs to be paid for, but this is simply a cash-grab by politicians. If people started jogging to destinations rather than use cars, would it be acceptable for the government to charge a "jogging transportation tax"?
zozbot234
This is true, but some portion of road maintenance costs is independent from vehicle-caused wear-and-tear on the actual road surface. You would want this portion to be paid also by standard, non-commercial vehicles since these users are clearly receiving some value from the existence of a well-maintained road.
adrianN
Everybody is receiving benefits from well maintained roads, just like everyone is receiving benefits from schools. Why special taxes for users unless you want to discourage use? Just pay for maintenance from the general budget.
SECProto
> This is true, but some portion of road maintenance costs is independent from vehicle-caused wear-and-tear on the actual road surface.
Possible formula to account for all the variables:
annual tax = F * (A + [BC{D^E} ] )
A = constant for non-loading based degradation (frost heave, slope maintenance). Base tax
B = constant to scale the following terms
C = distance driven in km
D = axial weight
E = exponent to account for non-linear relationship of axial weight to road degradation
F = adjustment for usage (could adjust for anything - user type, income class, vehicle class, etc etc)
goatinaboat
This is true, but some portion of road maintenance costs is independent from vehicle-caused wear-and-tear on the actual road surface.
A lot it is caused (around here anyway) by water permeating and expanding as it freezes.
tgb
A lot of road damage in some parts of the world is caused by nature itself, though. Even roads without any freight traffic get frost heaves.
chrismorgan
But for Australia specifically (this article being about Australia), frost damage to roads is typically either non-existent or negligible. There aren’t many roads that are exposed to substantially freezing conditions often.
sagarm
Mountain highways I've traveled have substantially more damaged right lanes from all the semis.
angry_octet
I object to this being framed in terms of vehicle mass, because what counts most is mass/area = ground pressure. Many big fat tires distribute the weight.
It is also much more relevant in places with sub-zero nights, i.e. a thaw/frost cycle. In relatively warm places like Australia this effect does not occur. Roads are much cheaper per km than in places with snow/ice, even with heavy vehicles.
cellularmitosis
Is it known if this is purely a weight issue, or does weight distribution make a difference? If a large truck were equipped with twice as many tires at half the PSI, what difference would that make?
I’ve seen weight limit signs on certain roads, I wonder if instead they should be PSI limits?
berkes
I'd imagine a 20 tire truck of 1tonne roughly equals 5 4-tire cars of 200kg.
So that would mean the first still has to pay 5x the tax of the latter.
AnthonyMouse
You can also sidestep the privacy issue there, because large electric vehicles are likely to need special chargers. (How many kW do you need to charge a 1MWh battery in a reasonable amount of time?) And then you can levy road tax on large trucks per kWh at the charging point in the traditional way without even having to track everywhere they go.
sokoloff
How much privacy concern is there to have your odometer reading recorded annually in places that already do safety inspections? I mean, I've driven an average of 3400 miles per year on my car. Violate my privacy as much as you like with that data.
fuoqi
This was one of the argued motivation for introducing the Platon system in Russia in addition to the fuel tax. It's an electronic toll system mandatory for trucks over 12 tons and costs every such truck ~5 USD cents per traveled km. Unfortunately it does not take into account current mass of a truck (probably because it's much harder to control and easier to cheat). Part of the proceedings goes to a federal fund for road maintenance, another one to the company (partially owned by an oligarch close to Putin) which has developed the system and currently maintenance it. This concession will work until 2027.
lmilcin
I think you misunderstand what the road tax (or any other tax) is for.
There are three main reasons for a tax to exist:
1. To bring revenue
2. To create incentive
3. Social justice (or illusion of it)
Revenue from a specific tax is almost never used for a specific purpose. All revenue goes into a large bin from which the government takes to finance everything.
Revenue from fuel/road tax is not used to finance building roads. Infrastructure is financed from budget or by private companies who then can impose tolls on road users.
Fuel tax (besides obvious goal of creating revenue) is there to create incentive to drive less and to drive more efficiently (using less fuel). This is not to preserve roads but rather to preserve capacity and environment.
I can only assume that tax on electric vehicles is as a response to increasing use of EVs. Initially, EVs were exempted from taxes to create incentive to use them more. Now that it is pretty clear EVs took off and will be widespread no matter what, some countries start to remove those exemptions to ensure continuing revenue stream.
AlotOfReading
I'm not sure how it works in your country, but in the US fuel taxes don't go to the general pot, they end up in a specific fund called the Highway Trust Fund that's specifically earmarked for transportation infrastructure and maintenance.
jholman
Even if it does, the amount of money allocated from the general fund toward transportation maintenance is surely lower than it would be if those fuel taxes were not there.
Unless an earmark pays 100% of the costs of something, the earmark is totally an illusion. Even if it does pay 100% of the costs, it is often mostly an illusion.
In practice, most earmarks fall into the former category, and thus are entirely about manipulating the public. Not that I'm necessarily objecting to manipulating the public.
===
worked example:
If fuel taxes bring in $100, which is spent on road maintenance, and then topped up by $40 of money from general revenue, that implies that the government thinks that $140 is the point at which marginal benefit drops below marginal cost. In other words, if there was no fuel tax, they'd probably still try to spend $140, or thereabouts. The earmark is entirely illusory.
If fuel taxes bring in $100, which is spent on road maintenance, and is not topped up, then that implies that the government thinks that the point at which marginal benefit drops below marginal cost is some number below $100. If there was no fuel tax, their spending on road maintenance would go down. Go down to what? Let us suppose that it would go down to $60. Then the fuel tax earmark is 40% reality, 60% illusion.
kelnos
Per the article, in Australia the fuel excise does not go toward road maintenance, but instead goes into the general fund.
notatoad
This is true, but the highway trust fund is not funded exclusively by fuel taxes, it's funded from the general fund
https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/what-highway-t...
SEJeff
And in the US, the overwhelming majority of road damage is done by long haul freight semi trucks, not electric or ICE cars.
lotsofpulp
I don’t see what difference it makes if certain taxes are earmarked for certain expenses. Any shortfall is made up by increasing taxes and/or increasing taxpayer debt, any surplus will result in less assistance from other taxes or get directed elsewhere.
conanbatt
Budgeting is often quite fungible and you can replace where to spend new money by replacing old money.
I would say that 60% of taxes might be raised for health and education this way.
chii
and the article is specifically talking about australia, which doesn't have specific tax buckets for a purpose.
sagarm
Gas taxes pay less than half of the costs of maintaining roads.
askvictor
> Initially, EVs were exempted from taxes to create incentive to use them more. Now that it is pretty clear EVs took off and will be widespread no matter what, some countries start to remove those exemptions to ensure continuing revenue stream.
I suspect that EVs weren't exempted by design, but just slipped through the gap. Australian road tax is applied to petrol/gasoline/diesel. The number of EVs hasn't warranted changing this formula (the alternative being a tax on kms traveled). In Australia, EVs still haven't taken off (as there haven't been any incentives to buy them; in fact as they tend to be expensive, they often fall under the luxury car category and get taxed even more), so there are still very, very few on the road. It's very slowly changing, and this change is definitely looking into the next decade more that the next year, but still strikes me as odd timing - just when momentum is building to EVs, this will dull that momentum (at least without an incentive to _purchase_ an EV.
ip26
One of the simplest arguments against it to me is basically to look at the landscape. For example, in the US, ballpark 1% of cars are electric. Meanwhile, the flat federal fuel tax is not indexed to inflation & hasn't been increased in almost thirty years. Yet everyone is in this panic about how EVs are going to cause a huge revenue shortfall!? I'm not opposed to EVs paying their share, but something is rotten in Denmark.
Anyway, shifting fuel taxes onto tires might make sense. All cars use tires, no matter the fuel, it requires no odometer reading, and a tire has a designed application & load range which ought to translate reasonably well to anticipated road wear.
riversflow
2 things. First, pretty sure it’s been discussed here previously(edit: and is down thread), but I believe the wear on the road is like the 4th power of the weight.[1] here’s a chart describing it. with that considered, I don’t think it makes sense to even really charge passenger vehicles in the US, when we have huge fleets of 80k pound big rigs on the road(and the limit is uncapped with overweight permits)—charge them.
Second, the problem with tires is that depending on what and where you drive you’ll use them considerably faster. I live a few miles down a very windy chip-sealed[2] road, that I have to drive down any time I go anywhere. As a result(best I can tell) my tires tend to go bald 10k-20k miles early. Chip seal is used because it is cheap, seems regressive that I’d be taxed at a higher rate for a poorer road.
[1] https://streets.mn/2016/07/07/chart-of-the-day-vehicle-weigh...
dalbasal
Who says you should tax directly based on wear anyway? The bigger scarcity is often traffic in any case. Some roads have higher costs than others. etc.
Maybe we want to lower transport costs by charging trucks less. Maybe we want to encourage electric car viability by charging them less. I mean, tax policies have outcomes. Doesn't it make sense to target outcomes we want?
Obviously the road needs to be paid for and fuel taxes won't work if people don't buy fuel. That said, I think it's inevitable that whatever comes next is a policy... encourage some stuff, discourage other stuff, benefit certain people/sectors and such. ATM, encouraging electric vehicle adoption with a fuel tax exemption doesn't seem crazy.
It does create a regressive dynamic, where new electrics are subsidized by legacy ICE. By the time that represents more than a rounding error the fuel tax deficit will be big enough that the tax system will be changing anyway.
A better approach is probably a time-of-purchase tax. =
undefined
mikeklaas
Good thought, but that might incentivize not replacing worn tires
reitzensteinm
This is exactly right. You're in a sense taxing safety!
ip26
Yeah, thinking more you are right. The tax would be quite substantial too, and probably drive a large black market.
rconti
yeah, once we get to 25% adoption (or something) we can talk about how badly EVs are hurting fuel tax revenue. in the meantime, jack up the fuel tax in a planned, regular way, and let the market decide :)
jejones3141
Jack up tax and let the market decide? Those seem inconsistent.
URSpider94
That might be rational, but it’s highly unpopular with the 99% of people who don’t drive electric cars. This is virtue signaling,
markdown
If you make it too expensive to change tires, people will drive for much longer with worn out tires, risking lives.
undefined
an_opabinia
> For electric, it was worse - because they do tend to be more expensive to purchase up front, and they paid no fuel tax at all
California was cutting $10,000 checks to rich people buying $80,000 sports cars called Teslas. You could be a solo driver in an HOV lane for a long period of time, in a part of the world where rich people's negative experience with the outside world is disproportionately traffic.
For every two Teslas worth of subsidies, for rich people who might actually drive very little, you could buy a poor person who actually needs a car a whole Prius.
> Encourage drivers to move to lighter vehicles which cause less wear and tear on the road
As other people said everyone benefits from roads. Cyclists still need food delivered to grocery stations in trucks. Parents still have their kids driven around in busses. Everyone needs construction vehicles to build more housing.
The vast majority of the value of roads is realized by commuters. It's not even just the long-ass trip some sucker makes commuting from his low cost community in the boonies. There are a dozen different trucks that need to go that same trip to wildly inefficiently provide him with services.
The most logical thing to do would be to tax surburban and rural residents at a state level, and sending that money back to cities. That lifestyle is so preposterously inefficient as an alternative to paying a landlord absolutely more but relatively less to live in a city. Suburban and rural dwellers just externalize their costs to the city people collecting their garbage, running their government, banks and hospitals, teaching their kids, training their police, firefighters, running their courtrooms, etc. - stuff they imagine is in "their" communities but is essentially welfare from vastly richer cities.
Thlom
I just want to chime in to say that it's true everyone benefits from roads, but not everyone benefits from ever wider roads and huge traffic machines. Delivery trucks and ambulances and what have you do not need 8 lanes and clover junctions. Those things are built to accommodate suburban commuters.
kortilla
Sounds like the logical thing to do is to heavily tax employers that place offices in cities and force people to commute to the same place as everyone else where there isn’t adequate housing.
Additionally, heavy taxes should be levied on the city dwellers that devastate nearby communities to externalize their water supplies, their power generation, their food growth, etc.
I think you’ll pretty quickly find that you can make whatever lame arguments you want how people should and shouldn’t live. Just tax the specific negative externality you want to reduce and move on. Don’t sit there and moralize about other lifestyles.
davidivadavid
As a European, 13.1 l/100 km seems... insane. What's happening here?
ElKrist
I've lived both in France and Australia.
Australians love 4 wheels drive and bigger cars. In some cases it's justified for obvious reasons: rough environments with less infrastructure (bush, outback..). In other cases it is for softer reasons: a big camping culture, having a big car being a social status, towing your boat/jet ski etc.
Also a few other points to consider:
_ Australia enjoyed economic growth for a long time and Australians are rich.
_ Fuel is cheap. According to www.globalpetrolprices.com right now a liter of gasoline is 0.74 euros compared to 1.33 for France
_ The road infrastructure is more favourable for big cars than in Europe (big/plenty parking spots in most towns in Australia).
chrismorgan
It’s funny: as an Australian that has visited the USA a couple of times (and never been to Europe), I’d repeat half of your points but for America rather than Australia. Some Australians certainly have large vehicles without good cause, but that number is nowhere near as big as in America. (Notwithstanding this, my Dad and I have discussed the concept of a ban or extreme tax on owning big vehicles unless you can justify why you need them (e.g. tradie or large family), with country dwellers immediately exempt for convenience.) And fuel is way cheaper in the USA than in Australia.
oblio
> towing your boat/jet ski etc.
A 180-200 BHP sedan can tow a trailer quite easily. You don't need a big SUV for that.
Someone
13.1 includes buses and trucks. Actual for passenger vehicles is 10.6.
https://www.bitre.gov.au/sites/default/files/is_091.pdf:
“The average rate of fuel consumption across all Australian vehicles in 2016 was 13.1 l/100km. However, this includes buses and trucks which are overwhelmingly used for business purposes. Given that this study is focused on the vehicle costs of Australian households (and not businesses), Figure 1 presents the average rate of fuel consumption for the three types of vehicles which have significant private use, namely passenger vehicles, motorcycles and light commercial vehicles. Motorcycles are relatively fuel efficient using 5.6 litres of fuel per 100 km travelled in 2016, compared to 10.6 l/100km for passenger vehicles and 12.0 l/100 km for light commercial vehicles.”
benhurmarcel
That's still surprisingly high.
chrismorgan
It seems insane to me as well. My 2010 Mazda 3, used almost entirely on country driving with an average speed of 81km/h since I got it, sits at an average of 5.2L/100km. I recall figures from a couple of family members with similar or slightly larger cars on mostly Melbourne suburban driving, and they’re something like 8–9L/100km. My parents’ Nissan Elgrand (2007 I think?) hit something like 13–15L/100km before it got switched to LPG, if I recall correctly, and it was acknowledged to be a huge fuel guzzler (so they got rid of it once enough of their children had left home that they didn’t need it), far more than the smaller-and-lighter-but-same-seat-count ’86 Tarago had been.
CountHackulus
Just to add another data point, I had a 2005 Mazda 6 V6 Wagon and I tracked the fuel usage for an entire year. Ended up a 10.2L/100km. Something I found was horrendous compared to my friends' Corollas and Civics.
sjwright
Back in 2010 both me and my parents owned Mazda 3 (model year 2009) cars. They live in the suburbs with no traffic lights for a kilometre in every direction. I lived in an inner city (CBD fringe) apartment. Their car consistently reported 7.1 L/100km average whereas mine consistently reported 12.5 L/100km average. Both would get the same ~6.5 on highway driving.
Point is, road conditions and driving style affect fuel economy far more than the marginal difference between vehicles of a similar size class.
rbg246
Can confirm I do 8-9l per 100km in Melbourne with my Toyota Corolla.
But when Im in traffic in the morning the number of 'consumer' (non work purpose) SUV / 4WDs is fairly significant and they would all be doing at least the average.
chrismorgan
(It occurs to me now, hours later, that I completely forgot to mention that my Mazda 3 is a diesel.)
tiew9Vii
Holden/Fords used to manufacture locally. There’s a bunch of not very economical V8’s driving around as similar performant more economical European cars got a 30% luxury car tax to give AU manufacturing incentives.
Now Holden/Ford have shut down here everyone seems to drive a Toyota Hilux / Landcruiser. Tradies get tax benefits buying an expensive Hilux, can use it as a family car as they have dual cab and can take it in the bush doing 4x4. Landcruiser are popular with those who drive in the outback due to being suited to that terrain.
As a lot of cars on the road are Hilux utes the average driver wants a similar sized SUV “as they are safer”
You also have Australia’s lack of commitment to emission policies, manufacturers use Australia to offload cars that don’t meet emission standards elsewhere in the world.
zizee
This is because it is not correct. Australians on average do drive bigger cars than in europe, but the average petrol consumption of passenger vehicles is 10.8 l/100km.
https://www.budgetdirect.com.au/car-insurance/research/avera...
pmontra
The last time I was in Australia I rented a Toyota Landcruiser and went from Cairns to Cape York and back. Probably all the cars on that road did 13 l / 100 km or worse. Then I rented a small Kia from Sydney to Bathurst. Maybe I refueled only before returning the car in Sydney.
alkonaut
Has to be including heavy vehicles?
Australians still by V8’s but not that many of them can be...
dmurray
It is including heavy vehicles, but also motorcycles. The average for "passenger vehicles" is still about 10.5 l/km. Just bigger cars I think.
https://www.budgetdirect.com.au/car-insurance/research/avera...
BlueTemplar
I suppose just larger cars coming from larger roads and smaller fuel tax ?
IronRanger
The solution is to tax vehicles by weight, and time and location of use.
Melbourne, the State Capital of Victoria, has a big problem with congestion at peak hours.
If road use charging like in Singapore or London was introduced, it would shift usage to non-peak hours, and raise sufficient revenue to offset fuel excise.
But that's politically difficult - whereas applying a tax to EVs, which currently very few people use, is much easier.
AmericanChopper
Singapore isn’t comparable to this situation at all. To simply purchase a car in Singapore you need to purchase something called a certificate of entitlement, which entitles you to own a car for 10 years. They’re sold by tender, with different tenders for different types of cars. But you’re looking at about $30k USD just to buy the right to then buy a car. Singapore is also a country where essentially the entire country is covered by mass transit.
ungamedplayer
That.. and a person can walk across it in a day. You cant walk across brisbane or many of the capitals in Australia in a day.
kanox
> Right now, EVs are absolutely creating an regressive tax situation with regards to fuel. Those who can afford to buy newer, efficient cars can usually save money on tax over those who can't. For electric, it was worse - because they do tend to be more expensive to purchase up front, and they paid no fuel tax at all.
Encouraging the adoption of cleaner but more expensive technology is always going to be regressive, no way around this.
A lot of environmental regulation has strong regressive effects, it hits coal miners much harder than people sipping 10$ coffee on their macbook.
kilotaras
I'm of mind that all government "monetary disincentives", e.g. fines, sin taxes, pollution taxes should go into fee and dividend scheme. Solves both moral hazard (we want more fines/driving because we need revenue) and regressive nature of those.
Gibbon1
I thought of that for a long time. Finally decided that fines should be handed over the Social Security Admin and booked against the offenders account.
bigbubba
Taxing milage directly seems to have worse distribution properties than taxing gas. Here is what I mean:
Suppose I am driving from New York to Alaska; I fill up my car with gas then drive into Ontario. I have now paid New York a gas tax but I'm driving on Ontario roads; Ontario gets paid nothing for this wear and tear.. until I run out of gas inside Ontario. Then Ontario gets their cut. This continues all the way until I reach Alaska. The money isn't distributed perfectly, but it is distributed.
Now imagine I am instead taxed by the mile. If the car is registered in New York, does New York get all the milage tax? Do they give any of that to Ontario when I tell them I was in Ontario? Probably not, and it would require a lot of book keeping for me to keep track of all the places I've been. Does Ontario instead check my milage at the borders and charge me an exit fee? That seems impractical and potentially problematic. Is some sort of vehicle tracking system used to fairly distribute the money wherever I drove? Such mass surveillance is obviously problematic.
I don't know what the answer is, except for imposing a tax anywhere I purchase gas (or electricity.) That's the least bad solution I can think of.
stouset
Taxing mileage (and gas) also has the unfortunate property of being generally regressive. Roads benefit us all, but those who drive the furthest are often the poorest who live far from city centers.
In my (admittedly uneducated) opinion, road taxes should be overwhelmingly be paid by commercial vehicles since they contribute much more to road damage, their costs will be passed on to consumers, and the largest consumers are the wealthy. Mileage might make the most sense for that type of tax, and I think wouldn’t unfairly burden the poor. Maybe multiplied by the value of the cargo?
repsilat
Progressiveness should happen elsewhere -- in income taxes and transfer payments. The road user charges can be regressive without making the whole system regressive.
If every part of the system needs to be progressive it's much more difficult to get the behavioural incentives you want.
bigbubba
This seems like a pretty good solution; the infrastructure is already in place for weighing trucks at borders. Raising taxes for trucks to replace gas taxes for cars would also incentivize the use of trains, which would be nice.
zozbot234
You could tax electricity at public EV charging stations. That would have the same desirable distribution properties as the existing gas tax.
bigbubba
Yes, I think this is the best way to do it. It may also make sense to tax residential power to fund roads, since many electric car owners will primarily be charging at home. Perhaps this electricity tax could be limited to people who are registered as owning electric cars. That would follow the same principle of applying the tax where the fueling/charging is performed.
dmurray
It's likely most electricity for EVs will be consumed at home, though.
Scoundreller
> Suppose I am driving from New York to Alaska; I fill up my car with gas then drive into Ontario. I have now paid New York a gas tax but I'm driving on Ontario roads; Ontario gets paid nothing for this wear and tear.. until I run out of gas inside Ontario. Then Ontario gets their cut. This continues all the way until I reach Alaska.
It works roughly like this for trucks through the “International Fuel Tax Agreement”. Like the “World Series”, its international because it applies to Canada and US:
https://www.google.com/search?q=international+fuel+tax+agree...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fuel_Tax_Agree...
Gibbon1
I remember a comment on HN that said the authors city analyzed license plate reader data to find out who was driving on the cities roads. 80% of the drivers were from out of town. The annoying thing about that, unlike highways much of the funding for residential and commercial roads is paid for by local taxes.
When I think about transportation I think about a paper I read about development of rail. The US and UK's experience is you run into market failure with private rail. The broad based benefits and network effects are diffuse, too many people and businesses benefit indirectly. Which means you can't charge high enough fares to pay for a optimal system.
xupybd
Pay as you go roads?
RFID tag for your car with roads reading your entrance and exit. Then a bill at the end of the month from a single body that then divides the tax back to the area that maintains the various roads you used. High traffic roads get proportional funding. You could even have seamless integration with private roads. If someone thinks they can make money out of an expensive by pass the government doesn't want to build they can.
bigbubba
That seems like an implementation of the 'mass surveillance' solution to distribution. That probably appeals to many politicians, but to me that is intolerable.
It would also require different governments to cooperate; New York would have to be able and willing to redistribute part of my milage tax to a foreign country when that country says my car has been there. I don't know if that's feasible, but cynically I assume it would be difficult at best to put into practice.
jdashg
Is this a problem big enough to be worth solving?
There are places in the US where people live in no-income-tax states but shop across the border on no-sales-tax states. This is obviously an abuse, but it's never been enough of a problem to really crack down on.
If we can reduce our problems to known problems that aren't a big deal, that's good enough! Ship it!
Scoundreller
They’ve cracked down on it online. eBay now collects sales taxes on all US sales.
As a Canadian, I can’t offer my items as “no tax” if I include US as a shipping destination.
mullingitover
These moves always come out of some sense of unfairness about electric vehicles not paying gasoline tax. However, we want people to stop using gasoline, and it makes no sense to punish people for doing a net good thing for society by abandoning ICE vehicles. To truly make a fair system, the payments for road maintenance should be proportional to the damage done to the road by the vehicle. Thus, fees should scale exponentially with vehicle weight.
This of course would make road freight very expensive, and that's a good thing, because freight should be shipped on roads as little as possible. Freight should be shipped by rail until the last possible mile.
war1025
I believe road wear is calculated as the 4th power of axle weight. Trucks have many axles to distribute the load, and are forced to stop at weigh stations to verify that they are within weight requirements.
As far as road tax, the current system works pretty fairly for ICE engines, in my opinion. The larger the vehicle, the more powerful the engine, and thus the lower the efficiency.
So semis are paying higher road tax than a little sub-compact car.
Also, the more you drive, the more fuel you use, which means the more road tax you end up paying.
With an electric car, the incentives are all out of whack. Roads don't wear less just because you have an electric motor turning your wheels.
There is a similar issue with home solar panel installs. Utilities factor maintenance costs in as a part of their kwh rates. If you have solar panels rewinding your meter back to basically zero, suddenly you are hurting the utility company in two ways: They are buying electricity from you at retail instead of wholesale, and you are no longer paying your line maintenance fees.
It's great to give incentives for new technology, but as they say, you can't scale losing money on every transaction into a profitable business.
mullingitover
> As far as road tax, the current system works pretty fairly for ICE engines, in my opinion. The larger the vehicle, the more powerful the engine, and thus the lower the efficiency.
I'm skeptical about that claim.
"Freight trucks cause 99% of wear-and-tear on US roads, but only pay for 35% of the maintenance. This $60B subsidy causes extra congestion and pollution, and taxpayers pay the bill."[1]
[1] https://truecostblog.com/2009/06/02/the-hidden-trucking-indu...
koheripbal
Clicking through to sources in you source finds most are based on individual opinions, not studies.
goodcanadian
There is a similar issue with home solar panel installs.
It is my impression that straight up net metering is very rare. It certainly isn't a thing in the UK where you will generally be paid much less for exporting to the grid than you will pay for importing from the grid.
Moreover, as I recall, everywhere I've lived (several different countries) separated out a standing charge for grid maintenance from electricity usage. It is certainly the case where I am now.
war1025
> It is my impression that straight up net metering is very rare.
Perhaps how it's done around here is different, but for instance this [1] caused a bit of an uproar among people we know with solar panels a few years ago.
I believe the way it works here is that if you install solar panels, you are allowed to net-meter an amount proportional to your annual electric usage in the period before you go solar panels. I think there is a bit of room for growth allowed, so something like 1.2x.
scoopertrooper
Not merely that, but it disproportionately punishes EV drivers. The fuel excise currently stands at $0.423 so a non-EV driver getting 10 km/l would be paying $0.0423 per a km to drive their car while a EV drive would be stuck paying $0.2 per a km.
taion
Per the piece, it's actually "2.5c a kilometre", or $0.025, so the EV driver is still paying quite a bit less.
scoopertrooper
Oops! Should read more carefully!
abnry
> Thus, fees should scale exponentially with vehicle weight.
Work is force times distance. You have to factor in how much the vehicle is on the road, and the gas used is a decent proxy measure of that.
jpollock
In many countries, fuel taxes don't go into general revenues, they are ring-fenced and allocated for road maintenance. Even if they aren't, a reduction in revenue must be offset.
The fact that they aren't charged taxes for use of the roads was the incentive. This is removing it in recognition that electric vehicles are now enough of a percentage of the fleet to affect tax revenue.
New Zealand does the same, with diesel and commercial vehicles already paying "road user charges" (RUC) to fund road maintenance. Petrol (gasoline) vehicles pay this tax at the pump.
EVs are exempt from the RUC until they represent 2% of the fleet.
https://www.transport.govt.nz/area-of-interest/environment-a...
https://www.stuff.co.nz/motoring/107372241/ev-drivers-are-bl...
layoric
This approach makes sense, but with Australia, EV sales are not close to 2% and are still 0.6% [0], and they are still really expensive upfront to buy.
Also in Australia, the fuel tax isn’t isolated for use only for roads, it is a federal tax that can be (and has been), used for other more general expenses.
In a time of “money printer goes brrr” and tax cuts disproportionately benefiting the wealthy, nickel and diming things like EVs keeping their cost higher makes little sense. I like cleaner city air for everyone, reduced CO2 etc, adding this tax will make EV choice a lot harder as you’ll be hit with a tax larger than your fuel bill total, especially if you charge off your own solar and for people who buy a second hand EV just to drive around town. A 2.5c per km is equivalent to doubling the cost of a lot of EVs, example 2015 Nissan Leaf 24kWh does ~100km on a full charge of say 20 kWh, at 15c per kWh you are looking at $3 fuel and $2.5 tax. 15c is low but with combo of solar (which is very common in Australia) or off peak this is pretty reasonable. What isn’t reasonable is that level of tax for something that has more general benefits for trying to generate such a small total of revenue at such an early stage of sales. There are so many other ways this tax could be generated in relation to cars that would encourage uptake of these cars while still reducing impact on lower/middle income earners, I think this is a very poorly thought out tax.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/aug/19/electric...
fy20
I don't know what fuel prices are like in Australia, but here in Europe I pay around €0.05/km to fuel my ICE car. Taxes make up around 70% of that, so an EV tax of €0.015/km (1 AUD = 0.6 EUR) wouldn't be unreasonable once everyone is driving EVs.
As you say there's probably a better way to tax it though (it doesn't make sense someone with a Tesla Model X pays the same as someone with a Renault Zoe). If you drive 100,000km over the lifetime of your car (this is just a nice round number for examples sake) that's only €1500 in tax revenue. Higher taxes on the sale of large and luxury cars could generate the same revenue with little impact on the overall price (if you are already planning to spend €50k+ on a new car).
Dumblydorr
These are island nations without their own fuel production and good renewable potential. Wouldn't they see it's in their best interest to maximize batteries to minimize fuel imports?
nordsieck
> These are island nations without their own fuel production and good renewable potential. Wouldn't they see it's in their best interest to maximize batteries to minimize fuel imports?
Presumably that applies at the individual consumer level as well.
jpollock
New Zealand is an oil and gas exporter. They have their own gasoline refinery as well.
This doesn’t maximize batteries, it impoverishes transport budgets (public transit and reading) and is a tax rebate primarily available to the wealthy, like solar panels.
There are good reasons to electrify the the transport system, but the transport network will still need to be funded.
x87678r
Specifically Diesel in NZ is not taxed because most a huge amount used by Farmers for tractors and/or generators so RUCs were added to charge diesel trucks.
jdhn
I don't understand the opposition to this. These vehicles continue to use roads but don't pay any taxes that would help maintain roads if they were gas or diesel cars. How is that fair?
josephcsible
My opinion: The transition from ICE vehicles to EVs is a very large net benefit to society, so during this period when new ICE vehicles are still legal, we should be giving EVs special ("unfair") benefits to encourage people to switch. If this new tax results in people choosing to buy an ICE vehicle who would have bought an EV without it, that's a very bad outcome.
As for the loss of revenue from the gas tax, I think a two-phase solution would be best to solve that. In the first phase (now), make up the revenue by raising the gas tax. In the second phase (once ICE vehicles are almost gone), ban new ICE vehicles and then implement this tax. This way, the tax would never result in someone buying an ICE vehicle instead of an EV.
octodog
Implementing the tax now makes sense because it brings ICE and EV into alignment now, while usage is relatively low, rather than suddenly introducing a tax down the proverbial road.
To incentive switching the government has other policy tools at their disposal, such as a one-off subsidy at purchase time.
the8472
> Implementing the tax now makes sense because it brings ICE and EV into alignment now
It doesn't. ICE vehicles are effectively subsidized by not pricing in externalties. The playing field was never level, suddenly insisting that it ought to be is a selective demand for rigor.
josephcsible
> it brings ICE and EV into alignment now
I know it does. My point is that bringing them into alignment now isn't a good thing.
refurb
"we should be giving EVs special ("unfair") benefits to encourage people to switch"
Sure, but at least in the US, electric vehicles already get numerous other benefits include tax rebates, lower registration fees, HOV lane access, etc.
josephcsible
> tax rebates
Not Tesla or GM.
> lower registration fees, HOV lane access
Not in most states.
adrianN
Gas and diesel cars don't pay for the damage they cause to the climate, or for the local air pollution. How is that fair?
ajmurmann
That is the real problem. We need to properly price in the negative externality. However, that would mean that driving (and even more so flying) becomes almost prohibitively expensive for many. We already saw with the yellow jackets in France that this would lead to unrest.
adrianN
You know what else will lead to unrest? Unmitigated climate change. We need to drastically reduce driving. Making it more expensive is just one of the measures to take here. We also need to alternatives easier to use. Better city planning and better infrastructure need to go hand in hand with price signals.
bigbubba
> That is the real problem
A real problem. Both are real problems. The importance of road maintenance isn't diminished by the importance of environmental considerations. Roads are vital to the economy. Governments need to multitask; they need to handle many important matters at once , not focus on one issue at a time while letting others fall to the wayside.
xd
What's the cost of mining lithium for starters.. before talking about fair.
edit: down voted for stating facts.. I've noticed this place is becoming very ideological.. or maybe I'm getting old.
matthewmacleod
You didn't state any facts though.
adrianN
What's the cost of oil spills? It's not like gas and diesel magically flow out of the pump either.
jdhn
That's a completely separate issue from what I brought up. The fact is that EV owners don't pay maintenance taxes that are captured through gas taxes, and are complaining when they have to pay additional fees at other times such as registration.
Dumblydorr
It's fair to incentivize EVs because they are far less damaging to the planet and local communities than gasoline vehicles. Gasoline vehicles get to pollute for free, why don't non-polluters get to use the road for free?
Either you're trying to minimize climate damage and disproportionate harms to vulnerable communities, or you're business as usual.
Zigurd
While maintaining pavement is not all of road maintenance, it is the central aspect. Trucks wear out roads orders of magnitude more than cars. In the US trucks pay much less than cars, in total, for road maintenance. It is likely the same in Australia. Simply rebalancing the taxation to the amount of road wear would eliminate the need to tax EV road use without it being a significant subsidy of EVs.
Diesel trucks are also the dirtiest vehicles on the road. It makes absolutely no sense to subsidize trucking.
AdrianB1
Actually Diesel engines are the most efficient ICE in mass production, modern engines respecting the latest emission standards (ex: EURO 6) are some of the least dirty vehicles on the road. If you compare fuel efficiency per ton per kilometer and what is the pollution caused, they become quite clean. Yes, older Diesel trucks are dirty and also the ones with improper maintenance, but hitting at all trucks because of some is not fair.
Zigurd
In the real world, diesels should be taken off the road as quickly as possible due to the impracticality of controlling particulate emissions and the damage to human health caused by those emissions.
Also, euro 6 emission standards are for diesel passenger cars. Diesel cars, even with strict emission controls, still emit too much dangerous particulates.
brogrammer2018
I live in South Australia. Taxes here are already high for everything road related; we already pay taxes for roads as part of Vehicle Registration (excluding compulsory 3rd party insurance); pay council rates (goes to roads), income tax (goes to roads), capital gains tax, and have a 10% GST (which may be 15% soon) which all feeds into the roads. Other parts of the world are providing incentives to EVs; but not here.
Lammy
Probably a lot of Tesla owners on here upset at the thought of losing any of the privilege it brings.
Full EVs do more damage to the road than ICE vehicles since they’re a lot heavier. I’m totally pro-EV, but we should definitely pay some part of the tax necessary to maintain the roads we drive on.
Some quick searches show:
Mazda MX-5 Miata MY2020 base curb weight: 2403lbs
Toyota Prius MY2020 base curb weight: 3010lbs
Tesla model 3 base curb weight: 4072lbs
dmurray
That's an incredibly disingenuous comparison. The Miata is a two-passenger roadster, and one of the lightest cars on the road. The Model 3 is a 4-door sedan.
Lammy
I tried to think of a fun car that goes fast and a thicc hatchback that can carry stuff, because the Tesla is kinda both :D
oh_sigh
A 4 door luxury sedan would be a better comparison. For example, an Audi A4 has a 3700 lbs curb weight.
Also, since road damage scales at something like axle weight ^ 4th, balance issues could completely override the 300 lbs difference in mass.
For example, if the Tesla 3 can have 2 axles each with 2036 lbs/axle (because there is no ICE weighing down the front), it could theoretically be less damaging to roads than an ICE that has one heavy axle and one light axle.
22036^4 = (x 3700)^4 + ((1-x) * 3700)^4. Solving for x = 63%, so if more than 63% of an Audi A4s weight is on the front axle, it will be approximately worse than a balanced Tesla 3 for road wear and tear.
dschuler
ICE vehicles aren’t front-heavy like that, it would be terrible for braking performance.
guerby
Model 3 SR+ is 3627 lbs
topkeks
"Full EVs do more damage to the road than ICE vehicles since they’re a lot heavier."
You have to be literally retarded to actually believe in this Trump propaganda.
tshaddox
Why is it incumbent on the EV owners to somehow solve the blatantly and deliberately incorrect means of charging people to use roads?
This is like saying “the movie theater makes money by charging to park a car in the parking lot, but you walked to the theater, so how is it fair that you get to watch the movie for free?” Well, perhaps the movie theater should come up with some slightly less ridiculous way of charging for entrance.
Or if governments had decided to fund road maintenance using a tax on car paint, would it be unfair to buy a car that isn’t painted?
And what about people who use gasoline and diesel for things other than automobiles on public roads? That’s also unfair.
rconti
There's a huge gulf between not understanding opposition to a particular scheme, and thinking the existing scheme is unfair.
I didn't see anything in this article about how it's levied, for one. Are they doing vehicle tracking, as was proposed in places in the US? Certainly I can see opposition to that.
Maybe people driving a Renault Twizy don't think it's fair to pay the same tax per mile as an electric Hummer (whenever that comes out).
All kinds of reasons to be opposed to it.
dsq
Governments that have fuel excise taxes will do anything to keep their income flowing, including sabotaging EVs and public transport. This is why I would always snicker when reading Tom Friedman's harping on a fuel excise tax: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/opinion/20friedman.html
Every new tax always leads to increased spending then to more tax ad nauseum.
mytailorisrich
The problem with all these taxes is one of 'pain' and political cost.
If fuel taxes and, say, VAT, were abolished and personal income tax adjusted to make up the revenue that would create a political shitstorm and public outrage even if people end up paying exactly the same amount per year.
Governments like relatively "stealthy" taxes. At the same time people want public spending so it's a political game of giving people what they ask for without making them feel too much that they need to pay for it...
ffggvv
how is that sabotage? it’s just not exempting them from a road tax
moralsupply
Also: taxes are arbitrarily imposed through coercion, therefore they are not legitimate under an ethical standpoint, no matter how one wants to cut it. The idea of a "social contract" to justify taxation is absurd, to say the least (did you ever sign it voluntarily?).
If the government can print its own money (which you're forced to use), why does it need to make you work and pay taxes to get that money back?
The money the government "prints" has no value on itself, it needs your work to "value" its money. Taxation is nothing but the imposition the government puts on you to work "for free" so that it can print as much money as it wants and increase its own size.
Never "defend" taxes of any sort, they are unethical and essentially constitute slavery.
BlueTemplar
Because inflation is considered to be bad (not sure whether it's worse than the tax system though), but more importantly, an inflation tax is regressive in that richer people can afford to store their wealth in things that do not inflate away (and even deflate due to this kind of speculation).
Also, taxes are probably a smarter way to deal with negative externalities than regulation.
moralsupply
Inflation is taxation on your savings. It's effectively the same thing as any other tax.
Laws and regulations are the reason as to why taxes exist in the first place. The government holds the monopoly of force, therefore it can issue any laws and regulations it wants. Because of that it can have a monopoly on the currency and tax its people.
sydneycatalyst
I think that road users should pay to use the road. Fuel excise, or electricity surcharge tax or whatever, is a tiny fraction of the subsidy that road users get from regular tax payers.
I'm a blind Aussie taxpayer.
Consider my tax situation. If I take an Uber to my local pub, that's about A$10. Of that $10:
$0.90 in Goods and Services Tax $1 to the taxi compensation scheme
That's 19% tax - or $1.90/$10.
In Australia, public transport and P2P services get to a tiny fraction of all available road destinations. It easier (and sometimes cheaper) for someone like me to get from Sydney to Singapore than to Sydney to Kangaroo Valley (about 350km from Sydney).
So, for my 19% tax rate to get to the pub, the equivalent journey someone who can drive a car on their own may pay $0.25 in fuel excise duty.
They can pay the road users tax. They already get enough of a subsidy from me.
throwaway0a5e
>I think that road users should pay to use the road.
I think we should have pay to use parks. And schools.
What's the point of having government funded infrastructure if not to make it equally available to all regardless of means?
sydneycatalyst
I agree. If we were to make roads equally available to all regardless of means, I should be able to travel to 100% of Australia, not the small fraction served by PT and P2P.
What I object to is that the tax for blind road users is several orders of magnitude higher than driver-users. And that comes with the caveat you can access maybe 5% of areas in Australia by PT and P2P.
At least my kids can use schools without an orders-of-magnitude higher tax. They can only use parks accessible by PT and P2P (which - in Australia - is a very small fraction).
So I get we all should pay for shared resources. But its less fair to ask someone who isn't permitted to access these shared resources an orders-of-magnitude higher tax to access a tiny fraction of those resources.
Tiktaalik
To be able to use the road at all requires buying a car, which is expensive. No such barriers in park use. Let's be clear, roads are for wealthy people, not the poor.
(Yes I know bicycles and buses use the road too, but if that's all we built roads for we wouldn't need so many!)
sydneycatalyst
I agree!
Well, besides not being blind or otherwise barred from driving through no fault of your own... :-)
tshaddox
Roads are a bit different than parks and schools, in that the vast majority of the maintenance costs of roads are caused by commercial (generally for-profit) activity. You do often have to pay to use public parks and school facilities for commercial events.
Also, there’s a difference between the government funding infrastructure or protecting monopolies that develop and maintain infrastructure, and government providing total end-to-end funding of something. We generally pay for usage of electricity, water, and postage, for example.
upofadown
>It points out the petrol excise goes into general revenue rather than road funding...
OK, but this is incomplete. We would have to know how much the government spends on roads. For all we know the government spends more than they get in excise tax.
schappim
In Australia most already fall under the Federal “Luxury Car Tax”[1]. Cars with a luxury car tax (LCT) value over the LCT threshold attract an LCT rate of 33%.
A Tesla model 3 starts at $AUD 66,900 in Australia.
https://www.ato.gov.au/rates/luxury-car-tax-rate-and-thresho...
Causality1
Road taxes should be directly proportional to how much wear a vehicle causes to the road. That ranges to effectively zero for bikes and pedestrians to dozens of times as much as a car for eighteen-wheelers.
peapicker
Further, large trucks don’t travel on many roads, which are useful roads to people throughout suburban and rural areas. These roads need maintenance too, even if the wear is more from weather. As a car owner, one has to participate in maintenance of the system somehow.
AdrianB1
If the taxes are going in a road maintenance fund, yes. In many countries road taxes are just taxes, in my country they are used to fund the general budget and over 50% of the budget is going to various forms of benefits.
cityofdelusion
Indeed, road damage is a 4th power function off the load of a vehicle. I feel this would be fairly easy to implement at registration (at least here in the states, weight is part of the registration application).
blisterpeanuts
This sounds fair except that trucks perform an essential service. Heavy taxation of the trucking industry just raises the price of food and other necessities.
horsawlarway
Sure, but you're still paying the same tax, its just buried under a different line item.
And at least for non-food goods, I tend to think usage taxes are appropriate, since consumption (usage) tends to go up as income goes up.
I'm particularly interested to see where we go as more and more shopping moves to home delivery. In theory, you save wear because each individual isn't driving to the store and back, but you're also increasing the number of large/heavy vehicles. And heavy vehicles account for basically all road damage.
ggreer
Shipping is important but current trucks aren’t the only way to transport goods. Taxing vehicles based on their road wear would incentivize the industry to move to smaller trucks that don’t cause as much damage to roads.
blisterpeanuts
But you'd need more trucks to move equivalent goods; seems like a wash to me.
Tiktaalik
Same issue is looming for many jurisdictions that have funded roads and public transit with gas taxes. As gas taxes decline, there becomes a hole in the budget.
Yes EVs are better than ICE vehicles on CO2 emissions, so of course we should pivot to that, but beyond that cars are still harmful and need to go away as much as they can. EVs create toxic road dust (brake pads + tire wear), congest the roads and kill pedestrians just like regular ICE cars.
Better for the taxpayer, the pedestrian, and the environment would be to fund roads and public transit through other, more stable means that don't rely on stable/increasing car ownership (eg. income taxes, wealth taxes), and then save money by limiting road expansion and taking cars off the road as we improve active and public transport.
Tepix
EVs create less toxic road dust from braking.
As long as there's so few EVs on the road, it makes no sense to tax them. You want more EVs, right?
quicklime
I agree that EVs cause problems and should be taxed too. In addition to the issues you mention, I also worry that subsidies for luxury car brands like Tesla are funded by redistributing wealth from the poor to the rich.
But the problem with funding roads from income/wealth taxes is that it moves it further away from being a user-pays system, which creates the wrong incentives. One way to avoid this would be a variable tax that shifts continuously with the mix of vehicles on the road.
Tiktaalik
I agree that there's advantages to the user pay system. People are enthusiastic to use a new bridge, less so when they find out that they have to pay a toll to drive over it. Various charges can be used to manage congestion.
In a system where road use is "free" there would need to be significant government discipline to not heed demands of road users for more roads.
Heavy taxes on the purchase of new cars may be a good strategy to dissuade vehicle congestion, with lesser taxes on new EVs and lesser still on used vehicles.
tinus_hn
So is Australia that country that actually uses the road tax to pay for roads?
Zenbit_UX
No but they are that country that was on fire this year due to climate change... How quickly they've forgotten.
Guthur
Nope, you don't know what you're talking about.
Australia has terrible land management. Before urban settlement the Aboringal population would carry out continual burn and migrate behaviour, keeping the bush leaf clutter far more in check and drastically reducing the amount of fuel available.
Austalia has always burned long before the industrial revolution and it can't burn without fuel.
Ardren
Australia does plenty of forest management. The problem has been in recent years it's been more dangerous to do controlled burning and the recent bushfires were so extreme the fire was jumping between the tops of the trees skipping the undergrowth completely.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/media-reaction-australias-bushfi...
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/nov/12/is-th...
rbg246
No what you are saying is not true or rather it's a deliberate obfuscation of the leading cause of the fires- climate change.
Rainforests that have not burnt before, burned last year.
The fires that exploded across Australia were unprecedented and never burn so rapidly and so hot.
Former fire fighter chiefs saying the opposite of what you are saying:
"Just a 1C temperature rise has meant the extremes are far more extreme, and it is placing lives at risk, including firefighters"
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/nov/14/forme...
guerby
Tax on using roads make sense as road maintenance costs money that has to come from somewhere.
But climate change is also a question of timing and transition, EV will be taxed at some point what about timing and message:
- do we want to replace fossil fuel for transportation? - if so how fast do we want to do it?
Taxing EV right now might not be the best idea...
EV is also less imports, less pollution (including less noise) so it will have some net positive budgetary effect.
alkonaut
The correct thing might be to add the road tax early as to not need to change the TCO calculation later, when people already own the vehicles.
To keep encouraging EV purchases, instead offset the road tax by subsidies for new cars. That brings more cars into the pool.
The subsidies can be more or less than the road tax, the point is that the subsidies are trivial to remove later, but a tax is harder and more unfair to those who already purchased a car assuming a specific cost of ownership.
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I'm not really sure there's a good answer here.
Fuel tax is 43 cents a litre. Australian cars right now avg about 13.1 litres per 100km. So you're looking at ~$5.6 per 100km for fuel tax.
This tax is adding $2.5 tax per 100km for electric.
Right now, EVs are absolutely creating an regressive tax situation with regards to fuel. Those who can afford to buy newer, efficient cars can usually save money on tax over those who can't. For electric, it was worse - because they do tend to be more expensive to purchase up front, and they paid no fuel tax at all.
And frankly, infrastructure is expensive, and governments need to plan on continuing to maintain it.
That said - I think the only real answer here is a more thorough overhaul of how you tax road usage. Perhaps it's time to ditch the fuel excise tax entirely, and tax all drivers based on (vehicle weight * kms driven * some constant).
Encourage drivers to move to lighter vehicles which cause less wear and tear on the road, and drop the disparity between fuel and electric. They both use the same tires.