Which way would you rather pay, by the gallon or by the mile?

Maria

Diet Coke
Staff member
By David Tanner, Land Line associate editor

U.S. Rep. Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore., is preparing to file a pair of bills that would fund infrastructure during the short- and long-term. One bill involves an increase in federal fuel taxes to address immediate needs, while the second bill calls for a pilot program to explore a tax on vehicle miles traveled, or VMT. Blumenauer plans to file the bills on Wednesday, Dec. 4.

Blumenauer cites the shortfall in the Highway Trust Fund as the motivating factor behind the short- and long-term approaches. The Congressional Budget Office has said the trust fund will be broke sometime in 2015, about a year after the current highway and transportation authorization law known as MAP-21 expires.

full story
 
It would not be broke if they would keep their grubby hands out of the Highway Trust Fund to build bike trails, bus/train stations, Welcome Centers, Scenic Overlooks, Parkways.........

That being said by the mile, by a private corporation, where all tolls are credit from any fuel tax owed.
 
diesel vehicles here go by the mile via Road User Charges... Hubometer ticks up the miles and you buy blocks of a thousand miles from the post office or AA.

Heavy trucks pay more, light trucks pay less, You can fill a jerrycan or drum of diesel for your tractor or boat at the same pump at the gas station as you do your truck, and pay no roading tax on the boat or tractor fuel since diesel doesn't have road tax at the pump.
 
That being said by the mile, by a private corporation, where all tolls are credit from any fuel tax owed.

I could live with this, since we at least wouldn't be getting double dipped with taxes and tolls.
 
The tree-huggers in Oregon where the author of this bill is from, created this problem when they all went out & bought hybrid & electric cars. An obvious solution would be to simply put the tracking devices on hybrid & electric vehicles & tax them mileage while going with the traditional fuel tax for everyone else. Owners of these "tree hugger" vehicles are typically the same environmentalist liberal types who support Big Government, so they shouldn't have any problem with being tracked by the state everywhere they go.
 
The tree-huggers in Oregon where the author of this bill is from, created this problem when they all went out & bought hybrid & electric cars. An obvious solution would be to simply put the tracking devices on hybrid & electric vehicles & tax them mileage while going with the traditional fuel tax for everyone else. Owners of these "tree hugger" vehicles are typically the same environmentalist liberal types who support Big Government, so they shouldn't have any problem with being tracked by the state everywhere they go.
Hater! :)
 
diesel vehicles here go by the mile via Road User Charges... Hubometer ticks up the miles and you buy blocks of a thousand miles from the post office or AA.
That system might work in New Zealand but it won't work here.

The reason it won't work here is because in the USA, we have some highways funded & maintained by the federal government, others maintained by state governments, and some maintained by counties & cities.

To properly distribute the tax revenue, they would need to put tracking chips on all vehicles so computers can log how many miles were driven on what roads. And in a country founded on the principles of individual liberty, having the government tracking us everywhere we go isn't going to fly with real Americans. In NZ, if all of your legal truck routes are maintained with federal funds, then tracking devices wouldn't be required & they can just go by the hub odometer.
That word is not in my vocabulary, as it was coined by young, immature liberals to insult anyone who doesn't subscribe to the ideas that have been implanted in their small brains by older liberals.
 
This kind of goes with the Progressive insurance thing. About 6 months after the introduced lower rates for their customers in the U.S. if they would put a monitoring device on their cars, They introduced it here. I was in the market for a new insurance company. Travel mileage in my personal vehicle is low. I do not drive aggressively. Still I decided NO! I am not having it.
 
This kind of goes with the Progressive insurance thing. About 6 months after the introduced lower rates for their customers in the U.S. if they would put a monitoring device on their cars, They introduced it here. I was in the market for a new insurance company. Travel mileage in my personal vehicle is low. I do not drive aggressively. Still I decided NO! I am not having it.
Drug dealers who hang around in dark places & come out to push their dope on innocent non-users hoping to lure them into drug abuse are sick, evil people.

Progressive agents pushing those tracking devices on naive sheep are no better.

In addition to that, they're openly mocking their own customers in that commercial with Flo emerging from the shadows to try to lure two guys into using the tracking thing in exchange for promises of "lower rates", just like a drug dealer approaches children. And yet, they're confident it won't affect their sales because they already know their tracking chip customers, as well as anybody foolish enough to sign up for it, are too stupid to realize they're being made fun of. Some people probably just think it's funny but it's actually a scarily accurate portrayal of what they're doing with that program.

I'm surprised General Motors hasn't made commercials making fun of people who purchase cars equipped with the OnStar system.
 
In NZ, if all of your legal truck routes are maintained with federal funds, then tracking devices wouldn't be required & they can just go by the hub odometer.

No "Federal" govt in NZ, We are set up far more like just a single US state with the "federal" overhead chainsawed off. Land Transport NZ, a Govt ministry maintains "roads of National significance" which basicly means all the red badged highways, Highway 1 for example, all other roads are maintained by district (county to you) or city councils. the IRD (IRS) collects the fuel taxes and road user charges, then hands it over to LTNZ which then funds it's roads and has a slush fund that councils can apply for grants to fund jobs too big for their budget.
 
No "Federal" govt in NZ, We are set up far more like just a single US state with the "federal" overhead chainsawed off. Land Transport NZ, a Govt ministry maintains "roads of National significance" which basicly means all the red badged highways, Highway 1 for example, all other roads are maintained by district (county to you) or city councils. the IRD (IRS) collects the fuel taxes and road user charges, then hands it over to LTNZ which then funds it's roads and has a slush fund that councils can apply for grants to fund jobs too big for their budget.
That's crazy. Is there a shortage of rich kids who never worked a day in their life to make up a Federal government? LOL
 
No "Federal" govt in NZ, We are set up far more like just a single US state with the "federal" overhead chainsawed off. Land Transport NZ, a Govt ministry maintains "roads of National significance" which basicly means all the red badged highways, Highway 1 for example, all other roads are maintained by district (county to you) or city councils. the IRD (IRS) collects the fuel taxes and road user charges, then hands it over to LTNZ which then funds it's roads and has a slush fund that councils can apply for grants to fund jobs too big for their budget.
Umm... ok.

Take my previous post & replace the word "federal" with "national". (I forgot "federal" refers to "federation" of multiple states.) But for the point I was trying to make, I'm guessing I was kinda right, ... if heavy trucks are only allowed on the "roads of National significance". If trucks are allowed on the district or city roads, then the highway use taxes would be more complicated if they attempted to have an honest, non-"socialized" (for lack of a better word) system of taxing people only for the roads they actually use.
 
I put those Progressive Snapshot doohickeys in my four-wheelers. They want them back after six months. They still won't know much about my movements. The Chev still needs a clutch rebuild and the Ford moves about twice a month. My one-year premium for both of them is $183 before doing the doohickeys. We'll see what it is after.
 
Trucks go anywhere... ALL roads other than those with low bridges or tunnels or which have substandard engineering or weak bridges are open to trucks.

So they run on National funded roads, Local funded roads, Parntership funded roads (local engineering dept, national funds)
 
Trucks go anywhere... ALL roads other than those with low bridges or tunnels or which have substandard engineering or weak bridges are open to trucks.

So they run on National funded roads, Local funded roads, Parntership funded roads (local engineering dept, national funds)
So how do they distribute the tax revenue from the diesel hub odometer thing?
 

Create an account or login to comment

You must be a member in order to leave a comment

Create account

Create an account on our community. It's easy!

Log in

Already have an account? Log in here.

Users who are viewing this thread

Top