Agreed, but it should be noted the current fuel taxes already far excede the environmental impact (Local and Fed combined). Where we come up short is the need for infrastructure, and proper allocation of funds (i.e., spending).

Ironically, part of why fuel economy is down and people drive less is that communties neglect road maintenance and expansion. The decline in fuel economy is just a small hint of the cost, the cost in time and lost economic growth is much greater.

But how do we correct the mis-information out there? Until people are largely aware that accelerating quickly, but smoothly is more fuel efficient than accelerating slowly and higher cruising speeds are more fuel efficient below 55mph, many of the price pressure on fuel will actually cause more congestion and worse fuel economy.

People are driving less and inefficient vehicles are selling less, but fuel economy continues to decline. Sure, it’s plausible that fuel efficient vehicles are being retired from the fleet faster than they enter, but not likely enough to account for such a decline. And increased cell phone usage may contribute by decreasing throughput at intersections and decreased road capacity from increased following distances. The increasingly harsh and long winters certainly account for some of the decline. But, I bet the big factor unexpected consequences due to high gasoline prices.

Personally I’d rather see us take the lower cost route for the long term, have Complete Streets in the urban cores, reduce our dependence on foreign suppliers, but that means the American public must reject their over dependence on motorized vehicles. It would mean we will have to get to know our neighbors better, have more civil discourse, a higher quality of life, etc. Just not sure Americans want those things as too many are now dependent on sprawl being continuously subsidized.

BTW those tests that provided the weight times speed formula also said that on roads designed to hold up to motor vehicle traffic bicycles and light motorcycles under 500 pounds GVW apply as much damage to the road as weathering without traffic. So these vehicles would be exempt from GVW tax.

The proper disincentive for sprawl is time: lower the speed limit, reduce capacity, or both. The biggest problem here is that these do not present the government with enhanced revenue stream options…

We still need to pay for the roads, even for the greenest of the green road users.

If everyone starts belly-aching about this, I don’t see why we can’t just convert the entire tax system into user-fees. This would result in substantial savings for many people:

I don’t have kids, so I don’t need to pay for schooling.

I don’t use public pools, so I don’t need to pay for them either.

I don’t own a large oil company, so I don’t need to pay for depletion allowances indirectly through the tax system.

Generally speaking, if a government bureaucrat wants to keep his job, he needs to file business plans and projected revenue streams from the user-fees he will manage, and the services he will deliver. Fail perform, he’s out of a job. Every department a profit centre!

But this doesn’t sound like a government anymore, does it?

Tom Vanderbilt: but what to do as we begin to introduce larger numbers of plug-in electrics, which while environmentally better still have all the other negative impacts of other cars — the damage to the infrastructure from use, congestion, etc.

I think in Canada and elsewhere, fuel taxes are general revenue, not specifically earmarked for road stuff. If this revenue model works for the things like the military, I fail to see why it would be a disaster for the roads.

Oregon, in their pilot program, has a system for paying the VMT tax at gas stations themselves, which somewhat (but not entirely) gets around the privacy question.

The incentive to move to more fuel efficient cars would remain intact. The addition of the VMT would be a disincentive for sprawl. We still need to pay for the roads, even for the greenest of the green road users.

In that way cars become cheaper to buy, but the day-to-day running costs are more tangible. It raises costs for those who burn the most fuel (which would undoubtedly get more people switching to public transport for longer trips and turning to bicycles for shorter ones), thus discouraging overuse.

Not exactly sure why Hummer’s get people so outraged; there are hardly any of them on the road:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hummer_H2#Yearly_American_sales

As for charging people due to “damage” to the road, it’s not difficult to show that under such a system semi-trucks would be paying over 99% of the costs.

In addition to the objections raised by Brad Templeton, I’d note that underlying all these proposals is the ideological position that the government is entitled to a fixed or increasing revenue stream. In a world where 500,000 people per month are being kicked out of work, and wages are dropping, this kind of attitude on the part of the state seems a bit rich. Why can’t they tighten their belt like everyone else has to?

And it’s possible to track miles from the odometer, we don’t need any GPS. In spite of promises that the GPS logger in your car would not be used to betray its owner, trust me, this information very frequently gets repurposed, no matter what the intentions of the people who initially put it in. If we’re to have it, let’s have it for something really useful to the driver.

The only thing GPS logs allow is congestion charging, and there are easier ways to do that too (parking tax.)

Why on Earth do people think this is a remotely good idea?