Republican lawmakers in Congress are trying to push forward the president’s priorities on taxes. This week, the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee advanced one piece of that effort. It includes a proposal to charge owners of electric vehicles a $250 annual fee — and a $100 charge for hybrid owners.
The revenue would go into the fund that pays for upkeep of the nation's roads and bridges. The proposal digs into a thorny debate over who pays for maintaining the roads we get around on — and how much.
We’ve traditionally funded highways and mass transit at the federal level through the gas tax. Right now, about 18 cents a gallon.
For a long time, it was enough to mostly cover what the federal government spent. But Congress hasn’t raised the gas tax for literally decades, said Kara Kockelman, a professor of transportation engineering at the University of Texas, Austin.
“Because our legislators are too nervous to raise taxes of any form, and that's a very visible price because of the advertising that happens on every corner of America at these gas stations that we have so many of,” she said.
The gas tax has stayed the same since 1993. If it had gone up with inflation it would be 40 cents a gallon.
Then, there’s another problem.
“There has been a growing vehicle efficiency,” said Yonah Freemark, a researcher at the Urban Institute.
On average, cars get better gas mileage now — especially hybrids. And EVs don’t use any gas at all.
“And the feeling is that those cars are not contributing as much as gas powered cars to the maintenance of the transportation system,” he said.
And so, in theory, the move by the House Transportation Committee could even that out.
The problem is, by Freemark’s calculation, the average gas car driver pays about $125 a year in federal gas taxes — half of what EV users would owe under this proposal.
“It's in essence, punishing electric car users for operating electric cars and encouraging people to use gas driven cars, which is absolutely the opposite of what we'd want to encourage, to encourage environmental sustainability and less greenhouse gas emissions,” he said.
The fact is, both gas and electric cars cause wear and tear on the roads.
Aside from gas taxes or flat fees, transportation experts have another idea for how to pay for road maintenance.
“If you use the road system more, you should pay more,” said Gil Tal, a professor at the University of California, Davis.
“You pay more when you create more wear and tear on the road. You pay more when you're creating more congestion, you pay less when you're just driving a rural road by yourself in the middle of the night,” he said.
Figuring out how exactly to do that, without tracking drivers’ every movement, is another debate.
