EV owners are currently enjoying a free lunch, by not contributing funds for road maintenance
Published April 12, 2023, at Heartland https://heartland.org/opinion/heavier-evs-not-funding-california-roadways/
Ronald Stein is an engineer, senior policy advisor on energy literacy for the Heartland Institute and CFACT, and co-author of the Pulitzer Prize nominated book “Clean Energy Exploitations.”
California has almost 400,000 miles of roadways used by the State’s 31 million vehicles. Those roadways are heavily dependent on road taxes from fuels that contribute more than $8.8 billion annually, the same gas tax revenues that also funds many environmental programs. That revenue source will be diminishing in the decades ahead as EV’s begin to replace internal combustion engine vehicles.
California Governor Gavin Newsom has mandated no sales of internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles after 2035 but appears incapable of acknowledging EV’s currently contribute nothing for road maintenance and repairs and that EV’s are heavier than ICE vehicles and will be inflicting more wear and tear on California roadways.
Newsom’s silence on how California will finance the billions of dollars for the roads being used by those heavier EV’s is an indication that he will just pass that problem on to his succesor. Newsom will not even discuss funding for future road maintenance as the EV mandate starts to negatively impact the revenue stream to maintain California roadways.
It’s public knowledge of Newsom’s dyslexia challenges that may hamper his ability to read reports that renewables and fossil fuels are not comparable for their support of humanity, but California voters support his avoidance of addressing those tough energy policy questions that would expose his limited energy literacy.
Regarding the high cost of energy in California, voters continue to be complacent with the state governments hidden taxes and mandates that contribute to the highest energy costs in America:
- Fuels that are more than a dollar a gallon higher than the national average and
- Electricity rates that are more than 60 percent higher than the national average and
- Natural gas rates are more than 30 percent higher than the national average.
The California Governor may be experiencing a “dangerous delusion” of a global transition to “just electricity” that eliminates the use of the fossil fuels that made society achieve so much in a few centuries. From the proverb “you can’t have your cake and eat it too” tells us that:
- you can’t rid the world of fossil fuels and
- continue to enjoy the products and fuels manufactured from fossil fuels.
Newsom may not be well read that there is little to compare between fossil fuels and renewables as fossil fuels are primarily used to manufacture products and fuels for humanity, while renewables manufacture nothing for humanity.
- Fossil fuels make products for humanity that allowed the world to populate from 1 to 8 billion in 200 years.
- Renewables cannot manufacture anything for humanity! The current rhetoric is falsely transitioning from apples to oranges, as renewables and fossil fuels are different.
To add insult to injury, those so-called renewables of wind and solar are 100 percent made from the products manufactured from fossil fuels!
The above insult pales to my disappointment that our elite leaders are oblivious to the fact that fossil fuels made it possible for humanity to grow from 1 to 8 billion in 200 years, because they can be manufactured into thousands of usable, life-enhancing and life-saving products. On the other hand, renewables can only generate occasional electricity, but cannot manufacture anything for humanity, while fossil fuels manufacture everything for humanity.
By contrast, “transitioning” humanity to just electricity means converting to wind and solar systems that can manufacture none of the vital products now being used by humanity. That will very likely cause the death of BILLIONS of people from diseases, malnutrition, lowered living standards and weather-related disasters, whereas projections of millions of fatalities from “carbon emissions” and climate change are based on computer models that take none of these realities into account.
National economies and nations’ militaries still run on fossil fuels. As both World War I and II historians Russia and China know, the country that controls the minerals, crude oil, and natural gas, controls the world! They both know there is no substitute for fossil fuel product dominance in the foreseeable future, even on a longer-term horizon. To believe a transition to just electricity from renewables is possible from the products manufactured from fossil fuels and act accordingly is suicidal for humanity. As former Congressman Don Ritter of Pennsylvania wrote “It’s the real “existential threat.”
In any event, you cannot run households, businesses, hospitals, and the military on occasional electricity and no products from fossil fuels!
EV buyers beware that the “tax equalizer”, higher electrical rates and/or the “VMT” is coming. The Vehicle Mileage Tax (VMT) that has been discussed for years sounds like a logical idea – requiring the users of the highways to pay the fees to maintain those highways. The VMT tax will be needed to replace the $8.8 billion annually from fuel sales that will be diminishing in the decades ahead.
Ronald Stein, P.E.
Ambassador for Energy & Infrastructure
https://expertfile.com/experts/ronald.stein
Gruesome Newsom, eh. In blighty it’s a little different but equally bureaucratic and mad.
“From 2025, however, electric-car owners in the UK will have to pay road tax. According to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Jeremy Hunt, the decision was made in order to make the British motoring tax system “fairer” as the Office for Budget Responsibility estimates by 2025 that half of all new vehicles will be electric.
New electric cars registered on or after 1 April 2025 will incur the lowest first year rate of VED, which is currently £10. From the second year of registration onwards owners will pay the standard rate of road tax, currently set at £165 per year.
Any electric cars that were first registered between 1 April 2017 and 31 March 2025 will pay the same standard rate from 1 April 2025 onwards. Meanwhile, owners of any EVs registered between 1 March 2001 and 31 March 2017 will have to pay the VED Band B rate, which is currently £20 a year.
https://www.drivingelectric.com/your-questions-answered/100/electric-cars-and-road-tax
Ten quid? Nuts. But there is another major factor: insurance…
“An electric car could cost nearly 50 per cent more to insure than a petrol equivalent”
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2023/04/10/electric-car-can-cost-nearly-50-more-to-insure-than-a-petrol-equivalent/
Not exactly your Ford Model T
I was in CA last week; drove South of Tahoe for a scenic drive and to fill up with gas at the Costco in Carson City, NV. I didn’t purchase any CA fuel so didn’t contribute to road maintenance funds. U.S. 50 from about Tahoe to the Sacramento suburbs is is terrible shape with potholes like mini-canyons.
I had hoped to ski Mammoth Mountain on the visit but the main highway was closed due to deep snow. I hit Palisades ski resort via I-80 on the way out. The condition of I-80 was not too bad. I guess I had missed the name change of the politically incorrect Squaw Valley to Palisades. The snow was nice and the terrain was wonderful, wide open at the top. I look forward to a future visit before the end of snow. (They say they are going to be able to stay open well into July this year.)
Deep snow and avalanches also twice prevented me from skiing Snowbird in Utah, but Solitude was a nice alternative. Snowbird remains on my bucket list.
I stopped at that same Costco twice when I visited CA. I drove over 1000 miles in the state and purchased only 10 gallons of fuel in CA as I filled up in NV going in and coming out. Nice to have nearly 600-mile range in my truck which far outstrips the range of an EV, and it took only 10 minutes to recharge my fuel tank. The Mendocino coast was wonderful, and we missed the storms for the most part.
The $1.50 brat and drink at Costco are nice too. I carried an extra 2.5 gallons in a plastic can in my ski carrier.
I visit friends in So Cal on occasion. My diesel pickup gives me a 600 mile range. I carry 18 gallons in the bed to ensure I can get back to Nevada before I need to refuel in Carson City. The total of about 1100 miles easily gets me there and back – without CA getting a single dollar in taxes.
Now if only I could figure out how to buy diesel that was not refined in CA here in Nevada. Like total idiots, we buy our fuel from CA.
Good report. It looks like Ronald has pounded another nail into the lid of the coffin of the rush to EV insanity. There won’t be any RIP for this deal, however, as the culture is in WOKE decline, and showing no signs of introspection. Look at Bud Light, gone WOKE and transexual and lost about $6 billion in a week. The insanity is everywhere.
Do they have multi-storey car parks in California?!
“Multi-storey car parks across the UK could be at risk of collapsing due to the weight of electric vehicles, experts warn.
Electric cars, which are roughly twice as heavy as standard models, could cause serious damage to car park floors with especially older, unloved structures most at risk of buckling.
New guidance is now being developed recommending higher load bearing weights to accommodate the heavier vehicles.
Chris Whapples, a structural engineer and car park consultant, is at the forefront of these new measures which are due to be published in the coming weeks.
‘I don’t want to be too alarmist, but there definitely is the potential for some of the early car parks in poor condition to collapse,’ he told The Telegraph.”
https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/electriccars/article-11956197/Ageing-multi-storey-car-parks-collapse-weight-heavier-electric-vehicles.html
More expense…
“More expense…”
But all in the name of saving us from an extra degree in temperature! /sarc
meanwhile, here in north central Woke-achusetts, it got down to 40F last night and will rise to about 84 this afternoon- good thing we’re going to spend trillions of dollars to make sure it doesn’t got to 85!
Actually, more like we’re going to spend trillions so the low temperature doesn’t go to 41…it’s not the daytime highs that account for most of the rise in the “average.”
We’re beginning to see shit hit the fan moments. Damage to the Bud Light brand is bad for AB Bev, but their injury will help others. Can’t wait for the main event.
Its even worse here in Canada with fuel taxes. A high of $2.00 CDN per US gallon in Vancouver to $1.30 in Toronto.
EVs should pay some form of road maintenance tax as their fair share, along with all other vehicles.
However, it is absolutely not correct that “heavier EVs cause more road wear and tear” than lighter ICVs. What causes most road wear and tear are extremely heavy wheel loads. It is those loads that cause excessive flexing in road pavements. We are talking loads imposed by 18 wheelers – what engineers refer to as the “HS-20” load, which is 20 thousand pounds per axle. The heaviest EVs are only a couple thousand pounds heavier than the equivalent ICV of the same size and capacity, with heavy duty pickup trucks and the largest SUVs being somewhere in the range of 5,000 to 7,000 pounds with typical loads – less than 1/3 of that imposed by semi tractor-trailer rigs that are fully loaded.
This is why only the largest trucks are subjected to mandatory scales testing on the highway – not passenger vehicles, light trucks, and even medium-weight trucks and vans.
Road pavements are designed by highway engineers to carry the projected number of HS-20 loads over the projected lifetime of the pavement, and the only loads considered are the HS-20s, not ordinary passenger vehicles and light trucks which do not even figure at their heaviest weights.
The road wear and tear process is one of stress repetition. As most engineers are well aware, stress repetition only becomes a non-negligible factor as the stress imposed approaches the ultimate strength of the material or component being designed. It varies with the material (steel, aluminum, asphalt or concrete pavement, etc.) but generally only loads approaching 80% give or take of the design stress matter to component life.
Why are you comparing EVs (many with an ICE analog) and ICE cars with “18 wheelers“?
Must be the weight.
Can you not read? The weight of 18 wheelers is what wears out roads, not the weight of passenger vehicles or light or medium weight trucks.
Every highway engineer knows this – it should not be a shock and it is surprising to see this error repeated over and over again.
It’s engineering, silly. I’m a civil engineer. Every civil engineer is taught this in their junior year of college.
“it is absolutely not correct that “heavier EVs cause more road wear and tear”
That’s wrong. There is a well-known formula relating axle weight and road damage. I believe the relationship is the fourth power.
So, all things being equal, EV passenger cars and light trucks DO cause more road damage due to their increased weight, class for class. Thanks for clearing that up.
You cannot read. There is NO significant wear and tear caused by passenger vehicles and light trucks, because the stresses involved are far below the threshhold stresses imposed that actually do cause a reduction in pavement life.
When I was in high school (ages ago) the NJ Garden State Parkway did not allow truck traffic (other routes including US1 and the NJ Turnpike were used.).
There most certainly was regular wear and tear and subsequent repair on that road.
Changing your tune again I see.
At first you claimed that your EVs caused no damage, no you are backing off to claim that the damage caused by them is insignificant compared to the damage caused by 18 wheelers.
That’s strange, my local street, built to local council standard urban road specifications, is full of surface damage from cars and vans … too narrow for trucks … so bad in fact, that as I write this the surface is being reprofiled and new bitumen sealed. Hope you don’t have a license to practice civil engineering.
It would also depend on the speed of the traffic and obviously cars are allowed, and do do, go faster than trucks.
Basically, as any vehicle moves along, it is ‘hitting’ the road surface and the enrgy of that impact will vary as the square of the speed.
So your recollection ‘fits’ with mine.
I recall a figure of a 6th power relationship. That would stack up if the 4th power was a ‘static’ loading on the road or when all traffic moved along at 0.01mph
The ‘hitting’ analogy stacks up with why roads are made of Tar-MacAdam (asphalt).
The tar/bitumen always retains some flexibility ## so the road flexes/gives as you ride over it.
Hence why the UK’s brief experimentation with concrete roads was ‘brief’
The concrete roads were noisy, gave a ‘hard ride’, wrecked your car and folks simply hated them.
Especially the noise aspect, people living miles away from a concrete dual-carriageway were driven crazy by the noise.
## I know. I worked at a place (GEC Marconi Research Centre, Chelmsford) that was skirted by the new (concrete) town bypass. (The A12, East London > Lowestoft)
They did try to coat it with asphalt but that didn’t help the noise and, they couldn’t get the bitumen to stick to the concrete. Section by section it all got dug up and made into conventional bitumen within 5 years of new.
And they were so eco-friendly designing that road. It had badger tunnels, owl nesting-boxes, hedgehog crossings and every eco- loveliness you could think of.
Except for the people driving it and living within3, 4 & 5 miles away, wind dependant.
Road pavements are relatively simple structures that are subject to the laws of material engineering just like any other material used to build anything. Aside from just weathering, which occurs with all materials subject to weather, the factor that controls pavement life is relative stress as measured on a cyclic basis compared to the design strength and lifetime of the pavement.
Cyclic stress is stress that is below the ultimate strength of the material, acting in compression or tension or shear, that when repeated causes permanent strain in the component or system that eventually results in failure.
Think of a piece of steel coat hanger wire which is a rather elastic material (as opposed to a rather brittle material). Bend it a little, and it snaps back, bend it a lot, and it retains part or all of the bent shape. Bend it back and forth over and over again, creating “cyclic stress”, and eventually the wire snaps.
However, if you just put slight pressure on the wire such that it doesn’t bend, and do it millions of times it will never fail due to that low stress, at least not before it finally rusts away (i.e., “weathering”). The “threshhold stress” is that stress below which no strain or damage can occur.
Another good example of low cyclic stress that has no appreciable effect on a material is a spring – like a coil spring or leaf spring on a vehicle. If you load the vehicle according to its design load or less, that spring will bend back and forth slightly many millions of times before it will fail – that’s called “normal use”. But lets say you overload the vehicle to twice its design gross weight, the spring or other suspension components will fail relatively quickly.
Road pavements come in two types – flexible and inflexible. Asphalt concrete is considered flexible, meaning it can be bent back and forth cyclicly for many thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of time before it will completely fail and fall apart. Portland cement concrete is considered inflexible, meaning that its strength must be sufficient to resist any bending at all under design stresses, because if it bends at all it breaks.
Flexible pavements and inflexible pavements are both subject to cyclic stress failure. It might take a million HS-20 loads, if that is what the pavement is designed for, to cause a cyclic failure. But if the stress is only 80% of the HS-20 load, then that pavement may be good for ten million cycles, and if only 50% of the HS-20 load, maybe 100 million cycles. But in the real world, the cyclic stress from 100 million cycles would not occur until the pavement is far older than weathering would allow it to get (hundreds of years?). So the limiting factor of pavement life would only be loads at or near HS-20.
Generally, asphalt pavement life due to weathering is only in the vicinity of 20 years give or take, while portland cement concrete has a longer weathering life, but of course dependent upon environmental factors such as whether salt is used on the road for ice removal, which tends to reduce the lifetime.
The number of cycles is a function of traffic volume. If the road is a low volume road, it needs a relatively thinner/weaker pavement to withstand the same number of cycles (HS-20 axle loads).
Why don’t you do some research and find out what box trucks and tractor trailers pay for taxes to support roads? They don’t drive for free you know.
Try this link.
https://www.mackinac.org/8433#:~:text=On%20average%2C%20heavy%20trucks%20paid%20%244%2C930%20each%20per,in%20registration%20fees%20and%20%242%2C935%20in%20fuel%20taxes.
A regular tractor pays about 35 times what an auto owner does.
They pay 35 times the taxes and do 100 times the damage.
Road pavement is 100% reliant on the quality and compaction of the materials bellow the base courses.
EV taxes pay for road maintenance as if they are like the magic carpets that leftists imagine them to be.
I am absolutely correct and you are absolutely wrong.
Road wear and tear as a function of vehicle or axle weight is a cyclic stress issue, and it is by no means linear or to the fourth power (WTF???) either. There is a threshhold stress level below which no significant road wear and tear occurs, and that stress limit is vastly below the axle weights of any passenger vehicles or light trucks.
All flexing causes damage, there is no such thing as stress that is too small to cause damage.
“…there is no such thing as stress that is too small to cause damage.”
Technically true. Practically irrelevant. It ignores the fact of Goodman stress. It’s the drastic increase in d repeated loads to failure/d stress, above certain stress levels. In my biz, we watch for it in the loads of beam pumping unit system components (unit peak torque, polished rod and sucker rod loads). It is flagged – nowadays by monitoring and pre installation in modeling software – and we attempt to stay well below it. But it applies to all stressed material, pavement included.
Whether that stress level is “vastly below the axle weights of any passenger vehicles or light trucks, per Duane, might or might not be true, depending on which vehicles you are comparing, on what kind of pavement. But it’s certainly true often enough to increase road taxes on a per wheel basis, with adjustments for both pressure and footprint, ideally using a function that captures the damage from approaching the Goodman line. This should be an adder on (yes EV’s should pay basic road taxes for the normal OPEX of the road systems they use), and should be applied no matter what.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/goodman-diagram
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodman_relation
“They pay 35 times the taxes and do 100 times the damage.”
Certainly directionally correct. Common sense tells you that a vehicle with tires of twice the footprint, at least twice the pressure, and many more of them, will damage more.
how about gravel roads? we have a lot of those here in New England- and now it seems almost everyone has an SUV or pickup- if they get much heavier, won’t those dirt roads get beat up more than in the past?
I referred only to pavements. Gravel roads can fail sooner rather than later due to excessive wheel loads, but again, it’s only heavy truck loads that cause the typical deep ruts or “washboarding” that gravel roads tend to suffer, not the loads from any passenger vehicles or light trucks.
it’s only heavy truck loads that cause the typical deep ruts or “washboarding” that gravel roads tend to suffer
Please define “heavy truck loads” as my gravel road would likely beg to differ.
Studded tires put grooves in I-90 in Washington State (asphalt) long before EVs; don’t tell me that considerably heavier vehicles (read:EVs) won’t do that damage faster and to a greater extent.
Indeed, ‘offroad’ style of tires common on trucks and SUV’s create an enormous amount of damage especially turning and maneuvering at low speeds.
The issue is the cumulative impact. There are *far* more personal vehicles on the road than there are 18-wheelers. Cumulatively the personal vehicles cause more damage. Increase their weight and their contribution goes up at least proportionally if not more.
Just drove back from Florida on 95 and it appears that 20% of the vehicles on the road are 18 wheelers. Could not believe how many there were. Went from Washington to Baltimore via Baltimore Washington expressway (only cars allowed,
Salute!
Remember that we are a peninsula, and even the Panhandle has few north-south roads. Try to go from Panama City north to Montgomery, Al. Ditto from Destin.
So much comes into ports or maybe rail on the east coast. Then stuff is loaded on the big rigs that are not long haul, but they still contribute to wear and tear. So going electric is still gonna wear more than the current weights of the most vehicles.
Gums sends…
No – EVs cause NO additional wear on roads than other passenger vehicles. None.
Yes, the issue is cumulative impact. The point, however, is that the cumulative impact of axle loads far below the designed HS-20 load (the standardized load virtually all public and most private loads are designed to sustain) creates effectively zero cumulative damage. The cumulative impact of axle loads at or near HS-20 (20 thousand pounds per axle) is in fact the limiting factor for road life.
That is why states never require lighter vehicles to go on the high way scales – because those loads simply don’t matter. Truck loads matter completely, and in fact it is the loads that exceed HS-20 that are designated for extra fees by the states because they impose greater than the design load and therefore have a far greater impact on pavement life.
Duane
If heavy trucks go EV, how will that affect road wear/damage?
All weight causes damage, the heavier the vehicle the more damage.
EV’s are heavier than ICE and electric 18 wheelers are heavier than diesel ones.
The fact that an EV is lighter than an 18 wheeler is irrelevant.
Not to fear, Big Joe will mess it up further….
We could see something similar to the Arab oil embargo coming thanks to Biden.
story tip
US-Saudi Oil Pact Breaking Down as Russia Grabs Upper Hand (yahoo.com)
and why not.
Thanks to Joe’s inflation act, inflation and interest rates have skyrocketed.
Of course the Saudis will always be sitting on a mountain of cash (US dollars of course) so all they need do to keep themselves afloat is lend the money back to Uncle Joe = no need to pump oil any more.
neat huh
Joe gets No Oil and Lots of Inflation – just exactly what he wanted.
Now then, how’s he gonna fund all the arms he’s pumping into Ukraine?
Looks like the silent treatment follows now….
story tip
Analysis-Biden’s subdued reaction to OPEC+ cuts foreshadows economic slowdown, carries risk (yahoo.com)
and piggyback on OPEC blame game opportunity with EPA regs also
Biden proposes toughest auto emissions rules yet to boost EV sales (cnbc.com)
I can’t help but wonder how they will enforce the VMT. I don’t think they’ll be satisfied with self-reporting, so are we looking at mandatory GPS?
Ron is an idiot! How did he get an engineering degree?
The reason Ca has high retail electricity prices is taxes. QED EV are paying taxes.
What I learned about WWII and since based on my time in the USN is that the country that controls the sea lanes controls the world.
China and Russia are done as world powers and are facing mass starvation. Follow international rules and the US Navy and our allies will allow free trade.
Like Ron, the top leader in Russia, China, and Ca are clueless.
Newsom will make the rich pay for it. Oh, wait… they are all leaving. I guess the little people will take it where the sun don’t shine.
Some states have an annual vehicle inspection along with renewing vehicle registration and plates.
For EVs, include annual mileage. (Maybe from the plug in diagnostic port.)
The manufacturer will have the weight for each model.
Have a basic tax for each mile multiplied by some factor for each pound. That’s the annual road tax for that EV. Let them make monthly payments to pay their tax.
Next year, recalculate.
(If they sell their EV during the year, the same thing must happen before the title can be transferred.)
Governments know they will lose gas tax revenue, with increased electric vehicle use. The governments of California, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia are all looking into “road pricing” schemes (tolls), for electric vehicles. I pointed this out in 2018. Hopefully, the links still work.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/11/26/vehicle-electrification-common-sense/#comment-2534488
The quality of roads in CA appears to be deteriorating. Friends have mentioned large potholes.
I’m wondering whether the Noisome government has decided to let the roads fall into disrepair so as to discourage driving. Because global warming, and all.
In related news, Stanford University Doerr School of Sustainability has decided its first focus should be to rid the atmosphere of carbon dioxide. Adamantine insanity.
It’s a tax money raising bait & switch that seems to always work. We raise money with taxes for a specific expense (for CA, the fuel tax was sold as for road and highway construction and maintenance). The money is siphoned off for other things (mass transit, parks, bike lanes, “road diets”, etc) The roads are not maintained, so they get worse. The taxes are raised because the we need more money to maintain the roads. Repeat as often as possible. They are now doing “pilot programs” to add (not replace) taxes based on miles driven in specific areas or total miles or both. Which will require collecting data on where and when you drove from every vehicle. There has also been discussion of basing the mileage charge on rate of travel, since driving fast causes more wear than driving slow. But don’t worry, knowing where when and how fast you drive is absolutely not an invasion of privacy and will never be used against you.
Cubafornia’s roads (at least in the LA area, as that is where I lived for several years in the late 90’s) have been a joke for a long time. Yes, they would repave and fill holes, but they never did a single thing to ease congestion. Try navigating the freeway where Rt 101 intersects with Rt 405….it matters not what time of day or day of the week, that intersection is a consistent fustercluck. And if you are heading from the north down to LAX, there really is no alternative route. It was (and likely still is) like something out of a third world country, like traffic you’d see in India. A trip that on a map (based on distance, road speed limits, etc) that should take an hour will take twice that, if you are lucky. I had to allot 2 and a half hours to get to LAX even though I was only an hour away….
Other than the time I lived in CA, I have always lived in Maryland. A blue state, yes, but at least congested roads here do get improvements. The Baltimore beltway is always being worked on to add lanes (it started with three in each direction and now, in some places, there are six each way). Rt 95 gets improvements, as do many busy non-interstate roads.
What kind of state would let such horrid congestion (and no, it wasn’t just that one intersection) go and not try to remedy it? They surely tax their residents enough (plus they would be getting federal funding for interstates, like I-5 and rt 101) to be able to pay for improvements! Worse yet, public transit isn’t that great either. If the idea was to fail to improve roads to get more people to take public transit, that has been a massive failure.
“they never did a single thing to ease congestion.”
I remember them constantly supposedly trying to do this, by means of constant construction to add lanes (at least in some areas). But given the construction never seemed to end (as soon as they added a lane they needed to build another) it actually always made things worse.
As less new vehicles drive with ice suppressed and e too expensive, the per-vehicle charges MUST rise.
However, Newsome can easily just jack up gasoline and diesel taxes, and claim it’s to demotivate used ICE vehicles and stick it to climate change deniers.
I’m sure he’ll also bring in a big fee to re-register used ICE vehicles, using the above reasons. The extremists will want to outlaw resale/re-registering of ICE vehicles, but he won’t do that, just appease the alarmists with a harsh “sin” tax.
My motorhome converted to an EV would need to tow a 5000 lb battery to provide anything close to current range.
French ecoloons keep insisting that nuclear fission can only produce electricity (not even technically correct, but nearly all nuclear plants are too large and too remote to produce anything else that’s transportable to big consumers, so in practice it’s the case) but want us to build windmills and PV panels that can … literally only produce electricity. No heat, no pressurized vapor, just electricity.
Nuclear at least can be build to provide usable heat.
No worries as you’ll all have smaller faster charging batteries-
StoreDot’s Smaller Fast-Charging Battery Packs May Increase EV Adoption (msn.com)
Because your average daily mileage is like the average global temperature or something like that.