Searched and couldn't find this discussed but what do ingoers think of the gas tax hike/ toll road proposal to generate revenue for road repairs?? I myself hate the idea and think it's a poor decision by lawmakers to try and generate revenue to cover poor money management and spending habits.. I know for myself when I travel I avoid toll roads like the plague even going slightly out of my way at times to avoid them..
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I65/70 Toll road proposal??
- Thread starter Bowman78
- Start date
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Taxes that are already in force.. Or maybe heavier handed use of Leo's on commercial trucking in the form of more traffic tickets and fines.. Which I do not agree with either.. How bout government work within a budget? Even the governor doesn't like the idea..
avboiler11
Master
I don't mind a modest bump in gas tax, and would prefer that to tolls. Cars have done nothing but get more fuel efficient, reducing gallons purchased, reducing gasoline excise tax revenues per car while the cost of road materials/labor has gone nowhere but up. A $0.05-0.10/gal bump would hardly be noticed by consumers (especially if raised while gas prices are low like now) but it would provide funds needed to maintain current roads/bridges while helping to fund future projects needed for a growing population.
That being said, when it comes to the Ohio River Bridges Project, I say gimme a transponder and I'll happily pay $1 each way to avoid the charliefox known as crossing to and from Louisville.
That being said, when it comes to the Ohio River Bridges Project, I say gimme a transponder and I'll happily pay $1 each way to avoid the charliefox known as crossing to and from Louisville.
digitalmonster
Sharpshooter
It is interesting that the feds mandated that cars be fuel efficient while ignoring that less fuel tax would be collected to keep up the infrastructure.
This is the great thing about big government, common sense escapes them when it comes to legislation.. It's happened with legislation levied against cigarettes in other states.. They assessed higher and higher taxes and more people quit so funds dry up?? Weird.
Shadow8088
Expert
- Jul 24, 2012
- 972
- 28
Yeah... curse the feds for... making it so I don't have to buy gas more often and that my cities don't look like Beijing...?
You do realize that us big rigs are already taxed for every mile we drive in this state. Our fuel tax is already higher than gasoline and we get 5-8 mpg.
Any cost that is put on truckers and trucking companys get passed on to you the consumer anyway so charge away, it will just cost YOU more in everything you buy.
This is why I myself do not agree with higher taxes on big trucks.. Truckers already have to deal with a lot of scrutiny and government oversight going about doing their jobs on a daily basis.. honestly the weather plays a large part in damage to roadways. I say we tax the weather and make it pay its fair share for use of our roadways!!!
Road maintenance should be an ongoing operation. What we don't know (at least I don't know) is how are existing state/federal gas tax dollars are being spent. Efficiently? Are any of those dollars diverted to other non-road uses? How about license plate fees and the annual tax we pay on our cars, does that all go to road maintenance? Before agreeing to any tax increase, it would be nice to see a proven need.
I have no fundamental objection to either being a toll road. My objection is to the government mismanagement this will encourage. Even with tolls the politicians will claim there is never "enough" money to maintain these roads and constantly jack up the prices.
Now, if there were an annual public audit of the toll roads, and tolls were adjusted to levels adequate to maintain those roads, it'd be great.
Say what you want about Illinois (they suck) their toll roads are well-maintained and constantly being improved and during the winter there is no shortage of salt being laid down.
Now, if there were an annual public audit of the toll roads, and tolls were adjusted to levels adequate to maintain those roads, it'd be great.
Say what you want about Illinois (they suck) their toll roads are well-maintained and constantly being improved and during the winter there is no shortage of salt being laid down.
This proposal has got me to researching toll roads and the economics that surround them.. They are mostly privately controlled and maintained with some government oversight but the end result usually leaves a bad taste in the taxpayers mouth.. A lot of diverted funds and alterior motives that drive these ideas.. From my little research it seems as though 80+% of the funds go elsewhere besides road funds... No thanks!!!!!!!!!!!
No way.
Pay the tax or stay off the tollway. Nobody rides for free.
If that happens, watch your prices go up in the retail stores.
steveh_131
Grandmaster
Ed Soliday. Why am I not surprised that this so-called conservative wants some more big government?
I say no more toll roads and no more taxes. Tighten up the budget and get it done. We are taxed enough.
I say no more toll roads and no more taxes. Tighten up the budget and get it done. We are taxed enough.
hoosierdoc
Freed prisoner
tax the trains, their increased use is decreasing the gas tax on freight haulers. yes, purple.
- Jan 12, 2012
- 27,286
- 113
First, for those of you who want to point at trucks, I would like to see how long and how well you would tolerate the sh*t we have to put up with. There is a reason why you have to play bumper cars on the highway with truck drivers who have no business in trucks, which is that most of us are either out or on the way out. I am transitioning and my not get completely out too soon, but I can assure you that it wouldn't take me very many more years of driving full time to be driven to the point of hating people in general. Back when, you made the decision to drive a truck because you wanted to drive a truck, and you learned from a truck driver. Then we had the driving school introduced. It started as a supposedly more refined version of the above and then morphed into what it is now. Having learned the old way, I am a little prejudiced on the matter although there are good drivers who went the school route. The problem is that this opened the door to people who knew nothing and had no particular inclination or aptitude who read an ad in the paper that said they could earn $50K per year (which most of the time means that you *could* *theoretically* if you drove every legal hour available in the year and got some kind of drop pay for every stop. Let me assure you that neither every happens.) Take this, with the advent of free-standing profit motive schools, and you get people with zero aptitude for driving who are good at memorizing checklists with over a hundred points these days rammed through in 2 to 3 weeks, put them in trucks, and hope for the best. Above and beyond this, it has become a favorite dumping ground for bottom-end immigrants where they don't really have to learn English and have minimal human interaction. Keep up the good work and you will see the day when it won't be safe to drive on the highway, so just go ahead and keep kicking us in the nuts until everyone who is any good finds something else to do.
Oh, and how would you feel about having your own subset of law enforcement dedicated to you for a perfectly legal occupation, complete with 'papieren bitte' stops and no fourth amendment protections whatsoever aside from your bed area in the event of having a sleeper-equipped truck, and even that more limited than you would expect in spite of it being your de facto home?
Now that I have addressed the stupidity of driving the best people off the road, let's move on to the fuel efficiency thing. First, the increased fuel mileage has largely been a function of reduced weight, which, in turn, leads to less road wear. I see this counterbalanced with the ever-increasing numbers of people who drive up and down the road for the fun of it. There was a time when people didn't go anywhere unless they had a reason to, and bored sitting at home didn't count for a reason. One of the things I learned in highway construction is that, first, in the morning, you have the people going to work. When they start to clear up, you have the people who run up and down the road all day come out, and then they go away when the work traffic comes back at the end of the day. Near as I can tell, it is a wash. Without having the information available to do hard research, I am going to go with something along the lines of half the wear per mile per car, half the fuel tax per mile, and twice the miles driven.
The trucks: As BigTanker already said, we have to pay a tax per mile for every mile we drive. The fuel we buy is not taxed at the federal level but it is taxed at the state level, and some states give us a partial credit for that tax against our mileage tax and others do not. Our license plates are also ungodly expensive in spite of there not being any more administrative cost than there is with your Civic. They also are NOT based on an excise tax, so the plate on a 20 year old truck costs just as much as a brand new truck. Pretty much any interaction with the state comes with a fee, and not a small one. My brother does the bookkeeping so I don't recall the numbers off the top of my head, but I do recall the sense of disbelief.
I am guessing that few of you really understand highway construction. First, concrete and asphalt are not only different but diametrically opposed. Concrete gains its strength from hardness, and for some strange reason, the concrete from relatively early last century was much harder than the concrete available today. Since I am an asphalt person, I don't really understand why, but know that it is. Also significant is that when concrete goes bad for reasons other than simply being broken up, it rots from top to bottom. In one instance that stands out in my memory with an old concrete highway, I actually dug through the concrete road (which had been overlaid with asphalt which had been removed) with a shovel. When it goes bad, it is all bad. Asphalt, on the other hand, derives its strength from elastic deformation--in other words, it is flexible. As with most things that bend, it eventually reaches a point at which it does not bend back flat or bend all the way back, leading to a state of plastic deformation which is the cause of the ruts you find in older asphalt, particularly in places where trucks sit stopped, especially while idling adds to the pressure in a fashion similar to compaction during construction. The redeeming quality in this is that you can mill off an inch or so from an old asphalt road, put down a couple of inches, and it will pretty well be as good as new, as opposed to concrete rotting clear down to whatever is under it.
There are two basic problems stemming from road construction, which are inadequate standards and inadequate materials and workmanship in construction.
The primary reason we had the problems we had with I 70 in particular is that it was inadequate the day it was opened. It's physical construction was marginally adequate for the 72,000 pound weight limit in effect when it was designed and the construction began. By the time it was opened, the weight limit had been increased to 80,000 pounds, for which it was completely inadequate. Incidentally, Mitch did the same thing with I 69 stretching money by thinning the highway, and now we have permits available for divisible loads up to about 130,000 pounds. This is not going to end well.
In addition to roads being inadequate by design, another critical change happened in the way the state did things back in the 90s. Up to that point, a contractor either did work that met state standards or did it again until they got it right. Some genius decided that a better way (read a way to claw back money on the contract) was to skip the rework and assign financial penalties for inadequate work. The result was most every contractor padding their bids by 10 to 15 percent, building crappy roads, and laughing all the way to the bank with the money they wanted in the first place. I see this as the primary reason for the problems we are having with roads heavily emphasized with seeing work being done that my grandpa would have been firing people right and left for doing.
This leads to my bottom line: We do not need more ways to twist money out of people. We need to solve actual problems. In a time in history when we have the technology to make most everything function better and last longer (provided that the will exists to set an adequate standard of quality) our roads not last as long as they did in decades past because we are paying for quality roads and getting crap. There is the problem. Fix it. Don't look for more tax money. Don't send an even bigger troop of thieving MFSBs with badges headed my way.
Oh, and how would you feel about having your own subset of law enforcement dedicated to you for a perfectly legal occupation, complete with 'papieren bitte' stops and no fourth amendment protections whatsoever aside from your bed area in the event of having a sleeper-equipped truck, and even that more limited than you would expect in spite of it being your de facto home?
Now that I have addressed the stupidity of driving the best people off the road, let's move on to the fuel efficiency thing. First, the increased fuel mileage has largely been a function of reduced weight, which, in turn, leads to less road wear. I see this counterbalanced with the ever-increasing numbers of people who drive up and down the road for the fun of it. There was a time when people didn't go anywhere unless they had a reason to, and bored sitting at home didn't count for a reason. One of the things I learned in highway construction is that, first, in the morning, you have the people going to work. When they start to clear up, you have the people who run up and down the road all day come out, and then they go away when the work traffic comes back at the end of the day. Near as I can tell, it is a wash. Without having the information available to do hard research, I am going to go with something along the lines of half the wear per mile per car, half the fuel tax per mile, and twice the miles driven.
The trucks: As BigTanker already said, we have to pay a tax per mile for every mile we drive. The fuel we buy is not taxed at the federal level but it is taxed at the state level, and some states give us a partial credit for that tax against our mileage tax and others do not. Our license plates are also ungodly expensive in spite of there not being any more administrative cost than there is with your Civic. They also are NOT based on an excise tax, so the plate on a 20 year old truck costs just as much as a brand new truck. Pretty much any interaction with the state comes with a fee, and not a small one. My brother does the bookkeeping so I don't recall the numbers off the top of my head, but I do recall the sense of disbelief.
I am guessing that few of you really understand highway construction. First, concrete and asphalt are not only different but diametrically opposed. Concrete gains its strength from hardness, and for some strange reason, the concrete from relatively early last century was much harder than the concrete available today. Since I am an asphalt person, I don't really understand why, but know that it is. Also significant is that when concrete goes bad for reasons other than simply being broken up, it rots from top to bottom. In one instance that stands out in my memory with an old concrete highway, I actually dug through the concrete road (which had been overlaid with asphalt which had been removed) with a shovel. When it goes bad, it is all bad. Asphalt, on the other hand, derives its strength from elastic deformation--in other words, it is flexible. As with most things that bend, it eventually reaches a point at which it does not bend back flat or bend all the way back, leading to a state of plastic deformation which is the cause of the ruts you find in older asphalt, particularly in places where trucks sit stopped, especially while idling adds to the pressure in a fashion similar to compaction during construction. The redeeming quality in this is that you can mill off an inch or so from an old asphalt road, put down a couple of inches, and it will pretty well be as good as new, as opposed to concrete rotting clear down to whatever is under it.
There are two basic problems stemming from road construction, which are inadequate standards and inadequate materials and workmanship in construction.
The primary reason we had the problems we had with I 70 in particular is that it was inadequate the day it was opened. It's physical construction was marginally adequate for the 72,000 pound weight limit in effect when it was designed and the construction began. By the time it was opened, the weight limit had been increased to 80,000 pounds, for which it was completely inadequate. Incidentally, Mitch did the same thing with I 69 stretching money by thinning the highway, and now we have permits available for divisible loads up to about 130,000 pounds. This is not going to end well.
In addition to roads being inadequate by design, another critical change happened in the way the state did things back in the 90s. Up to that point, a contractor either did work that met state standards or did it again until they got it right. Some genius decided that a better way (read a way to claw back money on the contract) was to skip the rework and assign financial penalties for inadequate work. The result was most every contractor padding their bids by 10 to 15 percent, building crappy roads, and laughing all the way to the bank with the money they wanted in the first place. I see this as the primary reason for the problems we are having with roads heavily emphasized with seeing work being done that my grandpa would have been firing people right and left for doing.
This leads to my bottom line: We do not need more ways to twist money out of people. We need to solve actual problems. In a time in history when we have the technology to make most everything function better and last longer (provided that the will exists to set an adequate standard of quality) our roads not last as long as they did in decades past because we are paying for quality roads and getting crap. There is the problem. Fix it. Don't look for more tax money. Don't send an even bigger troop of thieving MFSBs with badges headed my way.
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