On Monday, December 9, 2019 at 1:19:21 PM UTC-8, AMuzi wrote:
On 12/9/2019 11:54 AM, Tom Kunich wrote:
On Monday, December 9, 2019 at 12:17:02 AM UTC-8, Chalo wrote:
A trifling gas tax like that will have a very hard time keeping up the roads, when it's being pumped into gas-burning horror machines that keep getting heavier all the time.

The yearly tax intake of California on gasoline taxes is over 1.5 Trillion dollars. JUST California.

Cars are not getting heavier, they weigh pretty much the same as they did 50 years ago. The newest cars are reducing weight as they go from metal to plastic and carbon fiber body parts. Electric cars have to reduce their weights dramatically in order to carry the heavy batteries and the armor plating to protect those batteries and have sufficient range.


Uh, that cannot possibly be correct.

The entire sum of all economic activity in California is
roughly $2.7 trillion.

That's a very large amount of money but gas tax was not 55%
of California GDP.

I suspect a decimal has wandered or something like that.

--
Andrew Muzi
www.yellowjersey.org/
Open every day since 1 April, 1971

I don't know where I got that figure. I must have screwed up a decimal place.

58.7 cents a gallon tax x 50 to 70 million gallons a day is $410,900 a day on the high end which it most certainly is. 365.25 x that is $150,081,225. In California I can't remember when I've ever gone more than 25 miles between gas stations on the most forlorn roads. When I did an overnighter a couple of years ago, we wove our way across the Salinas Valley on nothing but farm roads. Every time we came to a major intersection there was at least one gas station there and often four. And these farm roads for the most part were too narrow for a truck to pass a bike in the opposite direction except at wide spots. Luckily it was in between planting and harvesting.

Now part of our state and property tax also goes to build and repair roads but nothing appears to be getting done. What's more, Google Maps is now routing commute traffic off onto these small backroads and these are being torn to shreds. Roads clearly marked "No Trucks" have 20 ton box vans on them. On several occasions I've seen doubles on these roads and you can see on the 180 degree bends that the asphalt on hot days was pushed into lumps by heavy trucks it actually looks like the asphalt ran like wet clay.