“we don’t actually want to penalize people for having more efficient cars”
Yes we do - more efficient cars is not the same as more efficient means of transport, and even electric cars have far higher emissions per person than buses or trains or bikes or walking.
Everyone has this weird mental block where they can’t imagine a solution that’s not cars (mainly because our built environment is mostly roads), but the reality is that electric cars are just a stopgap except for in the boonies, and in those cases using petrol isn’t that big of a deal anyway (it’s ~10% of the population so it’s only a tiny fraction of the car-emissions problem, air pollution is less because there are fewer cars and fewer people nearby, and EVs are more expensive because you can’t just drive a cheap short-range city-car like the Nissan Leaf). So rural transport emissions should be a low priority IMO.
To be clear, I’m all for taxing the shit out of commercial trucks too. Most of that shit should be put on rail (and it would, if we focused on improving rail infrastructure like we currently focus on improving highways), and so should most car drivers.
You misunderstand my intent with that sentence. We don’t want to punish someone for having an EV as opposed to an ICE vehicle. If someone is buying a car, we would prefer to gently nudge them towards the more efficient vehicle, if only through the savings of efficiency.
I’m entirely aware of the alternatives to cars, and would rather we have those. However, we don’t live in a world yet where cars are only needed for rural populations and we won’t get to that world in the timeframe where we need to figure out road maintenance financing, which is currently based on gasoline sales. So we should figure out the current finance issue in a way that doesn’t punish people for picking the best available option, even if it’s not the best possible option. Or at least doesn’t punish them more than the worse options.
“we don’t actually want to penalize people for having more efficient cars”
Yes we do - more efficient cars is not the same as more efficient means of transport, and even electric cars have far higher emissions per person than buses or trains or bikes or walking.
Everyone has this weird mental block where they can’t imagine a solution that’s not cars (mainly because our built environment is mostly roads), but the reality is that electric cars are just a stopgap except for in the boonies, and in those cases using petrol isn’t that big of a deal anyway (it’s ~10% of the population so it’s only a tiny fraction of the car-emissions problem, air pollution is less because there are fewer cars and fewer people nearby, and EVs are more expensive because you can’t just drive a cheap short-range city-car like the Nissan Leaf). So rural transport emissions should be a low priority IMO.
To be clear, I’m all for taxing the shit out of commercial trucks too. Most of that shit should be put on rail (and it would, if we focused on improving rail infrastructure like we currently focus on improving highways), and so should most car drivers.
You misunderstand my intent with that sentence. We don’t want to punish someone for having an EV as opposed to an ICE vehicle. If someone is buying a car, we would prefer to gently nudge them towards the more efficient vehicle, if only through the savings of efficiency.
I’m entirely aware of the alternatives to cars, and would rather we have those. However, we don’t live in a world yet where cars are only needed for rural populations and we won’t get to that world in the timeframe where we need to figure out road maintenance financing, which is currently based on gasoline sales. So we should figure out the current finance issue in a way that doesn’t punish people for picking the best available option, even if it’s not the best possible option. Or at least doesn’t punish them more than the worse options.