Let’s do some math:
The number of gallons of vehicle fuel consumed in California is approximately 18 billion gallons:
https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/pubs/hf/pl11028/chapter5.cfm
However, these are 2009 figures and let’s say that consumption now is 22 billion gallons of vehicle fuel annually
22 billion gallons x $0.529 = $11,638,000,000.00
So, right off we see that the proposal to raise $100 billion represents a nearly ten fold increase over the current revenue.
There are approximately 33.3 million registered cars, vans, trucks, motorcycles, etc in California:
http://dmv.ca.gov/about/profile/official.pdf
Consequently, the per registered vehicle fuel tax burden is approximately:
$11.638 billion/33.3 million registered vehicles = $349.49/registered vehicle
In order to eliminate the fuel tax entirely and raise the $100 billion based on a $0.05/mile driven tax requires a total mileage of:
$100 billion/$0.05/mile driven = 2,000,000,000,000 miles driven
2 trillion miles!
To put that into perspective:
2 trillion miles/33.3 million registered vehicles =
60060 miles/year/registered vehicle
($3003/year mileage tax)
5005 miles/month/registered vehicle
($250/month mileage tax)
164 miles/day/registered vehicle
($8/day mileage tax)
The proposal requires that every registered vehicle in the state be driven 164 miles each day of the year.
It is interesting to note that the legislator proposing this tax has a 200 mile/per day daily commute. He must think that every one else in California has a similar comute as well.
Note: Although I did use a spreadsheet to do these calculations, it is still pretty early here on the East Coast. When you are dealing with that many zeros, the possibility of an error exists. Frankly, given the derived magnitude of the proposed increase and its likely impact on the average driver if implemented, I hope I did make an error somewhere along the line.
You can bet they will have a ‘minimum miles’ charge tacked on case you park your vehicle.
Then, of course, administrative fees and any other fee they can think of added in.