Virginia Ping! If you want on or off the Virginia Ping List, please freepmail me.
And don't you just find it hilarious how the Northern Virginia liberal hybrid-owners are now getting the old "bait-and-switch" treatment with this proposed new "assessment" (theft)? Remember all the promises of big tax breaks, no gas taxes, and HOV privileges if they would just shell out the extra thousands of dollars to buy their hybrids. Now they're going to get shaken down like everybody else.
I’ve read that something like 30% is skimmed off the top of highway funds before we even think about blowing money on wasteful transportation spending.
There’s plenty of money for highways, its just being blown on other crap.
By that reckoning - making everyone pay for the toll roads, vs. those that use them, is like saying that raising gas taxes can be used to supplement movie theaters so they don't have to raise the prices on refreshments - you get to pay for it even if you don't go to the theater. It's the "democratic" way.
No it wouldn't. There is no need now either. There is plenty of money in state coffers to do what's needed. The problem is "what's needed". meh
I already pay a toll each day on the Coleman Bridge which spans the York. I sure as hell don’t need yet another toll or tax.
Those of us in Southern and Western VA are simply hostages of the non-Southern elite that runs this state from NoVA and the overly reconstructed “Virginians” in the Richmond/Tidewater area. If you want to talk about secession, this is justified secession from them.
14 cents a gallon is NOT going to kill anyone. If you burn a 1000 gallons a year (which is some serious driving) it’s still only $140 dollars per year. People, you’re not getting FREE roads - not possible.
If our AIRHEAD Governor in here in Texas would have been done this, we wouldn’t have toll roads pushing 20 cents PER MILE now. Our governor spends his time with a wad in pants bragging about how he didn’t increase the gasoline tax, while you have people in Dallas and Houston (and other cities) paying thousands of dollars more per year to drive.
I travel up I 81 pretty regular. As a matter of fact, I buy diesel fuel at a station at Exit 77, 100 miles from home because it is the least expensive fuel on my travels in either direction.
Gasoline is also less expensive.
Virginia could easily raise the fuel tax by from .07 to .10 per gallon and be in line with prices in adjacent Tennessee and still less than North Carolina.
Based on adjacent states, Virginia fuel is under taxed.
1. Fuel taxes are less reliable over time because they have been declining due to improved fuel efficiency even as funding needs have increased. This is exacerbated when you have more and more vehicles that don't use traditional motor fuels.
2. Check your state's laws closely to see what types of expenditures can even be paid for out of the fuel tax revenue. In some states, any transportation funding from the fuel tax can only go into new projects, not ordinary repairs.
3. At 17.5 cents per gallon, it seems like Virginia has one of the lower fuel tax rates in the U.S. (for whatever that's worth).
4. While there's an understandable inclination to make every attempt to have users pay directly for the use of public assets (hence the appeal of toll facilities in recent decades), it is very difficult to figure out who the "user" is for transportation infrastructure when you consider how much commerce takes place on our highways that benefits the public at large and not just the users of a given road or bridge.
5. Here in the NYC area we have a series of interesting situations unfolding involving major bridge rehabilitation and replacement projects. Two of them in particular -- the Goethals Bridge and the Tappan Zee Bridge -- involve bridges that have passed the end of their useful lives and need to be replaced. In both cases the agency that owns the bridges has looked at public-private arrangements for having the bridge built by a private consortium that would then collect tolls for a period of several decades to finance the cost. In both cases, the financial analysis shows that the tolls that would be required to pay the cost of the bridge would be so high that revenues would suffer simply because fewer motorists would use the bridge with such a high toll in place. The implications of this are really fascinating.
Anyway ... flame away if you feel like it, folks!
“State Sen. John Watkins (R-Powhatan) proposed a plan that would increase Virginia’s gas tax from 17.5 cents a gallon to 31.5 cents a gallon. The 14-cent increase would eliminate the need to add more toll roads.”
With “Republicans” like this, who needs democrats?
Virginia Ping! If you want on or off the Virginia Ping List, please freepmail me.
Where is the flying car I was supposed to have by now?