Some counties such as Pennington are considering wheel taxes. Registering a vehicle there usually saves about $16 now. Changes in state and federal funding may require all SD counties to have a wheel tax if they want to get other funds for repairing highways and bridges.
Heavy trucks do something like 15,000 times as much damage per mile of travel as do small vehicles with 2 or 4 wheels. The exponential proposal below doesn't approach a 15,000 times ratio, but does improve the ratio significantly compared to what most counties do now.
Instead of $4 or so for each wheel/tire up to 12 (which is an improvement since Republicans in Pierre finally learned to count past 4) is the typical current tax. For a modest start in making the wheel tax bear some minimal connection to actual highway damage by vehicles, consider an exponential increase based on two multiplied by itself. This would produce taxes as indicated below:
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Wheels -- $ per wheel--- $ totals for some wheel combinations
- 1--- $2
- 2--- $4
- 3-- $8
- 4-- $16 $total for 4 wheels $30.
- 5-- $32
- 6--- $64 $Total for 6 wheels $128
- 7--- $128
- 8-- $256 $total for 8 wheels $512
- 9-- $512
- 10--$1024 $total for 10 wheels $2048
- 11-- $2048
- 12--$4096 $total for 12 wheels $8192
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The ratio between 4-wheel total and 12 wheel totals is about 273 to 1...far from 15,000 to one which would be appropriate based on engineer's estimate of highway damage per mile comparing cars with heavy trucks and buses.
This may seem radical to South Dakotans and more or less rational to mathematicians, but it seems to me to warrant serious consideration. Car drivers should realize they are subsidizing heavy trucks (and heavy drinkers) as well. Time to rationalize this.
*** Stay tuned for more prosaic stuff--- Doug Wiken
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