alt Hacker News$130/yr? No matter how heavy the vehicle or how many miles you drive?
This is all so silly. Every other mode of publicly funded transportation infrastructure has direct user fees based on usage, why not roads? Some combination of highway tolls and a weight-based mileage fee.
But that would be an impossible sell because Americans have the impression that roads spring from the ground for free, since they're paid for indirectly with other taxes and figuring out how much of your personal tax bill goes to roads is nearly impossible.
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I agree with your comment a lot. My ideal for road pricing is something like a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_miles_traveled_tax multiplied by weight (maybe squared, due to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law of road damage).
I do think that a lot of people think that public roads are "free" and cost nothing to build and maintain. It is really hard to make people think about where the labor, materials, and funding come from.
Gas has a nice linear relationship with road usage. (Farms can currently buy tax exempt gas and diesel explicitly for this reason).
A lot of states have experimented with mileage-based tracking for EVs but there is no realistic way to do it that's not super fiddly or privacy invasive.
Some people don't want the government keeping track of what they're doing, unless the government has reason to believe they're doing something illegal. This sentiment is so strong to Americans that it is expressly stated as a reason for rebelling against British rule. Taxing consumables allows per-distance taxing without the tracking that comes from toll roads or mileage tracking.
Also, lots of publicly funded transportation infrastructure fees don't closely track usage. Many popular public transit systems charge a single fee for unlimited continuous usage or charge per day/month. There's other weird quirks, for example when going the San Francisco Bay area, I always plan my stops in a clockwise direction, because then I don't have to pay bridge tolls when traveling in that direction (north and east), but would in the opposite direction (south and west).