Fairer highway taxes needed

Your Nov. 12 editorial advocating mileage taxes on electric cars was off the mark. Such taxes would be far from fair. Any equitable road maintenance tax would be based on vehicle weight.

One large truck does the road damage of about 10,000 cars, as you reported in a story published July 18, 2010. The Washington Department of Transportation website agrees, as does the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials.

Pavement wear is almost entirely about truck weight. Trucks on Washington’s roads cost us more in road maintenance than all of the state’s cars do, yet these trucks causing 99 percent of the road damage pay less than 10 percent of costs. Even a large SUV or pickup contributes about four times the road wear of the typical small electric cars you’d like to target.

If you want to link road taxes to those incurring the costs, let’s do it! That means hiking taxes on heavy trucks 1,000 percent while charging compact hybrid and electric cars pennies at most, and getting the state’s general fund out of road maintenance altogether.

Tax by weight. It’s only fair.

David Camp

Spokane