Three stories torn right from the pages of the local newspaper of record, The
Zero, and other publications, all target cars in Portland.
The Zero runs a story on Monday about a local taxing district that
Rainbow City Council member, Sam Adams, has proposed. The other story involves the “successful” pilot program involving lojacking our vehicles (not bikes, of course) for the sole purpose of being able to tax us by the MILE DRIVEN in addition to charging a gas tax. The idea is to eventually fade out the gas tax but how they plan to capture outtatowners’ money is anybody’s guess. Mine? That they’ll never get rid of the gas tax and will tax us twice. The third story involves the discussion of charging tolls over Willamette River bridges (here) to raise money.Let’s take these quickly one at a time.
This so called “Halo” taxing district would allow people in other neighborhoods pay for improvements in a particular ‘hood. And what are those improvements? Bike paths and sidewalks. See? Bikes and peds are on the side of angels so they’re
covered by a Halo. Improvements for motorized vehicles? Spawn of Satan.
Now bikes and peds are fine, but you and I know
that there will be no improvements for the one mode of transportation used most in those SW Portland neighborhoods: cars.
The fact that I travel Hamilton nearly every day at peak traffic times and have NEVER, not once, seen a bicyclist apparently means nothing to a city hellbent on becoming a Platinum Bicycle city, whatever that means. The way it has worked since time immemorial is to have, at the time of the development, the developer pay for the improvements, or, if there were no improvements, to assess the homeowners for the improvements. Now the homeowners don’t want to pay
On the issue of putting the GPS or lojack on cars, well, I’ll let one of my wise 5th Listeners synthesize it for you:
Victoria,
Do not be fooled. We are already paying by the mile for the privilege of driving our cars. Oregon ’s gas tax is by the gallon of gas and every car gets some number of miles to the gallon (EPA publishes that data). It is a word problem from 6th grade. Say my Prius gets 45 miles to the gallon. Oregon averages 24 cents of tax per gallon. Thus, I am paying 24/45 or about ½ cent per mile. If I had a Hummer (please tell Santa) and only got 10 miles to the gallon, I would be paying 24/10 or 2.4 cents per mile.
But were the State folks sleeping the day they taught arithmetic? They want to tax by the mile and not call it a “gas tax” hence the GPS idea. The term “gas tax” is a bad word and a mileage tax is “good.” They also want to factor in the “impact” that a vehicle has on the road infrastructure. So the heavier the vehicle, the more it wears down the road (or so the theory goes). So, then they would want to charge more for the heavier (like a Hummer) vehicle and less for the light weight ones (like a Prius). But wait, the current gas tax does that already since miles per gallon is proportional to vehicle weight. Now, if someone comes up with a 40 mph 400 horsepower engine, then the Hummer owners would get a real deal with our current gas tax.
So in the normal manner, Oregon wants a several hundred dollar per car way to measure something they already know and let the out of state drivers pay nothing. Only in Oregon .
David
Finally the story about Sam and Ted Wheeler proposing Willamette River bridge tolls. This story is to soften up the ground a bit to get us used to the ideas that the city and county have no money to improve bridges.
May I remind you of just a few expenditures we’ve been asked to endure or have endured as taxpayers:
$500,000,000 in subsidies to SOWA, millions of abatements and subsidies in the Pearl, $500,000,000 requested to build a fiber optic network in Portland (what, so they can tax the internet? Why wouldn’t private industry do this?), $80,000,000 for a choo choo train down Burnside. $25,000 to pay off business leaders who would ostensibly benefit by this train to sell the idea to reluctant neighbors. I Tax. Klingon translators. Gay marriage. Wapato Jail sitting idle. Screwing over Dorothy English and burning tax dollars to do it.
These are just a few examples. There are dozens more.
Oh, and, don’t forget, they have no money to improve infrastructure. None.
Sure.
Cars represent freedom to go anywhere we want, when we want. They allow us to live and work in different places. The most important component to getting and maintaining a job is having the flexibility of a car. Government doesn’t do that.
Consider the deleterious economic effects of making it more and more expensive to own a car.
