No free ride: EVs are economical and important for the climate, but they’ll still need roads to run on

Illinois lawmakers cannot be criticized for failure to anticipate the dilemma facing a state that is pulling out all the stops to welcome electric vehicles while needing to ensure they have safe, smooth roads to run on.

They added a $100 surcharge to registration fees for electric vehicles and that generated 60% more in revenue for road work from those vehicles than they contributed last year.

But, as Daily Herald Watchdog Editor Jake Griffin reported over the weekend, a 60% increase from a single source doesn’t necessarily produce the kind of revenue the figure might lead you to expect, and in the long run, the registration surcharge alone will fall far short of what the state normally requires when balancing the revenues vehicles produce against the costs they incur to maintain safe, smooth roads to travel on.

In fact, so far, they don’t even provide three-fourths of the $12 million allotted for incentives to encourage people to buy EVs.

And that $100 a year EV owners pay to bypass the gas pump represents just a fraction — not quite two-fifths, in fact — of the average $255 paid in road taxes by the owner of a gasoline-powered vehicle.

Drivers of traditional vehicles naturally may feel more than a little pique to be paying two and a half times as much as EV owners to drive on the same roads, but the issue here is more than simple fairness. Eventually, if the dreams of environmentally conscious planners and drivers come true, EVs will constitute a major portion if not almost the entire complement of vehicles on the road, and when that happens, the $100 a year they’re now paying for road construction and upkeep won’t be nearly enough.

The challenge is how to make up the difference. Griffin’s story notes that the gasoline tax provides a fairly direct connection between the need for road work and the source of paying for it. But electricity can come from more than just an isolated station and powers more than just cars and trucks. So at present, the only pure link involving EVs is the registration fee, and bumping that to a sudden whopping $255 would doubtless slam the brakes on encouraging EV purchases.

So, while lawmakers have obviously begun preparing the way to deal with a coming duty to support the roads on which electric vehicles will run, they’ve only, as the song says, just begun. State officials hope to see a million EVs on the road by 2030. That’s more than 11 times the 88,600 or so on the road now, It doesn’t take a supercomputer to portray the impact on our road quality if state coffers are getting $155 a year less from each of some 911,000 vehicles.

For good reason, electric vehicles are an important component of the nation’s and the state’s strategies for improving the environment and combating climate change. And, to be sure, they can be an economical choice for consumers, even with additional costs to support roads. But consumers and road planners must not go into this new world blindfolded. The ride ahead will be better and cheaper. But it clearly won’t be free.