Transportation is the leading source of carbon emissions in the United States, and Democratic-led state governments are increasingly targeting the sector in proposals that would shift vehicles away from fossil-fuel power to electric.
California lawmakers, already committed to producing 100% of the state’s electricity from renewable sources by 2045, are debating how to transition its transportation network off fossil fuels. In 2017, California Assembly member Phil Ting proposed a bill that would ban selling new cars powered by internal combustion engines by 2040. Others have focused on making electric cars more affordable by offering tax incentives and subsidies.
“They are making a political effort to address the problem [of climate change] as they see it. That doesn’t mean it’s not going to have gigantic costs,” Nick Zaiac told the Washington Examiner. Zaiac is a fellow at the R street institute, a free-market think tank, focusing on transportation and infrastructure.
“At least what they are doing is trying to address an actual problem, unlike many California solutions that are just simply trying to do something without actually addressing the underlying problem,” Zaiac said.
California’s isolated efforts to cut emissions likely won’t have a noticeable effect on global emissions. Drastically cutting the amount of carbon-based fuel burned for transportation in California “will just lower the price of fuel everywhere else in the world and may or may not actually decrease the amount of carbon,” Zaiac said.
Under the plan, fossil fuel-powered vehicles would gradually get phased out and replaced by electric ones. As demand increased, the price of electric vehicles would fall, but likely not enough to cover the gap left by the cheaper gas and diesel cars that would be outlawed.
Families without the extra income to pay for a more expensive electric vehicle would be forced to find a workable solution for the short term, whether that is driving an aging car longer or switching to public transit if available. On top of the increased cost of a vehicle, the state government will likely increase taxes on residents to pay for new infrastructure projects, such as installing electric car charging stations.
So while the rest of the world would enjoy a marginal decrease in the price of fuel, any state that adopts a proposal such as Ting’s would significantly increase the costs of travel on its own residents.
Aside from decreased emissions statewide, a switch to electric vehicles has a chance of helping slightly with congested city streets because electric vehicles generally accelerate faster than gas-powered vehicles.
Any gains in faster stop-and-go traffic could easily be undone by increased road work. Electric vehicles are often heavier than other similarly sized cars. A Tesla Model 3 weighs more than 3,500 pounds at the low end, while a Toyota Camry is several hundred pounds lighter. That difference, multiplied hundreds of times over, would lead to increased wear-and-tear on roads.
“That could cause more road damage that needs more construction, and more construction causes more congestion,” Zaiac said. “So any transition to electric vehicles that requires a large amount of new construction would cause more congestion, at least through the decade-or-so-long transition period.”
Infrastructure across the U.S. is aging and in states such as California, governments are already under financial pressure to cover the costs of maintaining it. Road conditions in California are especially bad, ranked 49th in the country by U.S. News & World Report. The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that the state would need to invest $130 billion into infrastructure over the next decade to repair the crumbling system.
“Realistically, this means that much of the burden of this will just fall on commuter taxpayers” in the form of a new type of gas tax that can be applied to electric-vehicle travel, Zaiac said.
Local governments with much thinner budget margins would also strain under new electric-vehicle requirements to transition their infrastructure and public transportation fleet. Replacing a fleet of fossil fuel-powered buses with electric models would be “a huge cost.”
“This will just put further strain on municipalities that simply have not prepared and saved to buy new buses right now,” Zaiac said. “They have already-made units, and those last a long time.”
In the short term, public transit would likely be thrown into chaos under increased pressure to transition a fleet of vehicles in a period when people may opt to ride public transit in greater numbers, rather than invest in a new electric vehicle.
