TL;DR: A ton mileage fee to shift the cost of maintain the roads to commercial users and ensure everyone pays their fair share, and the CalRail program to improve regional rail.

I hate Express Lanes. Express Lanes are government malfeasance in concrete form. The government separates the jobs and the housing so you have to commute, then fails to build enough infrastructure so there is a lot of traffic. Instead of solving either of those problems, the government builds a lane for wealthy people to buy themselves out of the issue while everyone else sits in traffic. I understand the economic arguments, but it is just immoral.

Solano County is defined by the 80 and the 80 is defined by its potholes. The current funding model relies on fuel taxes to pay for the upkeep and expansion of the road network. However, not all road users pay fuel taxes. I have driven an EV for several years all over California and haven’t contributed. More over, trucks who create much more damage to the roads do not pay substantially more fuel tax. If a semi truck gets 5 miles to the gallon and your Prius gets 50 it only pays 10 times the tax but causes 20 times the damage.

The solution is to replace the fuel tax with a ton milage fee, charging road users based on the number of miles they drive and the weight of their vehicle. So a 40 ton truck would pay 20 times as much as a 2 ton car. This has been proposed in the past and the sticking point is always how to collect the tax, because it can create real civil liberties issues. Putting a government tracker in your car should be nonstarter. The idea is to charge commercial vehicles based on their mileage which they already report for depreciation tax benefits and for privately owned vehicles simple assume around 15,000 miles per year.

My car weighs about 2 tons, and the fee would be a penny a ton a mile, so $0.01x2 tons x15,000 miles = $300 a year added to my registrations fees which should be lower than the current annual cost of the gas tax. And a semi truck that weights 40 tons would simply pay $0.40 a mile, whether it is diesel, electric or something else when they report their taxes.

Highways are not the only solution to moving goods and people around the state. Many of California’s freeways are constrained by development on either side, they simply cannot get any wider. There needs to be an alternative, and that is to use the rail network to provide alternative capacity, and protect the freeways from overuse that causes traffic jams.

It is time to turn the train to nowhere into a train to somewhere. The Californian High Speed Rail authority (CAHSR) has been an embarrassment for the state. They have failed to meet all of the conditions that the voters placed on them when the bonds were approved and are unlikely to meet the much lower standard they set for themselves.

The problem with HSR is that the rail network is just that, a network. You cannot draw a line in the middle of the state and hope that it work. We need to think regionally. The proposal is to reorganize the CAHSR into a new department CalRail within CalTrans that would be responsible for the purchase, operation and maintenance of rail right of ways in California; with goal of grade separated electrified regional rail. Much of the design work has been completed by the CalTrain modernization project, and by expanding that standard statewide to the Capitol Corridor and the Gold Runner right of ways etc. we start to create a network that can support regional rail and eventually high speed rail.

In order to start a bus company you just need to buy a bus, but in order to start a train company you have to buy the train and then buy or lease all of the tracks. Amtrak gets delayed because the freight companies own the tracks and prioritize their own trains. By having the tracks move to public control we can open the rail system to many different operators lowering costs and increasing the number of journeys. Reducing the reliance on the highways so we can avoid costly and damaging expansions or just giant traffic jams.