A recent Columbia Journal of Tax Law analysis found that motor fuels taxes have failed to raise enough revenue for U.S. highways, bridges, and roads since at least 2008, and that the shortfall comes from stagnating fuel tax rates, inflation, rising fuel efficiency across the national fleet, and, to a far lesser degree, more EV and hybrid use (Columbia Journal of Tax Law, April 2026). That ordering matters. It is the difference between treating a symptom and blaming the wrong patient.

The same article says governments and legal scholars have introduced three remedies that target EV and hybrid owners with extra fees and taxes, and it concludes those approaches are ineffective, impractical, and likely to discourage EV and hybrid purchases without raising enough money to justify the interference (Columbia Journal of Tax Law, April 2026). That is the basic flaw in the unfair EV tax proposal now taking shape in statehouses. It asks a minority of drivers to patch a funding hole they did not create, at least not in any serious sense.

Nebraska offers a neat example of how this thinking works in practice. In February, lawmakers gave final approval to a bill tripling the registration fee for owners of heavy commercial EVs, in a 49-0 vote (Unicameral Update, February 2026). LB207 requires owners of commercially registered alternative-fuel vehicles over 7,500 pounds to pay $450, three times the standard fee (Unicameral Update, February 2026). The standard state registration fee for alternative-fuel vehicles like electric cars is $150, while electric motorcycles and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles pay $75 (Unicameral Update, February 2026).

That is already narrow. It is not a blanket tax on ordinary consumer EVs, and it should not be described as one. Even so, the logic is hard to miss: isolate the electric drivetrain, then attach a multiplier. The bill also excludes large commercial trucks that operate across state lines (Unicameral Update, February 2026). If the point is road wear, that carve-out is doing a lot of work.

The cleanest objection to EV fees is not that roads need no money. They do. It is that charging EV owners extra is a blunt answer to a structural problem. When the cause of a shortfall affects every driver, singling out one technology is less a funding strategy than a political shortcut.

If the issue is that road users are not paying in proportion to road use, the obvious fix is to charge for road use. Miles driven tell you far more than the type of battery under the hood. A flat EV surcharge does not do that. A vehicle-miles-traveled charge does.

Hawaiʻi is already trying that approach. The state launched its road usage charge for light-duty passenger EVs on July 1, 2025, after a federally funded three-year research and demonstration project and 2023 authorizing legislation (Hawaiʻi DOT, June 2025). On the next registration renewal, eligible EV owners can choose between $8 per 1,000 miles, capped at $50 a year, or a flat $50 annual charge (Hawaiʻi DOT, June 2025). Both options replace the state’s current $50 EV registration surcharge (Hawaiʻi DOT, June 2025).

That matters because the fee tracks use instead of ownership. Low-mileage drivers pay less than they did before. Heavy users pay more. The math is not mysterious, which is probably why it makes politicians nervous.

The privacy objection is also less dramatic than critics like to pretend. Hawaiʻi says the registration renewal process will be nearly identical to today, with odometers photographed at the next safety inspection and no GPS or continuous tracking involved (Hawaiʻi DOT, June 2025). Vehicle registration renewal can still be completed through existing methods, including online, by mail, or in person (Hawaiʻi DOT, June 2025). So much for the idea that mileage-based charging requires a government black box under every dashboard.

Hawaiʻi’s design also shows the point of starting with EVs without pretending that should be the end state. By 2028, the state per-mile RUC will become mandatory for EVs, and by 2033, the program is expected to expand to all light-duty vehicles (Hawaiʻi DOT, June 2025). That is the right direction. A system that charges all drivers by mileage fixes the structure of road funding. A system that keeps nudging one vehicle class forever does not.

The strongest argument against a mileage-based tax is familiar: rural drivers travel farther, and they often have fewer transit options. That sounds like a real problem, and sometimes it is. But the best available evidence does not support the claim that a VMT tax is inherently regressive.

MIT’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research modeled a revenue-neutral shift from a gas tax to a VMT tax across roughly 80,000 U.S. census tracts. The analysis used household-level data from the 2017 National Household Transportation Survey and 2022 ACS projections to estimate average vehicle miles traveled at the tract level (MIT CEEPR, September 2025). Its first result was that the shift is modestly progressive in income terms, with lower-income groups on average gaining from the swap and upper-income groups paying more (MIT CEEPR, September 2025).

The geographic pattern is even more interesting. Republican-leaning districts, which overlap significantly with rural areas, showed marked advantages compared with Democratic districts under the modeled shift (MIT CEEPR, September 2025). That is not the result one gets from the standard political script.

There is a caveat. This is a model, not a live rollout. It works at the census tract level and relies on survey data and projections, so real-world behavior could differ. Fair enough. Still, the burden is on critics now. The best available analysis does not show that mileage-based charging is a rural punishment machine. It points the other way.

That leaves EV-targeted surcharges looking weaker than ever. If the politics of a broader mileage system are manageable, then the justification for a narrow and unfair EV tax proposal gets thinner by the page.

The road-funding shortfall is real. So is the temptation to solve it with the least controversial target in sight. EV owners are visible, new, and politically convenient. That does not make them the cause of the problem, and it does not make them the right group to carry the fix.

The better answer is not complicated. Charge for miles, not motors. Start with EVs if that helps the transition. Use existing inspection or registration systems where possible. Then expand the system so everyone contributes in proportion to road use (Hawaiʻi DOT, June 2025). That is simpler, fairer, and much closer to the real mechanics of the problem.

A Columbia Journal of Tax Law analysis published this year concluded that current EV- and hybrid-targeted fee proposals are ineffective, impractical, and bad for adoption without producing enough revenue to justify the damage (Columbia Journal of Tax Law, April 2026). That should be the end of the debate over whether a narrow electric vehicle road tax is a serious fix. It is not. Policymakers who want to solve road funding should stop looking for the easiest group to bill and start building a system that actually matches how the roads are used.