Currently road maintenance in most places is funded by gas taxes which is more or less fair because if you drive more with a larger car you pay more.

Aside from posturing, the EV transition would end gas sales, thus ending this mechanism for funding roads. A per mile tax seems like a fair replacement.

Unfortunately common sense vanishes when everything is a chance to demonstrate which tribe you're a member of.

What you're really arguing for is toll roads. The quibble is over how to collect the toll.

When I think "toll road" I think limited access highway, like the NYS Thruway. We've got to pay for other kinds of roads too.

You could put a GPS tracker in the car but a lot of people won't go for that. Efforts to put more telematics in cars such as

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dedicated_short-range_communic...

have gone nowhere because nobody can find an agreeable solution for security, privacy, how to pay for the infrastructure, etc.

I meant you're making it manifest that all roads are toll roads.

I like your GPS-based toll system idea. Different roads could have different toll rates that are displayed on your device, including a meter for how much you owe, and all jurisdictions can get their money. Fueled up in one state and drove through an intervening state en route to another? They can get their money. Heck, you can do it on a county level. You can fluctuate the toll rate to effect congestion pricing.

There's a lot you can do with this idea!

RUCs existed well before EVs were a thing. They apply to diesel vehicles (as unlike petrol, diesel doesn't have a road tax on it). EVs were temporarily exempted from RUCs (partly as an incentive, and partly because RUCs on light vehicles are a lot higher than what an equivalent fuel-efficient vehicle will pay in road tax through petrol usage). The current government removed this exemption (without adjusting the RUC rates to a sensible level for EVs), causing BEVs to pay significantly more road tax than an equivalent fuel-efficient non-EV does and removing their advantage of lower running costs (which has massively hurt the EV market). They "justified" this with their vague plans to move petrol vehicles to RUCs at some point in the future.