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Can a miles-traveled tax finance infrastructure?
By Burgess Everett
February 6, 2013
Politico
Imagine paying into the nation’s roads and bridges based on how far you drive each year, rather than how much gasoline you consume.
That future is not far off, transportation experts and some lawmakers say. But the United States has not yet fully committed to researching a replacement for the outdated federal gasoline tax, which increasingly brings in fewer dollars relative to the trillions in investment needed for roads, rails and ports.
The main impediment thus far to a vehicle-miles-traveled fee: It’s easily cast as a policy that will bring more government intrusion and the specter of Big Brother.
“There’s a fair amount of ignorance on the subject. It is a new concept,” said Jack Basso, a transportation financing expert.
But Basso said that with the wide acceptance of electronic tolling schemes — which track car movements through plazas — the privacy flag raised “is a red herring.” Instead, the real problems to solve are selecting from myriad technological choices and evolving away from collecting taxes at the fuel pump to charging vehicle owners directly.
The reasons for shaking up the funding mechanism for road repairs, public transportation funding and interstate coordination are many. The federal gas tax has proved near-impossible to increase since 1993 and isn’t indexed to inflation.
President Barack Obama has led the federal charge to increase fuel efficiency in the nation’s auto fleet, which means fewer gas tax dollars. And a new class of alternative-fuel vehicles promises to not use a drop of gasoline.
Those factors have necessitated deeply unpopular general fund bailouts for the national infrastructure program in recent years and led Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) to introduce a bill to establish a $150 million national study of a distance-based fee during the dying embers of the 112th Congress.
The long-shot bill died in committee, but Blumenauer plans to submit another effort sometime this Congress. He said the country needs to get a jump on a new way to pay for the country’s beleaguered infrastructure, which plummets further down competitiveness lists each year.
“This is going to happen, I think, faster than people recognize,” Blumenauer said of a move away from the gas tax. “There are a variety of states that are dealing with a transportation fund that’s in a downward spiral and there are more and more vehicles that aren’t paying their fair share.”
Nearly everyone who has given the issue even a cursory look is aware of the problem — but that has not yet translated to action. The White House has said a vehicle-miles-traveled system is not a policy the administration would embrace. House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee
Chairman Bill Shuster (R-Pa.) has called VMT the long-term option that “seems to be the only way to stop the decline” in slackened revenues but isn’t backing Blumenauer’s national study.
“I’d like to see the states step up,” Shuster said. “The federal government doesn’t, I think, need to do that. The federal government should be talking to the states and saying: ‘If you want to do this, let’s all get together. Let’s all chip in.’”
States including Washington, Nevada and Oregon are already researching the issue; and Congress initiated a nationwide study in a 2005 transportation bill. But technology has evolved exponentially in the intervening eight years, and Blumenauer said more needs to be done.
He has not yet reintroduced his bill this Congress, holding out hope he can huddle with Shuster to devise legislation that can be tacked onto the next surface transportation bill, due in 2014. Blumenauer is bullish that bipartisan support for transportation finance innovation will soon coalesce.
“I suspect you are going to see momentum,” he said.
Oregon’s Department of Transportation is in the midst of a four-month pilot program involving dozens of drivers that gives a menu of choices for paying into the state’s transportation coffers based on driving distance. The option that could make the most sense on a national scale is a device that plugs into an automobile’s diagnostic port to get information straight from the odometer — not a GPS device.
Privacy issues have dogged the idea of VMT for years, and infrastructure boosters don’t expect the public to give slam-dunk approval to the idea of the government tracking drivers’ every movement to tax them.
Jim Whitty, ODOT’s resident alternative funding expert, said the odometer system would be the simplest and least controversial way to track how much road drivers use. Oregon offers a GPS tracking option as part of its program, but that’s from a private company.
“We just don’t want to be accused of tracking people,” Whitty said. “What we’re discovering is this solves the privacy issues. That people don’t have the concern.”
Oregon’s Legislature is also looking to address reluctance by liberals who want to ensure that fuel-inefficient vehicles like SUVs and trucks are punished for guzzling gas. A straight-up mileage-based fee would lead to a situation where a Prius and an Escalade are paying the same rate. A bill introduced in the statehouse would apply the mileage-based fee only to high-mileage vehicles.
“It doesn’t make sense to replace the gas tax for inefficient vehicles,” Whitty said. “Keep those vehicles on the gas tax.”
Sound complicated? That might be why such a study is needed. House transportation committee ranking member Nick Rahall (D-W.Va.) said he is particularly concerned about the possibility of putting black boxes in cars and inflicting economic pain on low-income constituents who drive long distances in his sprawling district. But he thinks it’s time for Washington to figure out what it can and cannot do.
“What kind of technology is that going to involve and how expensive is it going to be and how are you going to pay for all of that?” Rahall said, also disagreeing with Shuster’s assertion that research should be left to the states.
“I’d rather see the feds do it. I think it’s a federal issue.”
House Republicans fought to prohibit the federal government from even studying a distance-based fee in last year’s spending bill but recently dropped their insistence on including that provision in the next one, due in March.
Former Rep. Chip Cravaack (R-Minn.), who’s from a massive district on the Canadian border, was the bulldog behind that prohibition effort and expects the deep opposition in the House to continue.
“I don’t think people will be embracing VMT. I really don’t,” he said. “I carried the ball this time. There will be someone else that will carry the ball.”