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Mileage tax may fund new road repairs
Driver behind the wheel.
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Bill Radke: The price of gas has been rising the last few months
-- as you probably know -- right along with the stock market, which seems like bad news while you're standing with the nozzle in your tank. But the increase has been great for the people who maintain our streets and highways. Because road repairs are funded through gas taxes. In fact, governments are worrying about what'll happen to that revenue if more and more people start buying hybrids and plug-in electric cars.
As Mitchell Hartman reports from Portland, Ore.,
the search is on for a new way to tax motorists.
Mitchell Hartman: I started this story by getting in my Toyota Prius and driving about an hour south on I-5 to the state capital, where I went to see Jim Whitty, of the Oregon Department of Transportation.
HARTMAN: I just drove from Portland to Salem, took just about exactly a gallon of gas, since I get about 46 miles to the gallon.
JIM WHITTY: That's great for the environment. It's just that if a lot of people start doing that, with highly fuel-efficient vehicles, the revenues for the roads start dropping off because people aren't paying gas tax. If you want to keep the roads up, we've got to find a solution.
Whitty's in charge of finding that solution in Oregon. His office did a pioneering study of 300 drivers whose vehicles were wired to pay a mileage tax. Every time they pulled up to the pump, a wi-fi receiver logged how far they'd driven. The tax was then added to their bill. They could be charged a higher rate for driving during rush hour.
The main concern of the Oregon drivers? Privacy.
Congress has now funded a nationwide study of drivers from Wichita to Albequerque to Miami. University of Iowa researcher Jon Kuhl will be gauging how willing Americans are to have Uncle Sam sit on their dashboard.
JOHN KUHL: Our cell phones that we all carry around in our pockets are certainly implicitly tracking where we go and providing information about our behavior in much more explicit ways than a system like this would. Yet we're much more likely to accept that compromise of our privacy.
Because, says Kuhl, we get cell-phone service in return. A system that tracked real-time mileage using GPS could offer services that motorists might want. Oregon's Jim Whitty says that could outweigh privacy objections.
WHITTY: The devices ought to be able to do other things than raise revenue, to make their driving easier. For example, predicting time on a specific route for getting home, identifying congestion and alternative routes.
If politicians do eventually roll out a mileage tax, it won't happen overnight. Revenues from the gas tax are now flat. They're not expected to fall precipitously, until a lot more fuel-efficient vehicles are out on the road, around the year 2020.
I'm Mitchell Hartman for Marketplace.
If we tax truck to pay for their share of the road damage there will be less truck traffic. Long distance freight can move by rail, or water if possible � it does not have to go only by truck. Freight can move to distribution centers, then by truck to the final user. Better yet if we get just ship by rail to those shippers who have a rail siding. Trucks cause the majority of the road and bridge damage. They pay fuel taxes like automobiles but they use more fuel so the pay more tax. But when you look at the tax compared to the damage there is an obvious disconnect. Local streets are paid for by property taxes, county roads are paid for with bonds � trucks pay nothing to use these roads. Stop trucks from getting a free ride at our expense.
I don't see an immediate reason why a motorist should be charged a higher MILEAGE tax when driving a stretch of
road during rush hour. Rush hour driving causes more wear and tear on the road than off peak driving?
I think that case has yet to be made.
As for GPS, I believe it is needed in cell phones because of the mobile nature of the technology. I'm not sure it is the right technology to employ to track vehicle mileage. Taxing on total miles driven since the last fueling doesn't need to involve any tracking of up-to-the-minute location. The tranponders at the gas stations should be able to ping a stored count in the vehicle to get the total mileage between fuel ups. There is the issue of different road tax rates when a vehicle crosses from one state to the road in the next state. The state-line pinger would probably not need to be a lot different than the gas station pinger.
The last comment from Mr. Whitty is:
"The devices ought to be able to do other things than raise revenue."
If mileage tracking is to be used to replace a fuel consumption tax than mileage tracking is what the technology
should be confined to.
Damned if we do, damned if we don't.
Fuel efficient cars are lighter, thereby not creating as much damage to the pavement.
Any vehicle requiring more than four tires is much heavier and will cause much more damage to the pavement.
Increase the mileage tax on truckers, that increases the cost of freight which in turn increases the cost to everyone else on down the line till we get to the consumer who pays the final, inflated price.
Develop cars that don't use gas or need to fill up? Additional taxes just for having such a car to pay for the roads.
Electric cars use power from coal burning electric plants = not so green.
Raise prices, taxes and cost seems to be the pervasive answer. How can people afford this?
If the question is "how to tax drivers by the mile", what benefit do the GPS devices give us over my odometer?
At least my odometer doesn't know where I've been, how long I was there, and how fast I got there.
Citizens should not be subjected to this kind of intrusion by the government. Just because my cell phone can track me doesn't make it okay for my car to do the same.
Damage to roads is proportional to the number of miles travelled times the number of axles times the fourth power of the axle loading. I have no problem with an additional tax based on distance travelled, provided someone else pays for the collection of it, and it is proportional to the product of the fourth power of the axle loading times the number of axles.
Of course, the simple solution would be a much larger fuel tax, perhaps in the form of a carbon tax. Individual motorists would still pay an unfairly large part of the tax, but perhaps some of the heavy traffic would be diverted to rail. That would reduce road damage disproportionately.
I understand the concern of "big brother watching" that may head off the gps supported documentation. In addition loss of payments from out of state vehicles.
In Atlanta, residents are required to have their autos have a smog inspection, a $20 fee, annually before the tag can be renewed. In Virginia, residents are required to have a safety inspection, an $8 fee, annually before the tag can be renewed. In both of these inspections, the inspection firm communicates with the state to verify VIN and to update the pass/fail certificate.
My suggestion is that have the mileage noted by a third party at a nominal fee, in addition to offering the gps service to those drivers, such as OTR semis, who drive many miles regionally or nationally.
