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Oregon Lawmakers Propose Mileage Tax On Fuel Efficient Vehicles
Hugh Pickens writes "Facing a $10 billion revenue shortfall for transportation financing, the Oregon Legislature is expected to consider a bill to require drivers with a vehicle getting at least 55 miles per gallon of gasoline to pay a per-mile tax after 2015 to offset the loss in tax revenue for fuel efficient cars at the gas pump, where the government has traditionally collected money to build and fix roads. Oregonians currently pay 30 cents per gallon, a tax that is automatically added at the pump, but as cars become more fuel efficient and alternative fuel sources are identified, state officials project gas tax revenue will decline. 'Everybody uses the road, and if some pay and some don't, then that's an unfair situation that's got to be resolved,' says Jim Whitty of the Department of Transportation. Opponents of the Oregon proposal say it will hurt a new industry. 'It will be one more obstacle that the industry and auto dealers will face in convincing consumers to buy these new cars,' says Paul Cosgrove, a lobbyist for the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers. Other states, such as Nevada and Washington, are also looking at a per-mile charge and a Washington law that would charge electric car owners an annual fee goes into effect in February. Oregon did a pilot study of the mileage tax (PDF) where participants paid 1.56 cents per mile and got a credit for any gasoline tax they paid at the pump. Although initial media portrayals of the system were almost uniformly negative, 91% of test participants preferred the mileage tax to paying gas taxes."
Without GPS, how do they know when you leave the state? And with GPS isn't that a serious privacy issue?
Here in Washington State, they are planning a $100 / year fee for these types of vehicles.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Or older cars. Not everyone who drives a gas guzzler is necessarily behind the wheel of a bulldozer.
If computers were people, I'd be a misanthrope.
Increase the gas tax to compensate. Gasoline should already be taxed more highly that it is because of it's numerous externalities.
That will just incent the purchase of higher mileage vehicles, reinforcing a virtuous cycle.
Eventually I suppose the time will come when taxation of high mileage vehicles will be needed, but clearly that isn't now.
I don't really understand the difference between levying a higher gas tax (which is far easier to implement), and implementing a complicated system for tracking miles driven, and levying this at the gas pump.
Call me stupid, couldn't Oregon achieve two goals of their goals (reducing SUVs, and increased revenue) by simply adjusting the gas tax by the average MPG for cars each year? No crazy GPS+Transmitter system needed, no transition time to a new system, and no invasion of privacy needed...
I don't really understand why people are more amenable to a mile tax system vs gas tax... Unless you have a 100% electric car, you still pay for the additional miles driven, through the additional gas you consume. The only difference is you can reduce your taxes paid by purchasing a more fuel-efficient car...
It's backwards to penalize people for conserving oil. This is a very short-sighted strategy.
They already have the mechanism to subsitute some amount of mileage taxes for some of the gas taxes. Most state already have a "smog-check" requirement where a licenced facility records the odometer reading so you can register your car. They could easily just add a mileage tax to your vehicle licencing fees as a requirement to register your car. If enough states do this, you could even just tie this to the reciprocal licence-plate identifcation toll agreements that states have with each other (to enable them to replace toll takers with electronic toll devices and licence plate readering software) to account for some out-of-state licence plates.
The current gas tax is probably highly regressive anyhow (poor folk driving older cars that get lower MPG on average pay more than rich folks that driver newer cars that get better MPG), so this seems like the progressive thing to do. You probably don't want to get rid of the gas tax entirely (as it has a small amount of incentive for getting cars that get better MPG), but say split the desired revenue collection about 50-50.
The shortsightedness is trying to subsidize one group with another... when the taxed group is one you are trying to reduce the # of.
While today there are clearly more traditional petrol autos than hybrids (or fully electric)... what happens when the scales tip?
Funding the S-CHIP program through tobacco taxes sounds good... until you reach the tipping point when there aren't enough smokers paying the tax.
As I recall Minnesota ran into a similar problem a few years... where vehicle tabs (amongst other things in part) fund the bus system... when the recession hit, quite a few people got rid of their cars and started running the heavily subsidized bus system.
The result? Massive losses to Metro Transit who had to go running to the city & state for piles of cash because the designs of the legislature had worked too well.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
Electric/hybrid vehicles should pay less per mile as they do less damage to the roads. An engineer friend told me that road damage is proportional to the fourth power of the weight, so an SUV that weighs 5500 pounds will wear the roads approximately 10 times faster than a hybrid that weights 3000 pounds. It's only fair and reasonable that the Escalade driver pays 10 times the gas taxes, assuming that lawmakers are being honest about what those taxes are used for. Yeah, I know; I had a hard time typing that last part with a straight face.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Isn't it more fair to distribute the tax according to use?
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
SUVs are not the gas guzzlers many make them out to be. Newer ones are getting 22 to 30mpg. Most vehicles that use a lot of gas are older cars owned by the poor. Gas taxes, which are quickly turning into the modern vice tax, do just what other vice taxes do: Tax the poor. The people you want to tax, who drive $60k suvs could give a shit less what gas costs.
Back in the 90s there was a panic over water shortages in California so they pushed people to reduce water usage. The program worked so well it cut into the operating budget of the water department so they raised rates to make up for lost revenue. Essentially they are penalizing people for being responsible. It's a horrible message at best. Just raise the gas tax on everyone. Sure the gas guzzlers will keep paying more as they should. This idea of shared burden so you don't single out SUV owners and others that prefer gas hogs like aging Hummers and trucks is nuts. If you are worried about road upkeep raising taxes on tires would make more sense so everyone pays rather than attacking high mileage car owners.
That's like Japan when they decided to go on a water conservation program to save both water and money. Showers were installed in bathrooms, toilet cisterns were modified to reduce consumption, storage tanks used to recycle rainwater for gardens. The project was a success, water consumption was reduced by 50%. But the water company had to double rates as they were now running at a loss.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Yes, let's ignore the 2nd law of thermodynamics and stop funding for road repairs. And yes lets make maintenance management a job that someone who attended college (and accumulated tuition debt) to get a civil engineering education can't afford to take. Everyone knows things like concrete design and construction surveying are just a useless waste of money, especially in an area that has a history of earthquakes.
It is quite amazing how downright STUPID Tea Party members can be.
The problem is how you determine which "fair share" they're paying for. If it's actual wear and tear to the roads, that's pretty much all caused by big trucks or by snow clearing (ploughs and, even worse, salt). Passenger vehicles cause essentially zero wear on the roads compared to those other factors. Fuel efficient cars tend to be even lighter and therefore even less likely to cause damage. You could say that the "fair share" is tied to how much space/time the vehicle occupies. The problem there is that it creates a negative incentive for state and local governments to care about preventing traffic congestion or providing optimal routes for drivers. Those governments already seem to consider driver's time to be irrelevant to cost calculations, so suddenly making it _relevant_ (by positively correlating driver time/distance to revenues) is a frightening thought. You could dismiss that thinking as paranoid, but you would have to ignore all the debacles with things like red light cameras where local governments have intentionally created unsafe conditions at red lights to drive up revenues.
How to pay for roads does become an issue, of course. Raising fuel taxes across the board when some people have much more efficient cars than others seems unfair to the drivers with less efficient cars (some of whom may be unrepentant gas-guzzler drivers, but others of whom are probably too poor to afford a new car). Mileage taxes on fuel-efficient cars are a very bad incentive since conserving fossil fuels is the behaviour a responsible government should be encouraging. Roads and similar infrastructure are the kinds of must-have items that benefit pretty much everyone, even those who don't have cars or drive anywhere, so rightfully could come out of general taxes applied to everyone, rather than just to drivers, but people who don't drive or don't drive very much will scream that they're being forced to pay for everyone else, ignoring the fact that the civilization they rely one wouldn't run without roads. The roads need to be funded somehow, though.
The worst case scenario (barring the big-brother box that tracks your car everywhere and bills based on that) is the government throwing up their hands and selling millions of acres of roadway to a private company (coincidentally run by some cronies) for a dollar and a vague promise of not abusing the position, then letting them run a toll system that makes the old, taxed roadway look cheap, while simultaneously being kept in worse condition and with traffic gridlocked from whatever toll-collection scheme they think up.
Austin?
Awesome idea! Please impose a per-mile tax on fuel efficient vehicles such as hybrids.
By the way, you might want to review your existing $1500 rebate for purchasing said hybrid:
http://www.oregon.gov/ENERGY/cons/res/tax/docs/hybridform.pdf
[reaches into bag of applicable figures of speech]
Let's see:
Left hand doesn't know what the right hand... no, wait...
Rebates giveth, and per-mile taxes taketh... WAIT, NO I GOT IT!
Stop being stupid.
That depends on how much of road damage is due to vehicles and how much of it is due to nature.
Many bicyclists bring up the point that they are so light that they shouldn't have to pay a road tax because they're not damaging the road. Of course, for this theory to hold, we should never have to repair bicycle paths. Yet we do.
While I would agree that the Ford King Ranch pickup does more damage to the road than the Nissan Micra, I would say that a good strong rainstorm with minor flooding does significantly more damage. And that's nobody's "fault."
You mean tractor trailers? Those things cause as much wear and tear as 7,000 passenger cars, but you can bet your ass they don't pay 7,000 times as much per mile in fuel taxes. Even at 2 MPG a truck would have to pay about $175 PER GALLON in fuel taxes if they were to shoulder their share of the repair costs. Since this is the United States, we don't tax business their full share and instead we ask individuals to pick up the tab in a way that they can't avoid. Then, when some individuals figure out how to significantly reduce their mandatory subsidy payments to the trucking industry, the government moves in to quash it. 'Murica.
22-30mpg is crap. I've had better mileage than that for over a decade even on US made autos.
It's not a penalty, you faint-hearted, lame, shit-eating excuse for a tree hugger. It's an attempt to spread the cost of BUILDING roads fairly across the people who USE those roads. It's about how miles rolled diverge from gallons pumped; not how your little junkmobile sips fuel while barely being able to push its thin-walled, plastic self down an onramp faster than an old lady in a walker, all the while you're bleeding off what little speed your tiny, tiny engine has managed to impart to your sorry amalgamation of mismatched parts as you leave skinny little tire marks dodging squirrels in abject fear of thousands of dollars of body damage.
Personally, I think you little turdlets in your I'm-so-hip tinycockmobiles should be penalized by being run off the fucking road, where your little texting-phones would get driven through your misshapen skulls until they met your little white earbuds in an explosion of angsty fucktard granola-fed brain matter. Then your remains should be fed to wildlife, while your complete piece of shit can't-go-in-snow junker gets crushed and recycled into a respectable 4WD with a bench seat so that adults with functioning gonads can sit together, rather than strapped into your paper-thin faggotty bucketass seats, seatbelts on, faces perpetually ready for immersion in a fucking airbag. We'll hang a rainbow-colored, bio-degradable kitchen apron on a reflector post to celebrate your erasure from the planet.
Only if it takes into account vehicle weight, where large trucks should pay the bulk of the cost.
In engineering classes about 30 years ago, I learned that road damage is roughly proportional to the fourth power of the weight per axle. Looks like it has not changed. Nothing says that the tax cannot be based on this model.
Note the not all road damage is a result of bending and flexing due to axle weight. You also get chemical changes (salt, water, oil, pollution), thermal cycling (daily and seasonal), topographical changes (a.k.a. earth quakes), and utilities dig-up. You also have non-damage items like mowing the grass, paying for lighting, interest on debt, etc. that must be considered a part of road maintenance. So, you really should not assign all of the maintenance costs to be based on axle weight if you really wanted to be fair about such things.
You may have noticed the signs on the back of trucks that mention something like, This vehicle pays $5,889 in road use taxes per year. According to this study in 2007 the average total tax burden was $13,889 total (for a 80,000 lb truck) and $397 per year for an automobile.
Consider that an 18 wheeler is over 20 times the weight of an average automobile (distributed over 5 axles, though not uniformly). So, ignoring the non-uniformities in automobile weight and axle weight distributions vehicle -- the axle weight related damage should be component should be roughly
(20/5)**4 : (1/2)**4 which equals 4**4 : 1/16 which equals 256 * 16 : 1 i.e., 4096:1
Considering only the 4th power rule component only, avg. damage for truck are roughly 4000 times that of a car. Actual studies show this is more like about 10000:1
it is probably a safe bet that trucks are proportionately undertaxed everywhere in the US.
It's not unfair to gas guzzlers, it's unfair to people with long commutes regardless of what they drive.
It would be better to just jack up the gas tax. It punishes the wasteful more than the thrifty and is still has some relationship to distance driven. Plus it doesn't punish EV drivers at all, for now I'd think they're worth giving a break.
Or even better yet, start charging big rig operators the lion's share of the road maintenance costs for causing the lion's share of the damage.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Sorry, but you couldn't be more wrong.
In fact I am a rocket scientist - my graduate engineering work involved simulations of chemical reactions on space shuttle heat shield tiles under re-entry conditions to evaluate catalysts to try to prevent exothermic recombination of atomic radicals on the surface.
So shut the hell up. You have no idea who you are talking to or what their knowledge and experience base is. And you got caught blowing out a stereotype straight out of a conservative radio talk show which was utterly and completely wrong in every possible way.
Miles driven does nothing to the road compared to pounds per square inch. My cars do almost nothing, both are around 2klbs, one is on 195/50/15 tires and one is on 30x9.5"s. Very low psi on the road. Compare to a big rig...every single time one comes into my neighborhood I find new potholes.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I should add, this measure, like most taxes, has little to do with fairness. Indeed, the art of taxation, as seventeenth-century French administrator Jean-Baptiste Colbert reportedly said, "consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing." -- The measure is about collecting more taxes. Period.
This article disputes your general premise. Government workers make more than private sector for the same education level.
http://www.dailyfinance.com/2012/08/29/federal-state-workers-overpaid/
Do you have any references to support your claim?
Thanks
You don't know any poor people do you? Most of the poor drive the old cheap cast offs and the big old luxury cars driven by old people survive well. The big land yachts that never tear up or die. 5000 pounds of steel and chrome with a front seat bigger than most peoples couches. 40 year old caddies and lincolns that get 10 to 15 mpg if they are properly tuned which they seldom are. You can pick them up all the time for 5 or 6 hundred dollars and drive around with a cloud of smoke following you. If it dies you walk away and get another one. When I got out of the service in 88 I had limited funds and picked up a 74 malibu with a 350 engine and 4 doors for the family for 600 dollars and spent about 400 dollars getting it in good running condition. It got about 14 city and 17 highway and I drove it from 1988 to 2002 and spent money on tires, oil and gas for it. When it dropped a valve I got 300 dollars for scrap and moved on. That's how working poor do it. Yes I could have got a toyota corolla for a couple of grand that I didn't have but it would have got maybe 22 mpg and that's not enough difference to be worth it, especially when it would have cost me tons of money to fix if it did break whereas if I had wanted to I could have dropped an engine in the malibu for 500 bucks if I needed to. Mileage isn't everything.
Put it on a train. Trains are so much more efficient for freight than trucks.
It's a shame that fuel costs are making it expensive for big trucks. Fortunately the free market can sort that out - trucking heavy things long distances will become more expensive, and maybe more efficient transport will become more competitive.
The amount of damage caused to the road by a vehicle goes up as the FOURTH power of the vehicle's weight. http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policy/091116/03.htm
So I have no issue with the cost of trucking going up - right now, it's the big rigs that don't pay their share of the road costs, not the drivers of light, efficient cars.
sustainable living
Yes, F=ma. Could you please tell the class then if when you drive you keep the pedal floored? Or at some point do you stop accelerating and move at a constant velocity?
I keep the pedal floored until I'm half way to my destination, then decellerate at the same rate for the remaining half :)
http://blog.nexusuk.org