Oregon Testing Pay-Per-Mile Driving Fee To Replace Gas Tax

schwit1 tips news that Oregon will become the first U.S. state to test a program to replace their gas tax with a fee for each mile citizens drive on public roads. The 5,000 people voluntarily participating in the test will be charged 1.5 cents per mile. Revenue from gas tax has been on the decline as vehicles get more fuel efficient and as hybrids and electric cars become more popular. This measure is an attempt to raise the amount of money the state takes in to pay for infrastructure projects. Many owners of those hybrid and electric vehicles are upset, saying it specifically targets them and discourages environmentally-friendly transportation. Others point out that those who drive electric vehicles need the roads maintained just as much as people still driving gas-powered cars.

Comments

It's the semi's that destroy the roads

[Anonymous Coward]

My dad is a retired materials science engineer; a road with infinite life for a car, will have a lifetime of something like 10 years for a fully loaded semi... They are the problem, not the cars. Tax the semis much more for the damage done to the road, vs mile driven.

Re:Vehicle Weight

[haruchai]

If they're not taxing trucks by weight, they're doing it wrong. The wear by heavy trucks is exponentially greater than a number of smaller vehicles of total similar weight.
For example, the wear & damage caused by a single tractor-trailer of 80,000 lbs is several thousand times greater than that of 20 2-ton passenger cars.

Fourth power rule of thumb

[tepples]

Road wear is often estimated as the fourth power of axle weight. So I imagine the final regulation will include road wear as a factor. Incidentally, this rule of thumb is sometimes cited as why cyclists aren't taxed. A 200 pound* bicycle causes one ten-thousandth of the wear that a 2000 pound car causes, which means cyclists' contribution to road wear would likely be too small to collect.

* Occupied weight

Re:Fourth power rule of thumb

[locofungus]

Assuming a reasonable pressure (no trains with flanged wheels trying to drive down the highway) then the damage comes from axle load and not pressure for standard road building materials.

It's the (hopefully elastic) deforming of the roadbed that leads to the damage - typically due to surface cracking that then lets weather in - and so below a certain axle weight (which will depend on the design load of the road in question) the damage is essentially zero.

No metalled road designed for cars (or even just foot traffic) will be damaged by bicycles at anything like the rate that weather (and vegetation) will damage it anyway. No road designed for significant truck traffic will be damaged by cars[1]

It would, of course, be possible to design a road that a 90psi bicycle tyre would damage more quickly than a 40psi car tyre but, in practice, it would be more expensive than one that a bicycle wouldn't damage if a car wouldn't.

[1] Cars under hard acceleration can damage the top surface of a metalled road independent of any flexing of the road bed - I've seen this on a steep uphill after a slow bend - every driver hits the throttle at the same point at the bottom of the hill. Once there is unevenness to the surface, whether from the weather or trucks, dynamic loading from cars can rapidly accelerate the ongoing damage.

Re:Tolls?

[knightghost]

The rich live close while the poor have to commute (NYC tried something similar). Not to mention this encourages less efficient cars. It's a very, very regressive tax.

Re:And maybe get rid of studded tires too.

[0123456]

Hint: those ruts aren't caused by studded tires, they're primarily caused by poor road design and big freaking trucks.

Besides which, modern studded tires are increasingly designed to reduce noise and road damage. New Nokians, for example, have studs that retract into the tire when driven on dry asphalt, and they're testing a future design with studs that can be electrically retracted and extended.

Re:Government Intrusion

[Chris Mattern]

READ my god damned ODOMETER every year when I have to do my registration and whenever I sell the fucking car therein.

That doesn't work. Oregon can't tax the miles you drive outside Oregon--the US Constitution explicitly forbids state taxation of anything outside the state. They *have* to know not only how far you've driven but where you drove it to impose this tax.

I think they need to junk this tax entirely. It's not workable without unacceptable intrusion into your personal information.

Re:Vehicle Weight

[Lost2Home]

Semis create 80x the road wear compared to cars, not thousands.

Actually he was correct. The actual number based on US Dept of Transportation reports is 9600x for a semi compared to a passenger car - source.

Re:Tolls?

[AdamThor]

From TFA:

"Drivers will be able to install an odometer device without GPS tracking."

And for that reason I approve of this program.

Re:Tolls?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong.... its the pressure times the contact area that is load transferred to the pavement. It doesn't matter what the pressure is... the weight of the vehicle (or portion of the weight transferred to the tire) determines the contact area of the tire and that weight is applied to the pavement. In terms of actual damage to pavements passenger cars are basically negligible compared to trucks.

See this
http://www.pavementinteractive.org/article/equivalent-single-axle-load/