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

Tolls?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not just tolls? That's a per-mileage solution that doesn't penalize hybrid and electric owners.

Re:Tolls?

[alen]

tolls need infrastructure which costs money to run

Re:Tolls?

[bondsbw]

This is why I think all this anger from the left about tax deductions is silly. The left pushed through energy efficiency deductions, and then were appalled when the only people who qualified for those deductions were the people rich enough to worry about energy efficiency.

Re:Tolls?

[hey!]

Well, with electronic toll-paying that could work, but it would still shift the burden from low MPG to high MPG cars.

The great thing about a gas tax is that it's a simple way to kill two birds with one stone: encouraging higher mileage and paying for infrastructure. The problem is that not everyone agrees that both birds are important. Two-birders think that high mileage vehicles should be discouraged because of externalized costs -- pollution mainly, but also space required in parking lots, greater risk to other road users etc. One-birders don't care about externalities but understand that the roads and bridges need to be repaired. Zero-birders are just idiots.

I'm a two-birder myself, so raising the gas tax is a no-brainer. I'd also issue everyone a flat rebate per driver, because in fact I'm a three-birder: I'm concerned about the effect of a regressive tax on the working poor who have no options but to drive to their jobs.

But I'm also a realist. There are a lot of one-birders out there and the roads need repair. It's also politically easier in one-birder territory to sell something as a fee rather than as a tax, even though from my perspective that's an irrelevant difference if you're raising the same revenue either way.

Re:Tolls?

[ShanghaiBill]

The rich live close while the poor have to commute (NYC tried something similar).

The rich also drive bigger and heavier cars, which cause more damage to the roads. But most road damage is caused by heavy trucks. A fully loaded 18-wheeler causes 10000 times as much damage as a typical car, and even more if it is overloaded. If big trucks actually had to pay their way, much of their cargo would move to trains.

Re:Tolls?

[ShanghaiBill]

tolls need infrastructure which costs money to run

Disadvantages of toll booths:
1. Require lots of new and expensive infrastructure.
2. Slows down traffic and creates congestion
3. Encourages people to drive on local streets, winding through neighborhoods, rather than on highways.
4. Doesn't discriminate on size, weight, efficiency of the vehicle, or number of passengers.

Advantages of toll booths:
1. Creates jobs for glaziers that are unemployed due to insufficient amounts of broken windows.

Re:Tolls?

[zwede]

Why shouldn't hybrid and electric owners pay for the roads they use?

We're fine with that as soon as gas cars start paying for health care costs related to pollution as well as middle eastern wars, fracking induced earthquakes and all their other externalities.

Re:Tolls?

[Anonymous Coward]

A post with pipe-delimited data. Maybe there's hope for /.

Re:Tolls?

[danbert8]

Maybe 20 years ago... New toll systems have few manned toll booths and don't require traffic to slow or stop. And it most certainly does discriminate based on size class of the vehicle.

Re:Tolls?

[Dutch Gun]

Maybe we should just nix the idea that road infrastructure needs to be paid for with gas or vehicle taxes, and start paying for it from the general fund. I don't have kids, but I still pay a crapload of taxes to pay for funding public schools. I'd argue that someone who doesn't own a car still indirectly benefits from the road infrastructure just like I benefit indirectly from our public education system.

Besides which, are we serious or not about encouraging people to buy and use electric vehicles? Why are we still offering subsidies if we're just going to stick it to the customer another way?

Additionally, I'd love to hear how officials expect to defeat those who attempt to hack or disconnect whatever methods are used to track mileage use. People are already plenty adept at rolling back odometers, and I'm sure creative folks will also find a way to defeat any system for mileage tracking.

Re:Tolls?

[squiggleslash]

Maybe he doesn't acknowledge it because it's not true? Public transportation is used by people inside cities, which are sometimes expensive, sometimes not, depending on whether the local government has managed to beat back the State DoT or not and allow redevelopment.

Public transportation outside of cities is generally unusable due to Suburbanist planning policies.

Re:Tolls?

[tompaulco]

The rich also drive bigger and heavier cars, which cause more damage to the roads.

Really, the rich people's sports cars and luxury sedans are bigger and heavier than the poor people's Escalades, Expeditions and Hummers?

Re:Tolls?

[ShanghaiBill]

Road damage from vehicles is entirely dictated by tire pressure ... Tractor trailers are another matter with tire pressures often at 90psi.

Racing bicycles often use a tire pressure over 100psi. Since road damage is entirely dictated by tire pressure, they are clearly the worst ... or maybe you don't know what you're talking about.

Re:Tolls?

[thaylin]

Driving hybrid cars and increased fuel economy vehicles is more about saving the environment than not paying to support the roads you have to drive on. Both are needed.

Re:Tolls?

[Richy_T]

Hah, wow. Have you ever actually been poor? This is exactly the kind of mentality the GP was talking about.

Having wealth gives you options, including the options to take steps that will give you even more wealth. Being poor means you rent whatever you can and take the windows that come with it and hope you can keep your car on the road for the next months and cross your fingers that you don't run over a nail because even a new tire would mean you don't get electricity next month (and then somehow have to find the money for the reconnect fee).

The left are delusional about what actually benefits the poor (though many of the right are too).

Re:Tolls?

[SoftwareArtist]

What's all this about "the left" and "the right"? You seem to have two images in your head of two groups that supposedly believe certain things. Unfortunately, they seem to have little in common with the actual beliefs of anyone I know.

Rather than assigning labels and talking about what imaginary groups like "the left" supposedly believe, how about sticking to the specific beliefs that specific people have actually expressed, and let everyone say for themselves what they do or don't believe.

So basically

[Anonymous Coward]

The tax burden shifts from low MPG vehicles to high MPG vehicles. Sounds like an environmentally friendly idea to me...

Re:So basically

[rjstanford]

No, the tax burden shifts from low MPG vehicles to vehicles in general. Big difference.

A better approach would be to have the fee slide based on the weight of the vehicle, since damage to roadways occurs by the square of the vehicle's weight, which would actually continue to reward more frugal drivers and shift the burden to those who actually incur the most cost.

Re:So basically

[Grishnakh]

If they actually cared about which vehicles damaged roads the most, they'd just leave the gas tax in place, dump this per-mile idea, and jack up the tax on diesel-powered semis. Passenger cars really don't affect roads much at all; it's the big trucks that do all the damage.

Re:So basically

[Anonymous Coward]

If 20% is paid by high MPG cars now and 80% low MPG, then moving to 50%/50% is a shift to high MPG no matter how you want to spin it. You might argue that it is more fair to do it this way, but it is still a shift to high MPG cars. So folks who did the math when they bought a more fuel efficient car get less out of the deal than they calculated.

Re:So basically

[gweilo8888]

And therein lies the solution. Switch to a fee that's not only per mile, but which also takes into account the axle weight of your vehicle when fully loaded.

If it happens, I'll be laughing, because the axle weight of my car (a Smart ForTwo) is just ~880 pounds -- and that's including all fluids plus a half tank of gas. A typical passenger sedan is more like 1,680 pounds per axle, and a pickup truck is more like 2,270 pounds per axle. (Those figures are based on average curb weights for a 2015 Camry and F-150, respectively.)

And as for the idiotic SUV crowd, they'll finally be paying their fair share. Based on curb weight, the axle weight of a 2015 Escalade is 2,860 pounds. That's *3.25* times the axle weight of my vehicle, and 1.7 times the typical passenger sedan.

Of course, it would be even more fair were the figure to take into account the actual weight of your vehicle including passengers and cargo at all times, but short of mandating new sensors on every vehicle or building weigh stations into the road network, there's no realistic way to achieve that.

Government Intrusion

[Lawrence_Bird]

with the aim of knowing your where abouts at all times. If you don't want a gas tax, charge a weight based fee at registration. And if you really, really must have a milage based tax, do it at the annual inspection based on total miles over the prior year. Accept that there is no perfect solution but that putting monitors inside people's cars is about as offensively bad as it gets.

Re:Government Intrusion

[cdrudge]

Don't worry. They already addressed this. From the article:

For those who use the GPS, the state and private vendors will destroy records of location and daily metered use after 30 days. The program also limits how the data can be aggregated and shared. Law enforcement, for example, won't be able to access the information unless a judge says it's needed.

See. Nothing to worry. No chance the government would abuse this. Besides, I'm sure it's just the metadata of your trips, not the actual details of the trip.

Re:Government Intrusion

[uncqual]

If weight fees make sense at all (for example, because of the fact that heavy vehicles cause more wear and tear on the roads and perhaps require building roads/bridges more robustly), they would make the same sense regardless of if the weight comes from batteries or lots of seats.

Re:Government Intrusion

[msauve]

"Weight-based fees also unfairly nail electric vehicle drivers, because the batteries tend to weigh more than an equivalent internal-combustion drivetrain."

The more a vehicle weighs, the more road wear it causes. How does the road not wear as much because the weight is from batteries? Do you think a semi-trailer loaded with car parts causes more wear than one of the same weight loaded with batteries?

Why GPS?

[therealkevinkretz]

"Private vendors will provide drivers with small digital devices to track miles"

There are already pretty strict laws for tampering with odometers. Why aren't they a sufficient measure?

"[D]ata on how much they have driven and where"

[mariox19]

And this idea of where someone has driven being collected by government concerns no one? That's the impression you would get from the bang-up job done by the journalist authoring the article.

Solution in Search of Problem

[nealric]

The gas tax works. It's hard to evade and benefits from existing taxing infrastructure. The only problem is that it was never indexed for inflation. Tell me why we need a completely new system? Are people really less resistant to this than paying a few more cents a gallon at the pump?

Electric vehicles and hybrids can't be the reason. Electric vehicles still represent a tiny portion of vehicles on the road. Hybrids don't really get much better fuel economy than the tiny econoboxes of the 90s. People still drive big trucks everywhere. Since less fuel efficient vehicles also tend to be heavier, they cause a disproportionate amount of road damage (and effectively get taxed more per mile).

Ha ha ha ha.....

[argStyopa]

...you didn't REALLY think that by driving your electric or hybrid car that you were going to permanently somehow avoid the government's rapacious tax-addiction, did you?

It's just like the cigarette taxes or any of the 'sin' taxes: they've worked so hard to get people to stop smoking, they are suddenly realizing they're losing revenue.

There's no question that we need to pay taxes for the roads we drive on.
Formerly, the connection between general road use and gasoline was irrefutable; now they need another mechanism.