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?

[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: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?

[hackertourist]

Depends on how you implement it. A PAYG tax scheme was discussed in the Netherlands a few years ago, tariffs would have depended on the environmental rating of your vehicle, i.e. an old diesel would be taxed more than a new Euro-5 compliant one.

Over here the big advantages of PAYG were seen as:
- congestion pricing becomes possible
- it'd replace taxes on ownership and car purchase with usage-related pricing, incentivizing people to drive less.

The big disadvantage was the privacy concerns.

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?

[rogoshen1]

road damage from a prius vs road damage from a semi. Hmm. sounds equitable.

I'm an Oregonian.. and holy god, this is one of those proposals which needs to be killed with fire before it metastasizes.

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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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.

Vehicle Weight

[Luthair]

Lower mpg vehicles often tend to be heavier (e.g. trucks & SUVs) which one assumes causes more wear than a lighter vehicle.

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.

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.

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

[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

[afidel]

Since it's primarily weight per axle that determines the wear caused on the roads, and the point of the tax is to maintain roads, it seems logical that heavier vehicles, whether they be SUV's or big sedans like the Tesla, should be charged more. It's not like a Leaf is particularly heavy (it's basically the same weight as the similarly sized Chevy Cruze).

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?

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.

Numbers

[CrimsonAvenger]

Currently, Oregon has a $0.30 per gallon fuel tax. Plus conversion factors for unusual fuels.

This $0.015/mile tax is equivalent, therefore, to the rate you'd be paying if your car got 20 mpg.

So the volunteers will come out ahead if they have gas-guzzlers, and way behind if they have even reasonably fuel efficient vehicles.

And in exchange for higher taxes on driving, they get the privilege of providing Oregon information on how much they travel and WHERE THEY TRAVEL.

What could possibly go wrong with this idea?

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:It's the semi's that destroy the roads

[CauseBy]

When you drive your car, I don't benefit.

When a trucker drives a semi, I benefit, because I buy products in stores.

So I'm more inclined to tax you.

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.

"[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).

Re:Why GPS?

[rlp]

> The odometer can't tell when you've left Oregon.

This law seems to be a good reason to leave Oregon.

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.