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?

[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]

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.

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.

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: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

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: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.