Oregon moves to implement per-mile fees for road usage instead of gas taxes

[RFayette]

http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/pay-roads-bridges-mile-fee?utm_content=buffer576ef&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer

Fantastic news!  I hope this works well and will be implemented elsewhere.

[Antonio the Sixth]

What concrete difference will that make?

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

What concrete difference will that make?

All I can think of is that it will put more proportional weight onto fuel-efficient cars, which doesn't seem right.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

doesn't this mean cars registered in other states won't contribute at all, even if they drive in OR on a regular basis?

[RFayette]

What concrete difference will that make?

The fees are variable, so more charges can be levied at peak-traffic times.  This has the potential to reduce road congestion during peak hours pretty significantly.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

What concrete difference will that make?

The fees are variable, so more charges can be levied at peak-traffic times.  This has the potential to reduce road congestion during peak hours pretty significantly.

That article specifically stated that Oregon's experiment won't monitor where or when a car is driven, so that can't be true here.  And if it were true, it raises some serious privacy concerns.

[RFayette]

What concrete difference will that make?

The fees are variable, so more charges can be levied at peak-traffic times.  This has the potential to reduce road congestion during peak hours pretty significantly.

That article specifically stated that Oregon's experiment won't monitor where or when a car is driven, so that can't be true here.  And if it were true, it raises some serious privacy concerns.

I'm sorry, I must have misread the article.  What O'Toole was talking about was what highway managers could do in the future, not about the specific policy in Oregon. 

[Oldiesfreak1854]

I'm not sure this is such a bad thing.  Instead of taxing people for the amount of gas they put in their cars, you tax them for the amount they use.  If it encourages people to use more fuel-efficient cars, then that's a plus.

[○∙◄☻¥tπ[╪AV┼cVê└]

Why not use gas taxes?

[DC Al Fine]

So how does this work in real life? You put some sort of GPS thing in your car that tracks your driving and get a bill every month?

[pbrower2a]

So would one pay the same per-mile rate whether one drove on an expressway or on a dirt road? Or off-road, as with vehicles associated with ranching or forestry?   

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

So how does this work in real life? You put some sort of GPS thing in your car that tracks your driving and get a bill every month?

I imagine they take note of the odometer when the car has the American equivalent of a MOT.

[Likely Voter]

I'm not sure this is such a bad thing.  Instead of taxing people for the amount of gas they put in their cars, you tax them for the amount they use.  If it encourages people to use more fuel-efficient cars, then that's a plus.

This may be good policy in terms of being fairer for heavier road users to pay more, it wont do anything for fuel efficiency. Clearly if you are paying per mile then your MPG wont effect your fee. The Hummer driver and the Tesla driver pay the same.

[Lief 🗽]

How is this better than a gas tax? It seems much more complicated and expensive to implement.

[Goldwater]

Won't this negatively affect people who need to drive a lot for their jobs?

[DC Al Fine]

Won't this negatively affect people who need to drive a lot for their jobs?

People who drive a lot were already paying the gas tax. If anything this shifts the burden somewhat to owners of more fuel efficient cars and people who drive in more fuel efficient traffic.

[© tweed]

doesn't this mean cars registered in other states won't contribute at all, even if they drive in OR on a regular basis?

good question

[Goldwater]

Won't this negatively affect people who need to drive a lot for their jobs?

People who drive a lot were already paying the gas tax. If anything this shifts the burden somewhat to owners of more fuel efficient cars and people who drive in more fuel efficient traffic.

True. In any case, doesn't sound like a good idea to me.

[Cory]

This idea frankly sounds outright absurd and impossible to implement.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

How is this better than a gas tax? It seems much more complicated and expensive to implement.

With increasing fuel efficiency, gas tax revenues diminish, leading to lessen amounts of dedicated highway funding. This is an alternative to continuously increasing the gas tax or other taxes in order to make up for it. 

[Ban my account ffs!]

There are many problems with this approach.  It would be better just to have road engineers measure traffic and road degradation independently and then determine the price to fix them and have any shortfall made up from the general fund.

[traininthedistance]

What concrete difference will that make?

All I can think of is that it will put more proportional weight onto fuel-efficient cars, which doesn't seem right.

It seems wrong because it is wrong.  Taxing gasoline instead actually provides some measure of incentive to choose a vehicle that doesn't burn through quite as many fossil fuels.

If you want to honestly charge folks for their share of "wear-and-tear," maintenance, etc., well... you're basically going to have to bankrupt the long-distance trucking industry, since they contribute to so much more road degradation (and a lot of other nasty things) than smaller vehicles, but don't pay commensurately more.  And if you care about "congestion"*, the right answer is, counterintuitively but surely, to stop building new roads, and in fact take space away from cars and give it to more fundamentally efficient uses of the road space like buses and bikes.  People do have to get from point A to point B... but forcing them to do so in a car is the real problem here, and taking ever more space to build wider and more far-flung highways (making point A and B ludicrously far away from each other) just deepens that forcing effect and makes it worse.  Induced demand is hard for folks to wrap their heads around, but it has been proven time and time again.

*(In the cores of larger metros, some sort of cordon charge with the proceeds going to fund mass transit is indeed called for.  In smaller metros, oftentimes "congestion" just never gets bad enough. Congestion in the peripheries is... a horrifying spectacle that I'd be happy to rant about but right now will just say won't get solved by either a VMT or just building more roads that's for sure)

[Fuzzybigfoot]

What concrete difference will that make?

All I can think of is that it will put more proportional weight onto fuel-efficient cars, which doesn't seem right.

Yeah, and wouldn't this mean gas guzzlers would be taxed less under this plan, theoretically?   

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

I've never understood the relative merits of a mileage tax, to be honest. That said, if the politics surrounding raising a mileage tax over time are friendlier - and they can't possibly be much worse - that alone might be enough to persuade me.

If electric vehicles ever take off as more than a niche, it may well be necessary to change how roads are funded.

[pbrower2a]

Won't this negatively affect people who need to drive a lot for their jobs?

People who drive a lot were already paying the gas tax. If anything this shifts the burden somewhat to owners of more fuel efficient cars and people who drive in more fuel efficient traffic.

But there is a huge difference in whether people drive a fuel-efficient subcompact (they were paying less in gas taxes per mile driven) or SUVs that devour gasoline.