The current edition of CQ Weekly highlights the Bush administration’s flirtation with a mileage fee as a substitute for gasoline taxes. It is not yet official policy to seek a shift in the funding source for federal highway programs, but the administration is underwriting experiments in Oregon to test the feasibility of technology to administer such a tax. (See my recent column, “The Oregon Solution” for context.)
A chip installed in a car would track the number of miles the car is driving; a one-way signal would turn off the chip when the car left Oregon. Every time the car refueled, the chip would calculate the mileage and transmit it to the pump. The tax would be charged based on the number of miles driven.
Writer Kathleen Hunter quotes Janet Kavinoky, a transportation lobbyist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which has backed efforts to revise the gas tax: “A gas tax is a proxy. You have different vehicles on the road with different levels of fuel efficiency. Regardless of their fuel efficiency, they are still using the road.”
That’s always been my logic: Motorists should be taxed to fund road maintenance based upon how much wear and tear they put on the roads. I’m surprised that the Virginia Chamber of Commerce hasn’t adopted the mileage-tax idea for the Old Dominion, just as I’m surprised that Virginia Republicans have failed — in spectacular fashion with the Transportation Abomination called HB 3202 — to embrace the user-pays ideas of the Bush administration.
Hunter surfaces one objection to the mileage tax that I find semi-persuasive. By taxing people on the basis of miles driven rather gasoline consumed, the mileage tax would reduce the incentive for people to shift to more fuel-efficient cars – a goal of both environmentalists and those who advocate energy independence.
That is a legitimate point, but I would respond as follows: Shifting to a mileage tax is one step among many that would make human settlement patterns more transportation efficient. In the long run, it will take a combination of both gasoline-stringy automobiles and more efficient human settlement patterns to reduce energy consumption to a more sustainable level.