Road Usage Charging Is Focus of Toll Industry Discussion

[triplemultiplex]

The biggest issue remains: How do you enforce any vehicle to verify their tracking device is in the car.  What will stop someone from just leaving it at home while they drive around the country?

It'll be integrated into the car I bet. And the vehicle probably won't be able to get on the interstate without it.  The 'gates' won't open without your GPS transponder or whatever.
Not something I'm necessarily advocating, but it seems to be a likely way to implement such a system.  The GPS tolling being restricted to interstates and other freeways due to them already being controlled environments.

[english si]

The flat gas tax hasn't been raised in 22 years, so you're really not paying your fair share anymore. If gas tax were indexed as a percent, then yeah, you wouldn't be paying more than you used to, but the gas tax is a flat 18.4 cent per gallon amount that hasn't kept up with inflation. We pay significantly less to drive than we used to. In the meantime, our infrastruture is aging and there is no money to maintain or expand it.

So raise it?

Better than bringing in tracking systems, etc and also has the effect of penalising those who burn more fossil fuels more.

[US 41]

The flat gas tax hasn't been raised in 22 years, so you're really not paying your fair share anymore. If gas tax were indexed as a percent, then yeah, you wouldn't be paying more than you used to, but the gas tax is a flat 18.4 cent per gallon amount that hasn't kept up with inflation. We pay significantly less to drive than we used to. In the meantime, our infrastruture is aging and there is no money to maintain or expand it.

So raise it?

Better than bringing in tracking systems, etc and also has the effect of penalising those who burn more fossil fuels more.

I agree with raising it. However do you realize how many more cars there are on the roads? The government is getting plenty of money to take care of the highways. They just choose to waste it and then complain when they don't have enough. I'd rather the gas tax get raised though than to track cars.

This will probably get deleted because it's "not related to roads", but really it is. The government gives over 50 Billion dollars a year to foreign countries (most that don't even really like us) when we can't even take care of ourselves. Do you know how many highways we could maintain and build with 50 Billion? A lot. We spend more money on welfare benefits than the military now. If we were to reform welfare we would even have more money to maintain our roads. The government literally collects every tax imaginable. They don't need more tax money whether it's state or federal. They get enough. They need to learn how to spend the money they get instead of just giving it away.

[kkt]

The flat gas tax hasn't been raised in 22 years, so you're really not paying your fair share anymore. If gas tax were indexed as a percent, then yeah, you wouldn't be paying more than you used to, but the gas tax is a flat 18.4 cent per gallon amount that hasn't kept up with inflation. We pay significantly less to drive than we used to. In the meantime, our infrastruture is aging and there is no money to maintain or expand it.

So raise it?

Better than bringing in tracking systems, etc and also has the effect of penalising those who burn more fossil fuels more.

I agree with raising it. However do you realize how many more cars there are on the roads? The government is getting plenty of money to take care of the highways. They just choose to waste it and then complain when they don't have enough. I'd rather the gas tax get raised though than to track cars.

There's several giant assertions here that, at the very least, need citations.  During the era when we were construction lots of interstates and maintaining the roads better, gas taxes were quite a bit higher compared to construction costs.  Now not only has the percentage of the pump price devoted to construction and maintenance gone down, but vehicles are quite a bit more efficient so they use fewer gallons of fuel as well.  You can't just handwave that away as the result of wasteful spending.  The amount of the federal gas tax spent on nonroads is very small, and even mass transit projects have good effects on roads by diverting traffic that would otherwise be on the roads.

Anyway, at least we agree on raising the gas tax rather than a Stasi wet dream track everybody everywhere system.

[Anthony_JK]

Uhhhhh....no. Unless you define "welfare benefits" to include Social Security and Medicare, which are wage-deferred programs, or the Earned Income Tax Credit, which only applies to working Americans, there is no proof that non-military social spending is bankrupting Americans. Tax breaks to the wealthiest corporations and bloated military budgets for endless wars are far more a drain on the budget than SNAP or even "foreign aid".


I do agree with raising and indexing the gas tax, though...it is far and away the fairest alternative for transportation funding. A carbon tax that could fund alternative means of transport would not hurt, either.

[corco]

I agree with raising it. However do you realize how many more cars there are on the roads? The government is getting plenty of money to take care of the highways. They just choose to waste it and then complain when they don't have enough. I'd rather the gas tax get raised though than to track cars.

More cars = more wear = significantly more expense for operation and maintenance, especially as states allow heavier and heavier loads

More cars = more need for capacity = more expense on large-scale, specialized infrastructure projects that accommodate a ton of cars in urban areas

So, no. Assuming that more cares = more money = plenty of money is a significant oversimplification. In this country cars are distributed about as poorly as possible for the "economies of scale" argument to make sense. In cities, you have incredibly dense numbers of cars that drive during a few peak hours, and those require incredibly expensive infrastructure solutions to keep traffic from functioning at something better than gridlock. Those cost enormous sums of money to build and maintain.  On the flip side, out here in rural Montana we have dozens of fifteen mile long county roads that serve three houses. Those cost more money to maintain than the $150 each home pays into the county road fund each year (even with federal subsidy under the now-defunct Secure Rural Schools Act, those roads still are still deeply rutted, only graded every other year with new material brought in probably once every five, and impassable by low ground clearance vehicles much of the year).

If cars were distributed uniformly across the country and were on the road at evenly distributed times (just as many cars on the road at 2 AM as at 2 PM), I'd agree more with "more cars = more money = plenty of money," but that's just not the case.

As far as "we waste so much money on other things"- government doesn't really budget that way, for better or worse. The highways people don't talk to the foreign aid people - could you imagine what that would look like from a bureaucratic perspective? If you think nothing gets done now....  You can whine about that, but it won't change. Support taxes and policies that go to things you want to spend money on, and oppose taxes and policies that spend money on things you don't - saying "I don't want to pay more in gas tax because too much of my tax money goes overseas" is unproductive and isn't going to affect change, given the way our government is and always has been set up, unless you can demonstrate that gas tax money is going overseas (which you can't).

Government takes a compartmentalized view of government, so in your protest of taxes, you should also take a compartmentalized view, since that's going to be the only way to actually fight the beast. If you just say "I'm paying too much in taxes already," then they can probably keep your tax rate the same, but in government's budgeting process it will then focus on keeping money in already existing programs at the same rate.

Better than bringing in tracking systems, etc and also has the effect of penalising those who burn more fossil fuels more.

I agree with raising it as part of a package, and I agree with avoiding the Orwellian tracking system. To a degree, I'm okay with penalizing fossil fuel users, but I also think with increased CAFE standards and increased fuel prices (pre-tax) the incentive to sell and buy alternative energy vehicles is as high as ever, and we need to start looking at how to integrate those vehicles into our existing system so that they pay for their road usage sooner rather than later, before we get to a point where 50% of the national motor fleet is either not reliant or barely reliant on fossil fuel. I don't know what the solution to doing that is, but I think it has to be more than just raising the gas tax and it has to be better than tracking everybody.

[J N Winkler]

As far as "we waste so much money on other things"- government doesn't really budget that way, for better or worse. The highways people don't talk to the foreign aid people - could you imagine what that would look like from a bureaucratic perspective? If you think nothing gets done now....  You can whine about that, but it won't change. Support taxes and policies that go to things you want to spend money on, and oppose taxes and policies that spend money on things you don't - saying "I don't want to pay more in gas tax because too much of my tax money goes overseas" is unproductive and isn't going to affect change, given the way our government is and always has been set up, unless you can demonstrate that gas tax money is going overseas (which you can't).

Government takes a compartmentalized view of government, so in your protest of taxes, you should also take a compartmentalized view, since that's going to be the only way to actually fight the beast. If you just say "I'm paying too much in taxes already," then they can probably keep your tax rate the same, but in government's budgeting process it will then focus on keeping money in already existing programs at the same rate.

There is a concept called "program budgeting" where not just the budget itself (which is basically a collection of line-item expenditures) but also program design and the structure of the agencies administering programs are included in an optimization exercise, with the goal of obtaining the highest social rate of return for a given amount of tax revenue.

From a political point of view, there are some obvious problems, such as the high probability that the path to a higher social rate of return involves making some agencies bigger while making others smaller, which gives the lobby groups linked with the latter a reason to obstruct the necessary changes, which is very easy to do in Congress given its current procedural setup.

However, when program budgeting was tried under LBJ, the main problem discovered with it was one of information processing.  In order to optimize an entity as large and with as many spheres of activity as the US Government, it is necessary to collect a tremendous amount of data, and try to reach an optimum by adjusting the values of literally dozens of variables.  In comparison, increment budgeting--where the budget of each agency is adjusted up or down according to the perceived value it offers during a given budget cycle, or is tied to the proceeds of a dedicated revenue source like the fuel tax--is much easier to implement.

As for government waste, while it exists, finding it can be not just a fool's errand, but also a way to spend more than you save.  In the highway sector, the most expensive forms of waste typically originate from "spilt milk" or "shattered egg" mistakes, where the cost to rectify is much higher than the cost to do it right the first time, and the money spent abortively on the mistake cannot realistically be claimed back.  An example of this is Kansas DOT's decision to use a sealant rather than an asphalt underlayer to waterproof the subgrade when reconstructing US 50 in concrete between Newton and Florence.  The sealant failed, letting water into the subgrade, so slabs cracked, forcing years and years of expensive repairs (dowelling and probably mudjacking as well) and premature application of an asphalt overlay.  This is money KDOT cannot reclaim from anyone.  The contractors are not responsible because they built the road according to the plans and specifications, and the engineers responsible for design don't have pockets deep enough.

There are many other much more well-known examples of this kind of error--such as every bridge design mistake that has ever resulted in a fatal collapse, like I-35W in Minneapolis--but I cite the sealant problem specifically to show that it is possible for costly errors to arise even in apparently simple and straightforward paving projects.