Tucked into the bipartisan infrastructure package in Congress is a provision that would green-light, for the first time, a national pilot program for a vehicle miles traveled fee.
A per-mile fee has the major advantage that it could capture every vehicle’s road usage, even those that don’t use fossil fuels. | Charging Americans for road upkeep based on how many miles they’ve driven has long been relegated to the dustbin of policy — intriguing ideas that are too politically toxic.
“This isn't something you can turn on overnight — you’ve got a 12- to 15-year lag, so the longer we wait to start implementing this, it's going to be even longer before we can start getting revenue from it,” said Rob Atkinson, president of Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a science and technology think tank, who chaired a 2009 panel that studied funding options for infrastructure.
“There were a lot of policy considerations taking place 10 plus years ago at this point as well,” he said. “But what was, I think, missing at the time was the political interest, and the willingness to really consider it because it was so new.” Graves would have been well-positioned to push a switch to VMT from his perch on the committee, before the House switched to Democratic control.
Some of the issues those state-level programs are trying to sort out: the concern that VMT disadvantages rural residents who must drive more, that it costs too much to collect, that it doesn’t do enough to take gas-guzzling cars off the road and that tracking locations would violate drivers’ privacy.
“We just do that because we want to help people and if another state does a road charging program, it lifts all of us — it gets us just that much more closer to a national system,” she said. “So every state that expresses interest, we do whatever we can to support them in that effort.”One of the thorniest challenges with any shift to VMT involves concerns around privacy.
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