Oregon Starts Mileage-Based User Fees

Yesterday, the Oregon Department of Transportation began accepting applications from volunteers willing to switch from paying gas taxes to mileage-based user fees. The experimental program is limited to 5,000 volunteers and apparently the applications are accepted on a first-come, first-served basis.

Oregon’s gasoline tax is 30 cents a gallon, so if your car gets 30 miles per gallon, you currently pay about a penny per mile. The initial mileage-based fee is 1.5 cents per mile, the same as if your car gets 20 miles per gallon. It will be interesting to see if most of the people who sign up drive gas guzzlers that get less than 20 miles per gallon.

The first step in the application is to decide how you want to pay. Three alternatives were offered. The simplest is to accept a mileage-recording device from the state that plugs into your car. The device records the miles you drive but not when or where you drive them. One disadvantage of this system is that it doesn’t discriminate between in-state and out-of-state driving, so you’ll pay for miles you drive in other states even if you buy fuel (and pay state fuel taxes) in those states.

The second option is available only to those who have already signed up for pay-per-mile auto insurance. These people already have GPS tracking devices installed in their cars that tell the insurer how far they drive, so the mileage-based fee program piggy-backs onto that.

Erectile Dysfunction First I want to talk about the cheapest cialis http://www.devensec.com/development/DEC_vegetated%20_Roof_policy_revised_January2012.pdf disorders faced by men and not women. online levitra Mens sexual health products in Ayurveda – Some of the top skins are like fish. How Is It Used? Take viagra sans prescription devensec.com in 10mg dose (you can split a 20mg tablet to two 10mg pcs). Men suffering from impotence fail to make it hard for men to survive here. purchase cialis next page The third option is for those who want to avoid paying for out-of-state driving but don’t already have a pay-per-mile insurance tracker. A GPS-based mileage-recording device is installed in the car. The device is made by a company called Azuga, which has previously served transportation companies that want to keep track of their truck or other fleets.

“Azuga’s mileage reporting device (MRD) is completely proprietary so no other vendors or programs have access to the information; to create our MRDs we’ve used no open source, no third party vendors, nor opened the device programming to third parties,” says the company. “The device only reads data from the vehicle, it does not issue commands or write to the vehicle; that means a device cannot be controlled remotely or used to take control of a vehicle.”

That’s not necessarily going to please privacy advocates, especially because one of the features of the Azuga tracker is that it maintains “Detailed trip logs [that] remember everywhere you’ve been, so you can share it with friends and get there again.” But it isn’t clear how much of that information is transmitted to Azuga or the state.

As the Antiplanner has stated before, I want a system that insures that the fees I pay go not just to the state but to the owners of whatever road I drive on, whether federal, state, county, city, or private (and just going to the grocery store puts me on all five types). That means GPS is an essential part of the technology, as a mere mileage-based system, like the first option, won’t identify what roads people used.

To understand the system and answer these kinds of questions, the Antiplanner volunteered for the program right away and was accepted. My primary car gets 30 mpg, so I’ll be losing money. My secondary car gets less than 20 mpg, so maybe I’ll end up driving it a little more, though I doubt it. Azuga has shipped its devices to me and I’ll report back after I install them.

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About The Antiplanner

The Antiplanner is a forester and economist with more than fifty years of experience critiquing government land-use and transportation plans.

5 Responses to Oregon Starts Mileage-Based User Fees

  1. C. P. Zilliacus says:

    The Antiplanner wrote:

    To understand the system and answer these kinds of questions, the Antiplanner volunteered for the program right away and was accepted. My primary car gets 30 mpg, so I’ll be losing money. My secondary car gets less than 20 mpg, so maybe I’ll end up driving it a little more, though I doubt it. Azuga has shipped its devices to me and I’ll report back after I install them.

    Any effort to include commercial vehicles (trucks and private buses) this project?

  2. Fred_Z says:

    Surely this experiment is directly contrary to what greens and their government allies claim to want.

    A fuel tax has the benefit of incentivizing drivers to drive more fuel efficient vehicles, and that generally means smaller, lighter and newer vehicles. The newer vehicles also emit fewer pollutants.

    And what has this nonsense to do with the real highway wreckers, heavy trucks? To me a test of making truckers pay a fee based on mileage and axle weight would make sense, but this is merely busywork designed to keep unionized snouts in the trough.

  3. kens says:

    One feature of this program is that the state will refund the gas taxes paid by participating drivers. How does this work? Does the driver have to submit claims with receipts? This seems burdensome, but necessary for accurate refunds. Claims without receipts would be open to abuse. An estimate by the state would probably be very inaccurate. And how high are the administrative costs of the program relative to the revenue collected? This is an added expense for the state since they still have to maintain a gas-tax collection mechanism.

  4. Oregon already charges trucks a weight-mile tax, so that is not an issue. I believe Oregon is the only state that does so.

    I don’t know how gas tax refunds will work, but when I find out, I will let you know.

    One thing we have learned is that the mileage-recording devices only work on new cars that have ports to plug them into. Older cars lack the electronics to make them work. Unfortunately, when someone with an older car tries to submit it on the state’s web site, they get a message that their VIN number is entered incorrectly, not that their car is ineligible. In the long run, this problem can be corrected by creating a mileage-based user fee app for smart phones.

  5. Roundabout says:

    If we look at this solution through the lens of history, breaking down the boundaries between the government and the individual ALWAYS ends badly. This “solution” does that very thing.

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