CBO Endorses MBUF

The Congressional Budget Office has issued a report encouraging Congress to promote the use of mileage-based user fees to pay for roads. The current highway funding process is very inefficient, says the report. For example, urban roads are most heavily used and need the most maintenance, but most maintenance dollars are spent on rural roads.

Click image to download this 1.6-MB report.

The report offers three solutions to this problem: mileage-based user fees; allocating spending on the basis of benefits and costs; and linking spending to “appropriately chosen” performance measures. The report does not say so, but the problem with the second and third solutions is that assessments of benefits, costs, and performance measures by government agencies inevitably become political. Attempts to use either of these solutions at the state level have had, at best, mixed results and in fact mostly negative ones.

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Oregon Mileage-Based Fee Update

As noted here a couple of months ago, the Antiplanner volunteered to take part in Oregon’s mileage-based user fee experiment. I promised an update on the program, but so far all I can say is that it seems somewhat disorganized.

Since the state was only accepting 5,000 volunteers, I signed up almost as soon as the web site began accepting applicants on July 1. It turns out I needn’t have rushed: after more than a month, only 700 people had volunteered.

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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.

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The Future of User Fees

The Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) is asking for 5,000 volunteers to test mileage-based user fees as a substitute for gas taxes. The Antiplanner had an op ed endorsing this idea in the Portland Tribune this week.

The email response suggests that many people still have questions about the program. The most frequent question is whether heavier cars will have to pay more than lighter ones. But, according to ODOT, a 2,500-pound Prius c has the same road impacts as a 6,500-pound Hummer. I suspect that road impacts are proportional to tire pressures, not vehicle weights, so heavy trucks have more impact–but Oregon already charges those trucks a weight-mile fee.

The second-most frequent question has to do with privacy. Oregon is giving volunteers three options, two of which involve smart phone apps that use the phone’s built-in GPS to keep track of charges. For the initial test, charges will be a flat 1-1/2 cents per mile, so all the GPS tracks is how many miles you drive, not where or when you drove. One app requires that you pre-pay, the other allows you to pay at the end of each month. The GPS won’t count miles driven out of state.

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