Section 13002 of the infrastructure bill that the senate passed last week calls for the secretaries of transportation and the treasury to create a pilot mileage-based user fee program. The last transportation bill, which was passed in 2015, offered states grants to create their own pilot programs, but only six states did so, and some of them are not currently active.
The proposed infrastructure bill extends the state program (in section 13001), but also creates a national pilot program. If passed, the Secretary of Transportation would first create an advisory board that would take up to a year to design the program. Then the Secretary of the Treasury would set fees, which could differ by size of motor vehicle. Then the two secretaries would do a “public awareness campaign” to try to find geographically and economically distributed volunteers to participate in the program.
Fees could be charged via smart-phone apps, third-party GPS devices plugged into the diagnostic ports of cars (which is one way Oregon does it), data collected by automakers (such as GM’s OneStar system, which keeps track of vehicle locations in case of an accident), data collected by insurance companies (which can charge people by the mile using a similar GPS device in at least eight states), or “any other method that the Secretary considers appropriate.” Continue reading
