To consolidate, disseminate, and gather information concerning the 710 expansion into our San Rafael neighborhood and into our surrounding neighborhoods. If you have an item that you would like posted on this blog, please e-mail the item to Peggy Drouet at pdrouet@earthlink.net
We've seen this movie before, where Congress heads straight toward a transportation funding cliff it totally saw coming,
so we know that lawmakers will find some
awkward-and-unnecessarily-dramatic way to stop at the edge. That's great
for all the jobs spared in the short term, but bad for the hope of
learning any long-term lessons. Because the real danger is not this
fiscal cliff, but the massive funding sinkhole coming to take car and
cliff alike; here's Senator Orrin Hatch, via The Hill:
"I think we'll resolve this problem," Hatch said. "But the big
problem is, what do we do about the approximately $100 billion we really
need to raise in the future? And we're going to have to come up with a
way of doing that."
In case you're new here, the recurring problem in federal
transportation funding is the increasingly puny power of the gas tax
that populates the Highway Trust Fund. That tax hasn't moved since 1993
despite inflation, a reduction in driving mileage, a massive spike in
construction costs, and increased fuel efficiency, among other
nationwide changes. The fund is fundamentally broken and desperate for a
replacement instead of a quick fix.
There's a case to be made that the federal government should get out of the transportation funding business entirely. Assuming nothing that radical will occur, the best short-term solution is to index the gas tax to inflation and construction costs,
but that still leaves the (good) problem of increased fuel-efficiency.
So the best long-term solution is to find a more direct way to charge
Americans for the damage they cause to highways, rather than continue
charging them indirectly via fuel costs.
Enter Oregon's evolving pay-per-mile road funding program. A new report
from the Oregon DOT summarizes the policy steps that took the state
from the realization that the gas tax was not long for its treasury,
back in 2001, to the passage and pending implementation of the country's
first mileage-based funding system, in 2013. Against a backdrop of 21 years of federal gas tax stagnation, 12 years of development looks like a bargain.
The beauty of Oregon's system is its flexibility. First is the way
people pay. As Oregon learned over time, some people are scared to have
government track all the mileage they drive. Fair enough. So the state
offers five levels of mileage-based payment options, from a simple
odometer reading to precise GPS monitoring via smartphones. There are
benefits to the more invasive option—namely, the GPS knows when you're
on private roads, which means you aren't charged for that mileage—but
the point is that options exist to suit everyone's privacy tastes.
Then there's the flexibility of the system itself. Oregon's pilot
system charged drivers 1.56 cents for every mile they drove, the idea
being that cars place a direct stress on road infrastructure. But the
fee rate can be adjusted to charge more money to heavy trucks that cause
more damage to roads. Or it can be adjusted to charge more money for
cars driving during rush-hour, serving as a congestion deterrent as well as a funding mechanism.
And, at the end of the day, the system seems to do a better job
generating road funding than the gas tax does. Oregon reports that
revenue under its pilot program exceeded expected gas tax earnings by 28
percent (and as fuel efficiency rises, the system would also stand to
do relatively better):
While
Oregon seems to be targeting fuel-efficient cars unfairly here, hybrid
and electric vehicle drivers still benefit from lower fuel costs. The
per-mileage funding discussion is about road damage, specifically, which
all cars produce. So if everyone were to drive EVs, gasoline might
become obsolete, but road damage wouldn't. (And, by extension, if people
stopped driving entirely, and mileage revenues dipped, lawmakers would
realize they don't need to build as many roads.)
But the greatest potential of Oregon's program is its ability
to change the way Americans think about the cost of driving. Right now
the cost of road maintenance is hidden in the price of fuel. In a
mileage-based funding system, such as Oregon's, drivers would receive
monthly statements showing their driving activity and road expenses. The
entire funding system becomes more like a utility—like an electricity
or cable bill—enabling people to adjust their behavior in response to
their expenses.
In other words, people would think more proactively about their road
consumption. Right now, like too many representatives in Washington,
they don't.
