More on VMT
- Posted by ryan on February 10th, 2010 filed in Policy/Politics
It’s interesting to me that so many people find the idea of a VMT tax to be clearly ridiculous. At present, federal gas tax revenues are insufficient to cover spending on highways (to say nothing of all transportation needs), and spending on transportation is insufficient to cover critical needs (to say nothing of desirable expansions). Meanwhile, vehicle efficiencies are likely to increase substantially in the decade to come. As hybrids and hybrid electric plug-ins become more common (and as other alternatives to travel by gas-powered engine — transit, biking, etc — become more common) gasoline demand will become more elastic. Governments looking to wring more revenue out of the gas tax will have an increasingly difficult time doing so. I strongly support an increase in the gas tax, but as a means to adequately fund transportation spending, its days are numbered. Now is the time to begin thinking about how to fund transportation ten and twenty years down the road.
I think the place to start is with congestion pricing, although I’d also like to see a share of revenues from carbon pricing devoted to transportation. But I don’t think it’s absurd to put a VMT tax on the table. Policy merits will be balanced in Washington against political acceptability, and clearly there are legislators who feel that the idea of a VMT tax — of paying for the miles you drive on public roads — might make sense to drivers. I don’t think that’s nuts.
I know that many people feel that the civil liberties issue is a dealbreaker, but I have a hard time believing that. These days, people don’t blink at the prospect of unwarranted domestic surveillance, they walk around with multiple mobile devices, and they live half their lives online. A gizmo that keeps track of how far they’ve driven isn’t likely to phase most Americans.
February 10th, 2010 at 7:30 pm
I think the biggest problem with the VMT is that it would be impossible to build a real time VMT tracker that was secure. You could still implement a VMT that used annual inspections to check mileage driven, but that sort of VMT won’t get you the infrastructure you need for awesome congestion pricing.
I have not seen any explanation for how we could design a VMT box that is secure. I have degrees in electrical engineering and computer science so I know how to design all sorts of devices, but this is fundamentally very difficult. We’re talking about a device that needs to be attached to the vehicle, and transmit data from anywhere in the country, and has to be secure against user tampering, and has to anonymize user data for their own protection. And it must be cheap. We don’t have good system design principles for solving those kinds of problems, let alone cheaply. That’s why systems like the xbox or various DRM systems always end up getting hacked. A hacked xbox will save you very little money compared to a hacked VMT counter.
Perhaps I’m mistaken, but it seems like the economists and lawyers have just decided that real time VMT tracking would be awesome, ergo, the engineers can just magic one up instantly. I don’t think that’s true.
February 10th, 2010 at 8:26 pm
I actually love the idea of a VMT tax, but I fail to see how there will magically be political support to gain all this new revenue when there isn’t such support for a relatively simple measure like raising the gas tax.
Either way, the amount drivers pay will have to go up. I don’t think the notion of fairness and user fees will help change that.
Also, the logistical issues are quite real and are a severe complication for actual implementation of the VMT tax, no matter how good of an idea it is.
February 10th, 2010 at 9:18 pm
If we need more revenue at the federal level, there’s a tax available which has proven itself to efficiently raise revenue without expensive gizmos: the income tax.
February 10th, 2010 at 9:21 pm
I don’t understand why people think increasing efficiency is an argument against for the VMT.
Switching to VMTs would decrease the incentive for smaller, more efficient cars. Rising gas prices will dis-incentivize driving more miles.
Raising the gas tax makes more sense, and further taxes people driving obscenely large SUVs, or gas guzzling muscle cars.
February 11th, 2010 at 1:48 am
To borrow from Joel Garreau, as humans we are notoriously shortsighted at failing to predict what will be technologically within our capacity 2 or 5 years down the road, let alone 10 or 20 years. I’m with Mr. Avent: We are already “geo-tagging”…and noting our favorite hangouts on foursquare…Why is everyone being so slow and daft about VMT?
February 11th, 2010 at 3:08 am
We are already “geo-tagging”…and noting our favorite hangouts on foursquare…Why is everyone being so slow and daft about VMT?
Why don’t you explain exactly how a real time VMT tracker would work. Specifically, explain how you would design one that would be secure against user attacks. I’m pretty sure you can’t come up with a design that I couldn’t easily break and that’s the problem: we live in a world where some guy on the internet can figure out how to break things and suddenly everyone can do it. And if doing it saves people money, they’re going to do it, because people feel entitled.
February 11th, 2010 at 2:23 pm
The technology question is just one of logistics.
The real question for me is still why we expect the VMT tax to solve our transportation funding issues when we don’t even have the political will to raise the gas tax? If we replaced the gax tax with the VMT tax for the same level of revenue, I would think there would be just as much opposition to raising VMT rates.
The VMT vs. gas tax debate seems rather pointless in that regard - first there must be political commitment to raise far more funds than we currently do - regardless of the mechanism used to collect those funds.