Slow moving US road user charging programme

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Bern Grush recently attended the Mileage-Based User Fee Conference in Austin Texas where the fledgling American landscape for Road User Charging is beginning to take shape.

When I was a kid I liked to poke sticks into the ants' nests in sidewalk cracks. Ants would scatter in every conceivable direction. They ran in circles, they ran over and through each other. They screamed without logic. I was fascinated.

While listening to a variety of speakers at a transportation symposium in Austin this April, I was reminded of those youthful adventures. The stick poked into the nest in this case was the long-awaited report released by the National Surface Transportation Infrastructure Finance Commission (NSTIFC) in February of this year. The opening ant-tic was the spanking that President Obama's Press Secretary Robert Gibbs gave to Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood. On 19 February, and in anticipation of the NSTIFC report, LaHood had said, "We should look at the vehicular miles programme where people are actually clocked on the number of miles that they travelled." When asked next day whether Obama had weighed in on the matter, Gibbs replied sharply, "I don't believe the President has. I can weigh in on it and say that is not and will not be the policy of the Obama Administration."

We professionals cringed in unison. And it was never made particularly clear just how closely Gibbs was speaking for the President. Considering the gravity of the state of funding of the national transportation system, one can guess why.

Shortly after, on 24 February, Minnesota Representative Jim Oberstar, Chair of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, scolded Gibbs by saying that LaHood, "had the temerity to think...and what did he get? Slapped down. He's a good man. A decent man. Don't let him get slapped down by know-nothings." Oberstar then suggested that Gibbs ought to stay out of the conversation on transportation policy: "I've got news for you: transportation policy isn't going to be written in the press room of the White House." We cheered.

The press had not yet settled down when the NSTIFC's Paying Our Way report was released on 26 February. There are few things that can so powerfully misinform the public than a newspaper article about a complex subject for which the journalist has not read the foundation study. The average American motorist likely gleaned little insight - his or her fears displaced by new ones given the economic headlines of the next days. So he or she will have simply forgotten, secure in the assumption that opinion was sufficiently knee-jerk that no leader could possibly find useful political traction.

Out with the old? 

I had thought that in the weeks following the release of the report US transportation professionals were - at least among themselves - largely in favour of the key message in the report: that the gas tax is a neat and simple idea whose time has run out and a shift to something which charges on a Vehicle Miles Travelled (VMT) basis is the necessary fix. We mocked Gibbs, commiserated with LaHood and delighted in Oberstar's thrust and parry - which had just vindicated all of us. On the whole, we nodded in unison at the work of the NSTIFC (see interview with Commission Chair Rob Atkinson, pp.35-36, ITS International Jan-Feb 2009). Of course, we might not all recommend spending the revenue the same way but we all seemed aligned with the principles: meter all road use and pay according to number of miles travelled weighted by when and where driving took place and the type of vehicle used.

With that in mind, I attended the 14-15 April Symposium on Mileage-Based User Fees, hosted in Austin by the 232 Texas Transportation Institute's University Transportation Center for Mobility, the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, the 584 University of Minnesota, and the Center for Transportation Studies, University of Minnesota. This would be about my 20th symposium dealing with Road User Charging (RUC) in the space of five years.

I have come to view RUC symposia as prayer meetings. We preach to the converted, chant about congestion, decry the free-road unbelievers, mock the road-building atheists, sermonise about the evident dogma of Adam Smith's market economics and await the messianic arrival of multimodal commuting - led, of course, by transit, carpooling and bicycles.

So this time, I expected a real love-in. I foresaw the celebration of a tremendous breakthrough after decades of economic argument for internalising externalities, for Transportation Demand Management (TDM), for correcting outmoded taxation structures and for resolution via a tax model shift. We were about to have our own little "Yes, We Can!" rally; I assumed we'd break out in song.

After that, I was sure we'd set to work on a variety of topics: on how we could get started on the NSTIFC's recommendations; on what ideas we have to implement its evident and clarifying direction; on how we could help advise politicians who would be reeling from the shock of the unveiled truth; on how we could ensure privacy protection; on how we could educate; and on how we could make all this affordable.

Or statis?

But that was not to be. Instead, I found myself among 90 people with as many opinions. Someone quipped during Mayor Bloomberg's congestion pricing scare that there were 8.3 million transportation experts living in New York City. I'd always assumed the same wouldn't happen at a transportation conference.

While everyone seemed to understand that the Highway Trust Fund was bankrupt - Jack Basso of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) stressed this in unprintable terms - unanimity appeared to end there.

The NSTIFC report called for a serious look at GPS-based VMT charging over the next Highway Trust Fund authorisation cycle, which is due to commence shortly. It advocated some real investment and a detailed decision on whether and how to deploy. It then recommended, assuming that things turned out as the Commission hoped (the "least stinky option" as Commissioner Adrian Moore candidly noted), that the subsequent authorisation cycle, six years on, would launch VMT charging such that 250 million US vehicles would have VMT meters by 2020 just as the Dutch expect to have by 2016.

But only half of the Austin attendees agreed that the Commission was dead on. Even that half argued over how to go about it - how it should be packaged for the public, and how we can overcome the privacy and cost issues. Whether the whole effort should be led by the Federal Government or by individual states was a particularly hot issue.

The Highway Trust Fund - a failing entity

Oregon invented the gas tax in 1919 and all the other states had followed by 1928, leaving the Federal Government until 1932 to catch up. This was offered as proof that the Fed is too slow to respond. So, the thinking ran, the states which are running out of money fastest should jump-start the process (something which is already starting to happen). I took this as more of an indicator as to how pressing is Highway Trust Fund bankruptcy than a particular criticism of a large bureaucracy.

In a final-day wrap-up, Texas Transportation Institute's David Ungemah underlined this by remarking that the problem with seeing this funding issue as a 'looming' problem is that we are "setting ourselves up as we did with our housing bubble".

"There was commentary over the past few years regarding instability and unsustainability, and certainly it didn't come as any surprise when the housing bubble burst but ... it still took the bubble bursting for action to occur. Are we [just waiting for] a 'fuel tax bubble' on the horizon? And will action occur only then? If so, this conference group and those who are associated with us better be ready to provide an immediate solution when that occurs," he continued.

Basso had earlier said something very sobering (numbers have that tendency): "The gas tax currently funds 45 per cent of the US surface transportation programme requirements. We have three immediate choices [VMT charging is not immediate]: do nothing; raise the gas-tax; or take it out of the general fund - except there is nothing in the general fund either." Texas State Representative Linda Harper-Brown made an even more frightening point: "We cannot plan transportation in this country because next year's transportation budget is set by last year's gas tax revenues, rather than by a long-range plan. Since gas tax is both uncertain and declining, we have no planning guideline." She then described our surface transportation network as "in a drought".

Michael Replogle, Transportation Director, Environmental Defense Fund, subsequently made the point that if we priced electricity like we priced our roads, we'd have daily brown-outs - which is effectively what traffic congestion is.

Perhaps the biggest contradiction of all was pointed out by Ed Regan of Wilber Smith Associates: "We are funding a massive and critical system by taxing the very thing we want people to stop using: gas. How stupid is that?"

A victim of 'greenery'

And we are using less. We buy more fuel-efficient vehicles and are starting to drive fewer miles. The first victim of our fledgling green success story is our surface transportation system. That recalls my father's favorite war story. A German U-Boat had sunk his merchant vessel. He and his shipmates all jumped into one of the lifeboats they were towing but no one had a knife to cut the line. Tethering our transportation system to the gas tax has the same effect.

The elephant in the room, however, was trust - or the complete absence of it. Motorists do not trust their privacy to GPS technology or that the government will spend the new money on transportation; governments do not trust these VMT-based systems to assure payment or that the operating expense will be low enough.

I pointed to the need for legislation similar to that proposed in the European Union providing that location data cannot leave the vehicle except under the motorist's control, and to the existence of technology that keeps all location data within the vehicle onboard system.

It was countered that a parent should be able to see where his or her teenager is, while another scoffed, "E-ZPass already keeps all your data." Anne O'Ryan, Texas representative for the 1765 American Automobile Association, which cautiously but unequivocally supports VMT charging, put it thus: "We're a John Wayne nation. It will be tough getting people to pay road taxes by the mile." The current average annual gas tax payment per vehicle is reportedly about $250, so we're talking an average VMT tax of around a dollar per vehicle per day; which is about what we spend per capita on tobacco each day.

Is it me, or am I still just poking at ants on the sidewalk here?RSS