NewVA Moves

One Step Closer

The Virginia senate has passed a repeal of last year's unpopular abusive drive fee law.  The repeal even includes a provision allowing those hit with the fees to seek a refund.

The abusive driver fees were an interesting lesson in how our transportation infrastructure is funded, and what kind of trouble that funding is in.  From the beginning, there were a number of problems with these fees.  Saddling dangerous drivers with additional costs for their trangressions is not immediately distasteful, though it quickly became apparent that trying to fund massive infrastructure needs on the backs of a relatively small proportion of Virginia drivers resulted in wildly ridiculous penalties.  It did make some sense to tie transportation funding to transportation users, even if the law targeted only a small number of users and irresponsible ones at that, but the law even failed at this by exempting non-Virginia drivers from the fees.  In an area like Northern Virginia, where massive employment and shopping centers must be drawing drivers from West Virginia, DC, and Maryland, this exempts a significant portion of users from having to pay for the roads they're driving on.  The law also suffered from something of a split personality - if the fees expected to serve as a revenue source for transportation needs, then clearly they required significant numbers of bad drivers to keep driving badly in order to keep the money flowing, so they couldn't possibly be effective deterents for unsafe drivers.  And if they did become effective deterents, then suddenly the state would find itself back at square one having created a very successful safety program but still with huge transportation shortfalls.

If the state wants to tie transportation funding directly into transportation use, they are going to have to do so across all users of the system, not just a tiny segment of lawbreakers, and neither can they exempt out-of-state drivers who are using Virginia roads.  The only way to do this, it seems to me, is an increase in the gas tax or tolls on the most highly congested/highly used corridors.  If politicians and the public find this distasteful, then the revenue will have to come from a broad, though smaller, general tax increase.  Abusive driver fees may still have a role to play - albeit on a more reasonable level - but it was a mistake from the beginning to think they this would be a successful way to fund our transportation needs.