October 2008 - Posts
This past weekend I was drawn into a brief email exchange discussing one of the proposed changes for transportation funding - moving away from a gas tax to a per-mile tax. You're probably aware that the Highway Trust Fund, which funds federal and state transportation projects and draws on gas taxes as its revenue source, is nearing backruptcy. This is in part because the gas tax has not kept pace with construction and maintenance projects, nor with inflation - the gas tax is a flat amount, rather than indexed to the price of gas, and has been unchanged since 1993 when it was raised to 18.4 cents per gallon (though it's important to note that not all of that money goes towards the HTF - some goes to deficit reduction). However, this year has also seen the first drop in vehicle miles travelled since records started being kept in the 30s; less fuel burned means less gasoline sold which means less tax revenue. There is also some concern that as high gas prices drive up the market for more efficient vehicles and encourage mode-shift to high-occupancy modes, revenues will continue to drop sharply.
Some states have played around with the idea of switching to a per-mile tax - charging cars for the actual miles of road they use rather than how much fuel they burn. As far as funding goes, this makes sense - it ties the charges to what the government is really concerned about: funding road maintenance. This makes sure that all vehicles pay their fair share of the highways they drive on, no matter what kind of vehicle they drive. Of course, not unlike the gas tax, drivers wishing to avoid paying the tax can simply drive less, take transit, and so forth, this has the dual benefit of saving drivers money as well as reducing demand on (and wear-and-tear on) the roads. In addition, the technology that would be required to make this work could also be used to implement congestion pricing not unlike what they do in London and have considered doing in Manhattan - charging a higher tax rate (or flat fee) to drive during the peak times of day. This would do even more to encourage either mode shift or flexible scheduling.
There are downsides, of course, to a per-mile tax. First, there is some suspicion that the technology used could be diverted for nefarious purposes. It would require placing some kind of transpoder or GPS device on every vehicle that would record where and how far a vehicle traveled. Drivers are concerned with privacy, and I think it's a valid concern; safeguards would need to be put in place to make sure this information couldn't be abused, and I'm not sure that anyone has figured out a good way to do this. Second (and this is what sparked the brief email flurry over the weekend), moving away from a gas tax reduces some of the pressure for vehicle efficiency - a behemoth SUV and a Prius now both pay the same tax, despite the fact that the SUV is burning four times as much fuel, emitting four times as many pollutants, and weighs significantly more and is not down doing more that its share of damage to the road (I suppose the latter could be corrected by basing the per-mile tax rates on vehicle weights, though I'm not sure if this has been considered yet). One of the benefits of having the tax tied to gas is that it also gets at the hidden costs of driving, namely the environmental impacts of air pollution, lung health, and climate change. The argument goes that moving to a per-mile tax and charging the SUV the same as the hybrid gives the SUV a pass on these hidden costs.
I suppose this is sort of true. The problem with the reasoning is that even now the gas tax only indirectly gets at the environmental impacts of driving - a very small percentage of highway money goes into transportation options, transit, or other air quality/environmental mitigation efforts. And since the gas tax is not currently indexed to the price of a barrel of oil, the increase in gas prices that finally encouraged people to get out of there cars this year were purely market driven. I imagine this will continue to be the case as worldwide demand continues to rise. Eventually, if we're smart, we'll begin moving away from the combustion engine altogether to hyrbids, electric, or natural gas vehicles, which will make the gas tax moot.
I think the move to a per-mile tax makes sense in terms of funding road-building, maintenance, and encouraging mass-transit and denser development. As a matter of fact, I think that this will be more effective in the long term than the gas tax. I believe, though, that there will still be a role for the gas tax, but mainly if we treated it as any other sin tax - use ther per-mile tax to fund infrastructure, but a reduced gasoline tax that went only to air quality and environmental mitigation efforts. In other words, tie the two taxes directly into their impacts. I think you could easily balance the two rates, and as we move away from an oil-based transportation system, both the tax and the need for it will diminish.
This is just thinking out loud, though, and I'm certainly no tax expert. It just seems to be that we cannot simultaneously try to move away from gasoline
and expect to rely on it as a major funding source for infrastructure necessities.
I was recently introduced to Robert Heinlein's 1940 short story,
"The Roads Must Roll" (the link goes to an old radio show version of the story from 1956; I can't immediately find a current anthology that includes the story). Like much of the science fiction of that period, there is much in it that is precognitive, at least in terms of how Heinlein saw the problem of transportation demand developing:
[T]he automobile, from its humble start as a one-lunged horseless carriage, grew into a steel-bodied monster of over a hundred horsepower and capable of making more than a hundred miles an hour. They boiled over the countryside, like yeast in ferment. In the middle of the century it was estimated that there was a motor vehicle for every two persons in the United States.
They contained the seeds of their own destruction. Seventy million steel juggernauts, operated by imperfect human beings at high speed, are more destructive than war. In the same reference year the premiums paid for compulsory liability and property damage insurance by automobile owners exceeded in amount the sum paid the same year to purchase automobiles. Safe driving campaigns were chronic phenomena, but were mere pious attempts to put Humpty-Dumpty together again. It was not physically possible to drive safely in those crowded metropolises. Pedestrians were sardonically divided into two classes, the quick and the dead.
But a pedestrian could be defined as a man who had found a place to park his car. The automobiles made possible huge cities, then choked those same cities to death with their numbers.
As always, science fiction is interesting as much for what it gets wrong as what it gets right. For example, a recent analysis I did shows that car ownership in Roanoke is about 1.1 cars per person, which is pretty close to the national average. Only in the particularly rural areas of the region does it even dip below one. So, we're closer to 2 cars for every 3 people. There's also this:
The National Defense Act closed [the automobile's] era. This act...declared petroleum to be an essential and limited material of war. The army and navy had first call on all oil, above or below the ground, and seventy million vehicles faced short and expensive rations.
Not only was there no such Act, of course, but just think back to at least one of the ideas our political leaders considered to solve the crisis of dramatically rising prices:
So, the problem is - in some respect - worse than Heinlein predicted, and we've not come anywhere near finding a solution (and I'm please, frankly, that we didn't go with his story's premise of 100 MPH conveyor belts shuttling us back and forth between cities anyways).
The problem Heinlein presents, I think, is the inextricability of transportation from all other facets of modern life. His hero fights a labor insurrection that threatens to stop the roads from rolling, proving that the technicians who run the roads are no more important than the people who use them. I don't think the story is completely analogous to our current situation (I don't know anyone who worries that we'll someday become slaves to VDOT), but I find that the broader point is certainly applicable: transportation is too important to let it come screeching to a halt, and that includes being made to do so by automobiles. We may not be at the mercy of disgruntled engineers threatening to jam up road-rolling motors, but in many areas of the state - and even in a couple of narrow corridors in our very own Roanoke and New River Valleys - we're at the mercy of clogged highways and rush-hour traffic that is no less inefficient. If the roads must roll today, and certainly they must, we will have to provide the safest, broadest array of options for people to roll across them.
Don't worry, we in the TDM industry aren't planning on revolting any time soon.
It's more likely than you think.In an unexpected bonus for bike commuters, the controversial $700 billion Wall Street rescue plan Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson proposed on September 20 ... carried along a $20-a-month tax-free reimbursement for biking to work....
The text of the legislation can be found
here. There has been some discussion on professional listservs regarding exactly how this interacts with the existing transportation fringe benefits for parking and transit, but it seems to follow the same basic rules: Your employer offers the benefit and can subsidize all, part, or none of it. If you pay for all or part of it, you pay no taxes on that portion of your salary; the employer similarly pays no taxes on whatever portion of the benefit it subsidizes. The trick, I guess, is how the employer verifies that the $20 is being used for bicycle-commuting related expenses, and what, exactly, those constitute.
Still, it's something that bicycle advocates have been fighting for, so it's good to see it finally put into place.
The Roanoke Valley-Alleghany Regional Commission, in cooperation with the Virginia Department of Transportation, will hold a public meeting to introduce and gain feedback on several of the region’s long-range transportation plans. Several regional planners will be on hand to answer questions and take comments.
WHAT:Public review and input on the following plans for the region’s urban, rural, and multimodal transportation systems
WHEN:Wednesday, October 22, 2008, 4:00 pm to 7:00 pm
WHERE:Roanoke Valley-Alleghany Regional Commission
3rd Floor Conference Room
313 Luck Ave. SW, Roanoke, VA 24016
WHO:Mark McCaskill, Senior Planner
Jake Gilmer, Regional Planner
Jeremy Holmes, Program Director, RIDE Solutions
Representatives of VDOT, Salem District
Each of these plans are in different stages of development but ultimately will establish the goals and objectives of regional urban and rural transportation infrastructure and multimodal options. Maps illustrating potential growth areas and needs will be available for comments, and the staff members leading each effort will be available to answer questions and accept input.
The statewide planning process is an important part of establishing local and regional priorities for state-funded transportation projects. Particularly in lean fiscal times when transportation dollars are at a premium, vigorous public participation is necessary to assure that plans accurately reflect local needs and that state funds are constrained appropriately.
The Roanoke Valley Area Metropolitan Planning Organization’s Long-Range Transportation Plan is a long-range strategy and capital improvement program developed to guide the effective investment of public funds in multi modal transportation facilities within the urban area, including Roanoke City, Salem, Vinton, and parts of Roanoke, Boutetourt and Bedford counties. The plan is updated every 5 years, and may be amended as a result of changes in projected Federal, State and local funding, or other significant studies/plans. The Long Range Plan provides the context from which the region's Transportation Improvement Program (TIP), a short-range capital improvement program for implementing highway, transit, and bikeway projects, is drawn.
The Rural Long Range Transportation Plan will cover the rural portions of the region, including Alleghany, Craig, and Franklin Counties, and portions of Botetourt and Roanoke Counties. This is the first time a long range transportation plan has been developed for such a large region, and VDOT is partnering with Planning District Commissions across the Commonwealth to develop similar plans for all rural regions. VDOT will use the plan when evaluating requests from the local governments for specific transportation projects and/or implementing projects that VDOT initiates. Recommendations from the plan will also be used in the statewide transportation planning process so that the magnitude of transportation needs statewide can be more accurately quantified and incorporated into Virginia's 2035 State Highway Plan.
RIDE Solutions’ Long Range Transportation Demand Management Plan will establish objectives for expanding transportation options in the RIDE Solutions service region, which includes the towns, cities, and counties of the Roanoke Valley-Alleghany Regional Commission and the New River Valley Planning District Commission. The plan will identify trends in congestion, air quality, and gas prices and set out service and infrastructure priorities for the region that allow commuters the best access to sustainable transportation options. Infrastructure will include the expansion and/or addition of Park and Ride lots, bicycle and pedestrian accommodations, preferential parking, and other items. Services may include additional transit service, carsharing, online ridematching, and service area expansion. This plan represents the state’s first effort to formalize local transportation demand management strategies and aggregate them into the statewide transportation plan.