With Gas Taxes in Peril, More States Study Alternatives

Date: 2018-02-01
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After more than a decade of watching Oregon and a handful of other states test alternatives to traditional gasoline taxes, more states, with the help of federal money, are now joining the quest.

Their goal is to devise an easy way to tax motorists for the number of miles they drive, instead of the amount of gas they buy. Oregon, California and other states have proved that it can be done, at least on a small scale. But there are still a lot of questions that must be addressed.

The work comes as the per-gallon gas tax has become a less reliable source of funding for transportation projects. Cars have become more fuel-efficient, and some don’t use gasoline at all. Meanwhile, raising fuel taxes on gasoline or diesel can be politically dicey, especially in Congress, where lawmakers haven’t raised the federal government’s 18.4-cent-per-gallon gas tax since 1993.

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“There’s a growing understanding that we’re going to have to move to a mileage-based system at some point,” says Lee Munnich, a senior fellow at the State and Local Policy Program at the University of Minnesota. “The questions are: How do we do it? How do we phase in to it? How do we fund transportation during this period when gas tax is less and less viable as a source of funding?”

To help answer those questions, Congress included $95 million in grants in its last five-year highway funding law for states to study mileage-based fees and other alternatives to the gas tax. States must match the federal grants 50-50. In the first two years of the program, the Federal Highway Administration has doled out money to eight states, but two of those grants were actually on behalf of regional coalitions, each with more than a dozen states.

“The next stage of this is: How could you ultimately get to a national system?” says Jack Basso, the chair of the Mileage-Based User Fee Alliance. It’s a pressing question, because, barring any major new money from a new infrastructure push from the Trump administration, the country’s major transportation programs are only funded through 2020, and gas taxes don’t bring in nearly enough money to pay for the current level of spending.

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Mileage-based fees likely won’t be ready for widespread adoption by 2020, Basso says, “but I think we can darn well lay the foundation and get moving fast if we get national leadership to take off after this [idea].”

So state researchers are trying to figure out how to make the systems easy to use, cheap to administer, effective across state lines and acceptable to a public that’s concerned about privacy.



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