While the cost of everything else rises, California’s 28-cent tax on gas has remained unchanged. While that may cause some motorists in the know to rejoice, it’s also a problem with a growing impact.
As newer, more fuel-efficient cars hit the roads, drivers are going farther on a gallon, saving fuel and money for themselves. They also pay less to Sacramento. Owners of electric and alternative fuel vehicles pay even less, if anything. Meanwhile, inflation nibbles away at the revenue that is raised. The system is broken and officials are considering major changes in how we pay for transportation.
Norma Ortega, Chief Financial Officer at Caltrans said the issue has made the agency unable to keep up with roadway repairs. “It’s a static tax, it is not indexed, it has not been raised in over 20 years, and so our buying power has decreased — by at least 50 percent,” she said.
Deferred maintenance and new regulations make work more costly, she said. “Projects do cost more now, there’s more requirements, whether we’re dealing with stormwater issues or water quality issues and prevailing wage and issues like that that have to be addressed in the cost of a project.”
Officials are considering an entirely new path. Rather than paying by the gallon, motorists would pay by the mile. The goal is both higher revenue, and a more equitable system — one where every driver pays their share of upkeep, regardless of how much or what kind of fuel they use.
Oregon has undertaken a similar experiment, setting the tax at a cent-and-a-half per mile. That equates to a tax of $1.50 for every 100 miles driven. Currently, the driver of a car getting 33 miles to the gallon would pay just 84 cents in California fuel taxes.
A pilot project begins this month. The volunteers’ experiences and complaints will, officials hope, help separate workable concepts from the rest.
Ortega described the options under study.
“We’re going to look at a time permit, which allows somebody to purchase a block of time,” Ortega said. “You put a sticker on your vehicle that says I’m going to travel over the next two months, three months. We have a mileage permit that will say I want to purchase miles in 10,000 mile blocks, and that particular method is kind of really the best privacy option. We do have folks who do not want anybody to know where they’re going.”
Technology makes it all feasible. While avoidance and cheating could be a problem, the biggest issue, Ortega admitted, may prove to be Big Brother.
“We are looking at an odometer charge where there would be a reading, whether it would be through the bureau of automotive repair when people go in for smog, or through the DMV,” she said. “We have a GPS option that you would install a small device that would allow us to determine the number of miles that you travel and that device could be with a GPS or without, so we could look and see where you were traveling, or something that just said, you traveling 1,000 miles of this past month.”The methods raise plenty of questions, and could spread unease and public resistance. If your distances are traced by a smartphone app, what happens if you forget your phone at home? What if you leave it behind on purpose? What if you remove the battery and SIM card? Could computer-savvy hackers find out you’re away and burglarize your home?
Those are among the questions officials hope the pilot project will answer.
“Certainly privacy is a big part of it,” Ortega said. “And we did build a number of privacy requirements into the pilot, but it is something that we do think that will be one of the biggest issues.”
Volunteers are scheduled to begin collecting data in California this month. Transportation commissioners from California, Oregon and Washington are scheduled to meet Friday in Portland to discuss and compare notes on each state’s pilot project.