Do a slim majority of people now support a vehicle miles traveled tax? That is one takeaway from the Mineta Transportation Institute’s 12th annual survey of taxation and transportation.
The California-based think tank didn’t call it a VMT tax for the survey, released in late March. Instead, it called it a green mileage fee and said it would cost drivers about 3 cents per mile traveled, with vehicles that pollute more paying more.
Mineta noted a steady uptick in support for this tax. When it started surveying in 2010, only 33% of respondents supported it. Support now registers at 53%.
The VMT tax is an idea that has seized a broad and ideologically diverse group of policy advocates in Washington, D.C. Adie Tomer of the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program has endorsed it. And now, so has the more small government-oriented Competitive Enterprise Institute.
Earlier this month, CEI circulated the “Highway Coalition Letter in Support of Mileage-Based User Fees.” The open letter to Congress was signed by two former secretaries of the Department of Transportation and many taxpayer groups.
The letter concluded, “We urge you to prioritize protecting and strengthening the users-pay principle in the 2021 surface transportation reauthorization and support the development of a nationwide, interoperable road usage charge trial.”
The Association of American Railroads has also weighed in to grease the tracks for a VMT tax.
“Freight railroads have long advocated that a VMT fee that takes into account vehicle weight or axle count can help make the Highway Trust Fund whole again,” AAR spokesman Ted Greener told the Washington Examiner.
Greener called the Mineta results “encouraging” and predicted that support for a VMT fee “will only grow as the public learns more.”
However, there are many miles to go before this idea is ready to roll out as anything but a trial, cautions Marc Scribner, a transportation policy analyst for the Reason Foundation.
Scribner supports the idea of a VMT tax, eventually. But right now, “a mileage-based user fee is not ready to replace fuel taxes. We probably need another decade to get it right before we’d be ready to potentially flip the switch from per-gallon taxes to per-mile charges,” he told the Washington Examiner.
“There are technological issues many talk about, sure, but there are also important governance issues that would impact interoperability and the efficiency of the system,” he added.
Some have suggested that Congress should try a VMT tax out on commercial trucking first and see how that goes. Scribner disagrees.
“There’s a logic to starting with trucks, given the technology involved and that truckers already deal with interstate and international fuel tax issues, but politically, it would be a disaster to single them out first,” he said.
So the Washington Examiner asked a trucking firm owner what he thinks of a VMT tax.
Mark Ruiter is an owner of the family trucking business Martin’s Feed, which operates dozens of semitrucks out of northwestern Washington state.
“I think that people would absolutely hate a pay-by-mile program,” Ruiter told the Washington Examiner.
“I don’t think they realize that in order to have those miles automatically calculate and get sent to the proper entity, this device would have to be a GPS. A lot of people are not going to want the government tracking their personal vehicle everywhere they go. Commercial trucks do it, but it’s not the government tracking. It’s the owner of the vehicle,” he added.
Ruiter said he thinks the Mineta survey results highlight a growing divide between urban and rural people. City dwellers want to cut down on traffic and have better public or quasi-public transportation options, and a VMT tax might help with that.
He argued that such a tax “would unduly burden rural areas where public transit is simply not a viable option and never will be and folks have no option other than driving to go to work, get groceries, go to their kids’ lessons or sports things, go to church.”
As for how a VMT tax might hit the bottom line of his or similar trucking companies, Ruiter gave the Washington Examiner a quick economics lesson in what hauling for a living looks like on the balance sheet.
“As a trucking business owner, I care about roads, bridges, and traffic. Time sitting in traffic has both a real cost and an opportunity cost that is measurable. My trucks already pay just over 10 cents per mile in Washington state fuel tax. That’s just the Washington tax, not the fuel itself or the federal tax or the licensing, permits,” he said.
“At $3.50 per gallon all-in for fuel, our costs are 70 cents per mile. Labor cost is close to another 70 cents per mile,” he said. “Many trucks on the road today are operating at $2 per mile. After labor and fuel, you have 60 cents per mile to pay for everything else. It’s a rough game.”
