Gas Tax on Miles, Not Gallons, Tested - You Heard it Here Months Ago

PORTLAND, OR, United States (UPI) — Oregon is testing the idea of collecting highway funds through a tax on miles driven, rather than gasoline consumed.

Eighty percent of Oregon’s highway money comes from its 24-cents-per-gallon gas tax. If the state promotes reducing gasoline consumption and consumers tend to buy the fuel-efficient vehicles, including hybrids, highway revenues would take a hit, The New York Times reported. Rest of article here:

I’ve reported on this in the past; including a heads up on this specific Oregon initiative … see here and here .

There are a number of issues, both good and bad as I see it with this type of mileage tracking. I’ll summarize them below, but the most important issue is here … you may be in love with this idea, you may absolutely loathe it, but if you do nothing it is going to happen and even if you want it to happen, it may be implemented in a poor way. This is the time to get active with your elected representatives … bitching about it after the fact won’t do much good.

Major Concern 1: Privacy, or more specifically, who owns the data? Most of the movers and shakers of these systems use the argument that tracking vehicles via GPS doesn’t so anything more than one can do with the naked eye and a pad and pencil. If you want to find out say where your next-door neighbor drives you can sit in your car, wait for him to drive away and follow at a discreet distance and note each and every stop. There are some anti-stalking laws in some jurisdictions that ought to be considered but in general, doing this is legal anywhere in the world. Because your tracking subject is driving in a publicly licensed vehicle on public roads he or she has no legal expectation of privacy.

However, there’s certainly validity to the objection that the “state” automatically collecting the data in bulk is in a much different category than the police or even a private individual collecting data on a specific individual. This is a question that certain I won’t answer; it must be thrashed out and forced to a legal answer ASAP. As a certified technogeek I love the idea of testing the system, but one has to understand that from day one data is collected and once collected it’s on record. How will Oregon use and protect this data and more importantly, how will they harmonize their data policies with the other 49 states and Canada and Mexico …all of whom already share information on commercial vehicles and all of whom both host Oregonian vehicles upon their roads and send their own vehicles into Oregon.

Major Concern 2. In some ways this isn’t even GPS related. It’s an area of concern I have with all taxation or commercial commerce systems based upon mileage. Pinning down how many miles a vehicle travels is a much less evolved technology than the average person may think. In spite of several federal laws requiring disclosure of odometer mileage when vehicles are sold, there is just no accuracy standard at all for vehicle odometers. Many manufacturers will not even respond to queries as to accuracy, and those that do will commonly quote errors as high as 8 pr 10% as “within normal limits”.

A business associate who makes a large proportion of his profit from miles handles the situation by asking customers to manually compare their vehicle odometers to highway mileposts and then apply an electronic correction factor to their on board mileage-based computers. There is literally no other way. Even highway mileposts have been proven in a few legal cases to be not admissible as court evidence of mileage.

The majority of GPS vehicle tracking units log a position for the vehicle on a time of travel basis … in other words they record and or send back to a central computer the vehicles coordinates every second, every minute, every 5 minutes … or in the case of the huge frog in the puddle … Qualcomm Omnitracs which already geolocates a huge percentage of the commercial vehicle fleet, every two hours. I don’t know about you, but if we both leave a fixed location and drive for two hours to get to another known location, I think that the two of us could wind up with a lot of difference in the mileage we actually drove across the state’s highways during our trips. I’m sure Oregon is doing some thinking along these lines; I surely wish they would release something with some technical “meat” to it so this factor could be analyzed.

This known and accepted inaccuracy in odometers is a big problem, as I said at the beginning. Nothing that is directly related to GPS. Nor only are there the huge amounts of mileage based fees paid by commercial vehicles, but think of all the mileage-based rental contracts (U-Haul trucks anyone?), where the consumer is charged prices like 90 cents per mile driven, based on a device in the truck that has no certification of accuracy by state or federal regulatory agencies. Ever look at the price you would pay on an auto lease for excessive miles? Again, the charge is determined by the vehicle odometer which is not required to live up to any standards of accuracy.

I wonder hwy it’s taken the US so long to look at this and I wonder how long the “average Joe and Jane” will continue to possibly be bilked … hint … put a set of one size larger than standard tires on your leased vehicle’s drive wheels and get extra thousands of miles fro free on your list … with no standards, how can you be wrong? (YMMV)