Two states tax some drivers by the mile. Many more want to give it a try

washingtonpost.com

4 points·dyno-might··6 comments

I have a technical question: Is there any feasible way to implement a vehicle miles tax without building a massive surveillance state that basically tracks every single place everyone goes? This hardly seems beyond the wit of man, but I'm not aware of any existing off-the-shelf way to accomplish this, other than just having the government promise to delete all records after X days.

It doesn't need to report your location, just total miles traveled. That's how it worked in Oregon.

Distance traveled is still private information, so the Oregon rules called for it to be deleted after 30 days. I doubt it would suffice for privacy activists, but the ACLU was on board with it:

https://usa.streetsblog.org/2013/09/24/ten-questions-and-ans...

Every non-antique car has an odometer. Some states require yearly car inspections. Odometer readings are normally required when selling a car.

I like it. We might want to take some extra efforts to make sure the odometer is accurate, but there's pretty strong incentives to fool with odometers already.

Apparently the average person pays 150-400 in gas taxes per year now. I guess the depreciation from mileage on car is of a similar order of magnitude. And we seem to do OK now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odometer_fraud

(I'm sure people cheat on gas taxes, too.)

The problem with odometers is that the tax is by state rather than federal. So you need to distinguish in-state from out-of-state miles.

why not just tax gas more?

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