It's Baaaack. Oregon, Once Again, Pursuing GPS Driving Tax

But the odometer doesn't track where you drove, say, to California, Washington or Idaho. Why should I pay for Oregon's roads when I drove 2,000 miles in another state?

Simple. This allows the state to charge BOTH gas taxes and GPS mileage taxes.

No one is proposing the gas tax be eliminated, or promising that it won't be raised in the future. Asking for the 'defect' in the current system is like asking the question of why we need sales taxes, property taxes, inheritance taxes, gas taxes, tariffs, telecom taxes, corporate taxes, sin taxes, license fees, alternative minimum taxes, and capital gains taxes when we already have personal income taxes.

The fact is that we never need another tax; we already have plenty enough. But the more places that you insert the taxman, the more total revenue you can extract without people noticing and raising a fuss (cf. VAT).

"L'art de l'imposition consiste à plumer l'oie pour obtenir le plus possible de plumes avec le moins possible de cris."

("The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest amount of feathers with the least possible amount of hissing.")

Jean-Baptiste Colbert

I don't know about what they will do in Oregon, but this can actually be a more fair tax system.

They can divide the state into tax zones. If you want to drive in a city with good public transportation, you should pay more than someone who is living outside the public transportation network.

A gas tax hits everyone. Some people depend more on their car than others. If the goal is to reduce carbon emisions, the tax burden could be put on the drivers who have better alternatives.

I wondered about this myself, but I do see potential long-term effects of a purely gas-tax based system. Even electric vehicles contribute wear and tear to the road system though they don't contribute emissions. The need for maintenance doesn't stop just because cars would be non-gasoline based. Eventually we will need to acknowledge this point from a purely pragmatic stance. Encouraging high-efficiency vehicles via a gas tax is a reasonable incentive now but it's not sustainable.

I suspect that the eventual system will bear a resemblance to the one in use for long-haul trucking, where operators keep a detailed log of how many miles they drive in each state as well as loaded weight. GPS is one way to facilitate such a system.

The potential problem with the current tax on fuel to fund road maintenance in that a driver's fair share of road maintenance may not correspond to the amount of fuel she consumes. This can be unfair. For example, Bill Gates, who can afford to drive a $100,000 Tesla electric car, may drive a around a lot and wear out the road much more than a poor person who commutes in an old, cheap gas guzzler. Yet because road maintenance is allocated by the gas tax, Bill Gates, whose electric car consumes no gas, would pay nothing for road maintenance, while the poor person with the gas guzzler would pay too much.

The very possible privacy issues are enough for me to form an opinion, let alone that this policy would be no better than a gas tax, and arguably worse, at reducing emissions.