CWL 2010 #4 Pricing Driving

I’ve been dreading writing this one because I fear it will be viewed as some sort of “War on Drivers” kind of thing. I’m frequently a driver these days, so I certainly don’t want to declare war on myself. But, to be frank, if we’re going to get more cyclists we’re going to have to have fewer of something else (or more total trips – it is true that bike sharing systems create trips where people would have just stayed at home, but that is really a niche). The best place, from a social cost standpoint to get cyclists from is the current pool of drivers. One way to do that, without it being some sort of “war on drivers,” is to properly price the cost of driving, which would encourage some fence sitters to save money by biking, walking, taking metro, etc…There are several ways we subsidize driving that could be addressed.

The gas tax: The federal gas tax has been stuck at 18.4 cents per gallon since 1993. With inflation that means we’ve been cutting the tax every year. The Federal Highway Trust Fund, which gets ~2/3rds of its revenue from the gas tax, has recently been running at a deficit, and our roads have billions of dollars of deferred maintenance. Just indexing the current tax to inflation would go a long way toward solving the problem, but if we want the gas tax to continue to fill the gap in the FHTF, it will probably need to be increased. On the one hand, 81% of people say they’d pay more taxes to repair and upgrade our infrastructure, but almost the same percentage said they’d oppose an increase to the gas tax. So that’s a mixed message.

Furthermore, you could make a case that the tax should be increased to cover the environmental costs of mining, shipping, refining and burning gasoline. Some have even argued that the gas tax is a fair way to pay for the Iraq war. An analysis done in 1998 showed that to capture the full cost of gasoline, the tax would need to be raised by several dollars per gallon. That is probably too extreme for most people.

Personally I’d like to see us move to a Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) tax to cover the costs of roads and infrastructure, with a multiplier for car weight; and a gas tax to cover some clean air, clean water and alternative fuel initiatives. But that is probably not going to happen.

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