Stefani Reynolds/Pool via AP
Transportation Secretary nominee Pete Buttigieg speaks during a Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill, January 21, 2021, in Washington.
Pete Buttigieg has parachuted in for a soft landing at the Department of Transportation. There were no Betsy DeVos-esque moments at the Rhodes Scholar’s confirmation hearing. “You know what the hell you are talking about,” gushed Sen. Jon Tester, a Montana Democrat, near the end of the former South Bend mayor’s two-and-a-half-hour charm offensive. That offensive has also taken Buttigieg to late-night talk shows and celebrity newsmaker programs, where he’s commiserated about the sad state of American infrastructure and what the Biden administration plans to do about it.
BANNER
But feel-good television blots out the problems of a sector cracking under the weight of early-21st-century inaction. There is a stunning lack of urgency in Congress about the virtual insolvency of the Highway Trust Fund, which shores up roads and public transit with fuel taxes that were last increased in 1993 and are not indexed to inflation. President Biden and Secretary Buttigieg are on the spot to devise interim measures to address the diminishing returns of gas taxes as cars grow more fuel-efficient and electrification looms—or to come up with something better.
That something better may be a vehicle miles traveled (VMT) fee system, which charges road users by the mile. Will Congress go along? In his only major misstep in the hearing, Buttigieg suggested that raising the gas tax was on the table when it wasn’t. Biden obviously does not want to serve up any “He raised your taxes in the middle of pandemic” GOP campaign-ads-that-write-themselves for the 2022 midterms. Right after Buttigieg misspoke, a Transportation Department spokesperson delivered a swift retraction: A “variety of options need to be on the table, but increasing the gas tax is not among them.”
Buttigieg, however, also suggested moving to a VMT, and on that, there was no pushback from the administration. Clearly, the returns from the gas tax are diminishing, and the announcement last week from General Motors that it will go all-electric by 2035 has alerted even Congress’s oil-patch members that times are changing. If increased fuel efficiency has already cratered trust fund revenues, vehicular electrification promises to kill them off altogether.
Congress could continue to rely on general-fund transfers since other short-term alternatives like indexing the gas tax to inflation are nonstarters. But members’ time-honored opposition to raising the gas tax doesn’t work like it once did. It has grown harder for Americans to ignore the potholes, the creaky trains and rusty bridges that they encounter every day, as the success of Democrat Gretchen Whitmer’s 2018 campaign for governor of Michigan, centered on her promise to “fix the damn roads,” clearly illustrates. Congressional inaction merely punts the issue to the states, where the fuel taxes are the primary transportation revenue generator.
About a dozen states are now studying VMT fees as replacements for the gas tax. The furthest along is Oregon, which implemented a program of voluntary miles-traveled road charges in 2015. It currently charges drivers of passenger vehicles 1.8 cents a mile and gives participating drivers who pay fuel taxes, currently 36 cents per gallon, the ability to get a credit on their gas expenses. It’s a choice that only a fraction of Oregonians make.
Adopting such road charges is not merely a matter of designing and implementing new taxes. It also requires convincing road users to share more personal data with the government. Many people’s qualms about VMT revolve, as Buttigieg acknowledged at his hearing, around data management and storage. Advocating for, much less implementing, VMT would doubtless raise fears that state and federal governments would use the information to track driver whereabouts. Oregon discloses driver location information only to drivers, even if they choose to use a GPS option to track their miles. The program’s account managers, such as Emovis, a tolling technology firm, use that information to determine whether those miles qualify for the program. By law, account managers cannot disclose personal information and data; the data is destroyed within 30 days of payment processing.
Ideally, a VMT framework should act like an odometer, totaling miles and billing accordingly. But in these deeply paranoid times, privacy assurances mean little to people who distrust government; it would be easy for the right-wing conspiracy theorists and Republicans generally (categories that increasingly overlap), as well as privacy advocates of all ideologies, to convince them that the government is monitoring every mile they drive. Given the controversies over cellphone data (and the ability of law enforcement to track people using that data), it’s a valid concern.
Nonetheless, VMT may spark a faint glimmer of bipartisan concord. This week, Rep. Sam Graves, a Missouri Republican and the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee’s ranking member, endorsed Buttigieg’s suggestion of VMT as one option to replace the gas tax. The test for Biden and Buttigieg is whether they can prod Congress into funding some infrastructure policy before the political calendar grinds everything to a halt. In this climate, as the Biden administration apparently knows, any progress requires a sustained charm offensive.
This article is part of our ongoing series on sustainable mobility, transportation, and climate.
