The commission, a 15-member panel created by Congress, is the second group in a year to call for increasing the current 18.4 cents a gallon federal tax on gasoline and the 24.4 cents a gallon tax on diesel.
In a report expected in late January, members of the infrastructure financing commission say they will urge Congress to raise the gasoline tax by 10 cents a gallon and the diesel tax by 12 cents to 15 cents a gallon. At the same time, the commission will recommend tying the fuel tax rates to inflation. The commission will also recommend that states raise their fuel taxes and make greater use of toll roads and fees for rush-hour driving.
Commission members said the government must find more road and bridge building money somewhere. "I'm not excited about a gas tax increase, but the reality is our current gas tax doesn't pay for upkeep of the system we have now," said Adrian Moore, vice president of the Reason Foundation, a libertarian think tank in Los Angeles, and a member of the highway revenue commission. "We can either let the roads go to hell or we can pay more."
The dilemma for Congress is that highway and transit programs are dependent for revenue on fuel taxes that are not sustainable. Many Americans are driving less and switching to more fuel-efficient cars and trucks, and a shift to new fuels and technologies like plug-in hybrid electric cars will further erode gasoline sales.
According to a draft of the financing commission's recommendations, the nation needs to move to a new system that taxes motorists according to how much they use roads. "Most if not all of the commissioners have a strong belief and commitment that we need a fundamental transformation of the current system," said commission chairman Robert Atkinson, president of the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, a technology policy think tank in Washington.
A study by the Transportation Research Board of the National Academies estimated that the annual gap between revenues and the investment needed to improve highway and transit systems was about $105 billion in 2007, and will increase to $134 billion in 2017 under current trends.
Projected shortfalls in revenue led the National Surface Transportation Policy & Revenue Study Commission, in a report issued in January 2008, to call for an increase of as much as 40 cents a gallon in the gasoline tax, phased in over five years.
Charles Whittington, chairman of the American Trucking Associations, which supports a fuel tax increase as long as the money goes to highway projects, said Congress may decide to disguise a fuel tax hike as a surcharge to combat climate change. Transportation is responsible for about a third of all U.S. carbon emissions created by burning fossil fuels. Traffic congestion wastes an estimated 2.9 billion gallons of fuel a year. Less congestion would reduce greenhouse gases and dependence on foreign oil. "Instead of calling it a gas tax, call it a carbon tax," Whittington said.
Bottlenecks around the nation cost the trucking industry about 243 million lost truck hours and about $7.8 billion per year, according to the commission.
Meanwhile, states from California to New York are talking about taxing gasoline more, reported WTVY-TV. Illinois is considering an 8-cent-per-gallon increase, which could raise $7 billion for the state. One proposal in California calls for a 13-cent increase, which would help raise $9.3 billion. Nebraska's gasoline tax went up this last week by less than a penny, and is expected to gross $2 million. Many states are billions of dollars in debt, and say the gasoline tax would pay for much needed infrastructure and road maintenance.
Also, Oregon Governor Theodore R. Kulongoski's upcoming budget calls for a highway tax based on mileage, not gasoline purchases, reported The Los Angeles Times. A state task force will look at equipping every new vehicle in Oregon with a Global Positioning System (GPS) to record every mile driven and where. Motorists would pay at the pump based on how much they drove, regardless of vehicle type.
The plan still requires legislative endorsement and the full details could take several years to work out, but state analysts said the governor's endorsement is a crucial step toward solving what has become a problem in many states: dependence on a gasoline tax.
While Oregon appears to be out in front in looking at a mileage fee, several other states, including Ohio, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Florida, Rhode Island, Minnesota and Texas, have also expressed an interest in phasing out the gasoline tax in favor of charging motorists for how much they drive, said the report.
Jason Williams, executive director of the Taxpayer Association of Oregon, said: "This is just another wide-eyed government experiment that's going to fail and cost the taxpayer a lot of money. We basically see it as the next big boondoggle of 2009."
In a Portland trial program in 2006 and 2007, about 300 cars were equipped with GPS devices and every time drivers bought gasoline, they were charged 1.2 cents a mile, about equivalent to the state's 24-cents-a-gallon tax assuming a vehicle that averages 20 miles per gallon.
"They drive up to the pump and there's a mileage reader there, very much like a modern toll reader, which identifies the car as a mileage fee payer, and the total mileage driven in each zone is transferred by a wireless radio frequency that goes into a database, and the mileage fee rates are applied," Whitty said.
In Kulongoski's proposal, GPS devices would be installed only in new vehicles, and would monitor mileage only on Oregon roads. Drivers from outside the state would pay the standard gasoline tax, Whitty said.
The monitors could also allow the state to charge higher fees for rush-hour travel in congested areas, Oregon officials said. Seattle recently conducted such a trial with GPS and found that drivers were much less likely to enter congested areas when charged to do so.
California has also looked at mileage fees, but "we're still talking. We're not there yet," Elizabeth Deakin, professor of city and regional planning at the University of California Berkeley, told the newspaper.
She said the increasing variation in vehicles' fuel efficiency has impelled the national debate over how to pay for transportation expenses. "A vehicle that gets 20 mpg pays more gas tax, but doesn't actually use that much more road than my hybrid does," she said. "I'm not paying much gas tax. I'm getting kind of a free ride. Of course, you can say that's not a bad thing, because it gave me an incentive to pay more money for the hybrid."
Mileage fees do not have to involve GPS trackers, Deakin said. They could be as simple as submitting periodic odometer readings when renewing car registration, for example, or setting an estimated average that everyone would pay. In the latter scenario, drivers could be invited to prove they drove less and car sellers could be charged if their odometer readings were higher than they should be.
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