It is very frustrating to engineers to read things like this. I blame the RAND study which was utterly irresponsible. It waved its hands and talked of a box which would track a vehicle’s movements by GPS as though such a thing existed, or as though that were an adequate description to get such a thing built. People assume a magic GPS box which can implement a VMT tax and then proceed to discuss the civil liberties issues that it raises.

There is no such box. not only has no such box been built, no such box has been designed. Not only has no such box been designed, but no such box has been specified. It tracks by GPS. What does it do if it has acquired only two satellites? Only one? None at all? Is the GPS antenna internal or external? How is it powered? How does it interact with the rest of the car? What degree of tamper-proofing is required? These questions (and many more) need to be answered before anyone can design such a box. Some answers are more expensive than others.

Answers are double-edged. A particular specification may be cheaper to build, but more expensive to retrofit into existing cars. Recognize that poorer people generally have older cars into which retrofitting any box is likely to be more expensive; a box which is picky about how it engages with the car runs the price up yet more. Recognize, too, that there are a quarter of a billion cars out there that would need retrofitting.

There are massive engineering and implementation issues with a VMT tax. Not talking about them doesn’t make them go away.

Wanna bet?

I’m not saying there is a hidden agenda, I’m just saying that opponents of the tax will claim that, and the US public will believe them.

But you’d like to tax me more than my co-worker– who drives 30 miles per day in a Hummer H2 (12 MPG). And you think this is more equitable?

Obviously a hyrbid puts more wear and tear on roads, while using less gas. Since there were a whopping 288,000 hybrids registered in the US in 2008 (out of 150 million autos), this seems (to be kind) a little premature.

Several companies banded together (an oil company, tire company, battery company, automobile company, etc), established a dummy corporation, which proceeded to purchase trolley lines around the U.S., with the intent of crippling and eventually destroying them all (trolleys were even burned), forcing U.S. consumers into buying their product for their private means of getting around and replacing city trolley lines with bus routes. Profit. Profit. Profit.

When their conspiracy was uncovered by Congress in the early 1950s, each individual was fined a whopping $1.00 and each company involved a whopping $5,000. Wow, that’ll show them. These type of conservatives will be the death of America. Privatize everything they can get their greedy hands on for their profit, and the public be damned. That’s their idea of a “free market economy.” And a subservient citizenry MUST be monitored…to make certain no one gets any crazy democratic, liberal ideas in their head.

These privateers, er, privatizers, therefore, blocked any attempt to raise the gas tax, even if by just a little, even when gas was around a $1.00 a gallon, to pay for new public-funded roads and maintain those already in existence. Thus, the gas tax has remained the same for almost two decades even as our population grew and more cars hit the roads.

But off of what were these privateers, er, privatizers planning to make so much money? Toll roads. For profit. For their profit. Around my town, these corporate privateers, er, privatizers have even gone so far as to propose turning current public roads (and the right-of-way purchased by the citizens) into toll roads, without any reimbursement to the citizenry for this corporate for-profit rape of this public resource.

I’m not fooled. Public schools underfunded to make way for for-profit charter schools. The U.S. military downsized to make way for for-profit contractors and sub-contractors taking over jobs public-funded members of our military used to do themselves. We saw huge amounts of this costly privatization scam during the Bush/Cheney years, a tsunami of outsourcing public jobs to for-profit contractors and sub-contractors (primarily Republican owned) through the extensive use by Bush/Cheney of federal-law-violating no-bid contracts.

So, now someone is proposing this VMT. Why? For what purpose? Versus raising the gas tax by a few cents nationwide? If more restrictions were placed on on-line oil futures trading, we’d probably actually see a net gain, with gasoline costing less, easily making up for the few cent increase in the gas tax.

I agree with McMia above. Just what our liberal democracy needs…more surveillance. Oh, wait, such surveillance usually is the hallmark of one right-wing totalitarian police state after another throughout history. Gotta keep an eye on those “loyal” subjects, don’t you know, who might get restless at having their democracy stolen from them by a bunch of for-profit authoritarian totalitarian right-wing control freaks. Yep. Yep. Like what has happened to America today.

A gas tax has its place, but that is as a integral part of taxing externalities, as in the negative consequences that come from the exhaust pipe. Not as a tool to build or maintain sprawl.

Since the gas tax is used for the sole purpose of funding limited access interstate highways, just toll them all based on weight, distance and place. No need for tracking devices, or complex odometer schemes, just %100 user based fees.

You’re comparing a high performance sports-car with a hybrid people-carrier. And it’s a crap comparison; The difference in weight is actually pretty minimal. Like 150 Lbs. Not nearly enough to offset the damage the much greater power and braking ability of the Mustang will inflict on the road. And then there’s the difference in emissions …

How ’bout we compare apples to apples? Say an Escape Hybrid (3650 Lbs, 29 MPG) and a Toyota Yaris (2400 Lbs, 38 MPG). Or a Mustang (3500 Lbs, 19 MPG) and a Mazda Miata (2500 Lbs, 28 MPG).

But everyone commenting here is right. The idea is objectionable and, perhaps more important, unworkable. It may not be that hard to build the requisite measuring capabilities into new cars, but retrofitting old ones, particularly old ones no longer made, is likely to be hard and not that cheap. Who pays? As McMia points out, above, it will have to be hard to disable.

@Amanda, odometers are notoriously easy to change. Or simply to be made to stop working.

No, that is not hard to imagine…not hard at all. This would be political suicide to whoever proposed it…and for once the uproar would be justified. Why on earth would you think it politically impossible to raise the gas tax yet think that a whole new tax that requires installation of equipment in your car will be welcomed?

Ordinarily, the heavier vehicle will have the worse gas mileage. Picking out unlikely circumstances seems like a poor way to base policy.

Weird post.

Furthermore, I have not seen any explanation for how we could design a VMT box that is secure. I have degrees in electrical engineering and computer science so I know how to design all sorts of devices, but this is fundamentally very difficult. We’re talking about a device that needs to be attached to the vehicle, and transmit data from anywhere in the country, and has to be secure against user tampering, and has to anonymize users for their own protection. And it must be cheap. We don’t have good system design principles for solving those kinds of problems. That’s why systems like the xbox or various DRM systems always end up getting hacked. A hacked xbox will save you very little money compared to a hacked VMT counter.

As for civil liberties, there’s a big difference between choosing to install GPS from a private company that gets you cool navigation features vs being forced to allow the government to install something that will cost you money. And the only transportation funding that makes people happy is transportation funding that comes from somebody else.

Not products mandated by the federal government.

The gas tax is good.

It has an incentive for fuel-efficient cars.

There is no need for a VMT tax.

The implication of this post that people can’t figure out that there is a connection between gas taxes and road use is absurd.