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is an occasional journal of Oregon, from arts and books to public policy & transportation.
All content © 2006- by Alexander B. Craghead, except where otherwise noted.
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Cafe Unknown
Travel, History and Portland Oregon by Dan Haneckow
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By Jack Bogdanski of Portland, Oregon. (Like he needs any other introduction by now? -- A.B.C.)
For Portlanders Only
"Why buy a mattress anywhere else?"
Good Stuff NW
Featuring stuff that is good in the NW
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LOST Magazine is an online monthly magazine that combines elements of many other literary, online, and national magazines with a singular mission--to reclaim in writing lost people, places, and things.
Mapes on Politics
Way West of the Beltway
Outside Is America
A journal about photography, roadtrips, trains and life, with occasional detours into movies, baseball, music, family and more.
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Good photos usually have good stories to go with them.... The goal of The Photographers' Railroad Page is to provide an outlet for top quality photographs and their story.
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Throwing Ourselves on the Grenade of Bad Food to Save You
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A Conversation About Access & Mobility in the Portland/Vancouver Region
PowellsBooks.Blog
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The musings of a farmer with a typewriter and camera
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Documenting Portland, Oregon architecture, history, and culture through photos, postcards, and words.
The Unauthorized Observer
Observations on faith, photography, trains, baseball, the city where I live (Fullerton, Calif.), anything that I find funny (a lot of things) or irritating (some things) and various incidents involving friends and family.
Under the Weather
...the open road, fatherhood, family life, music, railroads, photography, popular and unpopular culture, sex, violence, religion, the oppression of consumerism and capitalism and the general bullshit that makes up modern life.
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A blog to counter the myths, lies, and demagoguery others use against sound city planning to further their own ends, fair and foul - but also to urge the profession itself to pull back from the occasional wretched PC exces.
VanPortlander
Living in Vancouver; working in Portland. I have some thoughts.
Whiskey, Texas
...life and experiences in Texas and the Southwest. Recurring themes: Photography, railroads, fading ads / ghost signs, fallen-flag railroad logos, boxcars, bicycling, Texas music, pop culture, sports, road trips, literature, kids and family.
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The Travel Writing and Photography of Scott Lothes
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Thursday, November 29, 2007
The Mileage Tax: Snipe Hunt Time in Salem
Willamette Week yesterday put up a short, skeptical story on the state's experiment in a GPS-based mileage tax. The piece provides a nice overview of just why many reasonable people find the idea to be -- shall we be kind? -- of questionable merit. Labels: Civics, Public Policy, Transportation
For those unfamiliar with the concept, the Oregon Department of Transportation has been flirting with replacing the gas tax with a tax based on mileage. The reasoning behind the proposal goes something like this: gas prices have climbed rapidly, and as a result automobile maker are making more efficient vehicles. The first major breakthrough was the ever-present Toyota Prius, but now even major domestic producers like Chevy are in the game, bringing in even large SUV hybrids to market, and threatening a pseudo-electric car. As it is, Portland allegedly has the highest per-capita ownership of hybrids. Result? Gas sales may plummet, further reducing revenues from the state gas tax, a tax that has not been raised since 1993.
One of the potential answers might be a mileage tax. Such a revenue system would negate the impacts of fuel choice on state revenues, producing a more stable tax base. It sounds like a highly logical solution.
But to enact the proposal, there has to be a way to track mileage for each car. ODOT's solution is to put a Global Positioning System based tracking device. As Governing's Kathleen Hunter reports, each device currently costs $200, and there are over 100 million cars in the U.S. today. Why use a national number? As the earlier Willie Week story reports, this isn't a solution that can be implemented by one state alone:"[Oregon DOT's Jim] Whitty acknowledges it’s unlikely that a small state like Oregon could be the first to implement a mileage tax. 'You have to have a consortium of small states working together on this,' Whitty says. 'Or California would have to get involved. Or the U.S. Department of Transportation.'"
Why involve other states? Pause and consider; what happens when an out-of-state vehicle with no box enters the state? Or will ODOT put up border shacks, and require each vehicle entering the state to get a "loaner" tax box? And if Oregon were the only state with a mileage tax, you can bet that Oregonians won't want to keep paying for miles they drive out-of-state, on top of the local state's gas-based taxes.
My own take on this is that it is yet another snipe hunt in Salem. Throw out the technical considerations for a moment. There still remain a number of problems with the concept.
The first, ODOT is proposing to replace an in-place functional revenue collecting system with a totally new system. This new system will require millions of dollars of R&D. The tax box will add to the cost of new vehicles, essentially asking car buyers to pay for the privilege of being able to be taxed.
Additionally, it appears that we would be unable to make this work alone. So at the same time that the state doesn't have enough money to add a lane to 217 until 2089 -- which even Metro Councilor Rex Burkholder confirms, -- we're spending our money doing other states' R&D for them? Or are we operating under the belief that, if this idea proves feasible, California and Washington -- much less the rest of the states -- will altruistically reimburse us?
Perhaps the most damning aspect of this idea is the total abdication of leadership on the part of the state. The success or failure of the project would be dependent on the decisions made by other states in the region, or possibly the rest of the nation. The people of Oregon, in other words, would have to live with their in-state transportation funding options being decided by people not living in Oregon. If this is to be a system that needs to be nationally implemented, then it ought to be the federal government paying for it, not the cash strapped citizens of our state. Otherwise we are simply pissing away our own purse without any reasonable guarantee that we'll get anything back in return.
And this is all before I've even touched on the civil liberties ramifications. I won't do that here, as it's a deep subject of its own. I am far more concerned with the pragmatic bread-and-butter of how we build and maintain infrastructure anyway. But suffice it to say, those who are concerned about civil freedoms have a big problem with the government owning a GPS device attached to your car that can tell them not just where you are but where you have been.
Meanwhile, after all the money and the hype and the studying, we have a perfectly capable revenue generation system that would cost exactly zero additional dollars to continue to use. If less gas is being sold, then how about we raise the gas tax rate to compensate? As I mentioned earlier, we haven't raised it statewide since 1993. Many communities, having little to no hope in seeing additional state funds, have begun to pursue local gas taxes to fund projects in their region. This is good for them, as revenues from their communities stays local. But that is a two-edged sword: for rural Oregon, where the ratio of cars to miles of highway is far lower, local gas taxes is not such a good deal.
So why not simply raise that tax? Oregonians tend to be naturally skeptical of tax hike proposals. The insularity and opacity of ODOT has lead many citizens to view it with suspicion. Rumor mills speculate that ODOT may face some additional and serious public scrutiny of its budget if it makes requests for more revenue. Yet if the state does nothing, the transportation system could face major deferred maintenance, with that deference most likely being worst in rural areas most distant from Salem and Portland.
There is of course another model. Some states have notably employed the use of tolls to fund major highways. Many have had their own problems, but others such as the Ohio Turnpike have been excellent examples of what can be done with a toll system. The Turnpike serves as a clean, swift, and exceptionally well maintained freeway across the entire length of Ohio. Rates are surprisingly cheap, with most shorter hops being only a few dollars, and the entire 241-mile, cross-state run costing the average passenger vehicle a little over ten dollars. And atop all this, it's publicly owned.
While tolls have never been highly palatable in modern Oregon, they do have a history in the state. In more modern times, toll bridges were quite common, including the Astoria-Megler, the Longview, and the original Interstate Bridges. Most eventually ceased to charge a toll, usually after paying off the debt to build them, although the bridge at Cascade Locks continues to charge a toll. The proposed new I-5 crossing of the Columbia River may follow this historic toll-bridge route as well.
Yet most modern toll-road proposals in Oregon are hopelessly inept. The most recent toll-road proposal in the state is the "Newburg Dundee Bypass". This proposal would have created an eleven-mile, $493 million bypass of existing Oregon Highway 99W, and paid for it by a toll. The operation of this congestion-bypass would have been concessioned to Macquarie Infrastructure Group, a massive multi-national private toll-road operator based in Australia. Eventually, of course, smarter heads penciled it out: Bear Stearns issued a report in July of 2007 that pointed out that the only way to ensure people would even consider the bypass would be to toll the existing highway too, the very road that provides the main streets of at least three towns. Residents, you might be surprised to learn, didn't take too kindly to this idea, and made it a non-starter. Result? Macquarie Infrastructure pulled out of the deal.
But building a short, eleven-mile bypass of pseudo-urban congestion is not anything even in the same league as the Ohio Turnpike. Imagine instead something more ambitious. Consider the entire, 300-mile length of Interstate 5, from the Columbia to California, -- perhaps along with the 90 miles of U.S. 26 from Sandy to Madras -- as a toll-road. Making both highways self-funding would relieve a massive burden from ODOT. If successful the projects could pave the way for tolling other major routes that consume maintenance dollars, such as Interstate 84. It would also allow the department to concentrate gas tax revenues on investments in more rural areas, as well as continue desperately needed investment in non-road projects.
But of course, a plan such as this would require political leadership from the state. We'd rather hide behind the whiz-bang of a fancy technological fix than face growing what Hemingway called cajones. And far more than revenue, that is our true shortfall.
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