VMT Charges and the Future of Toll Roads

This article describes how the United States has seen growing transportation community support for shifting highway funding from fuel taxes to some kind of charge based on vehicle miles traveled (VMT) in recent years. A special committee of the Transportation Research Board (TRB) concluded that fuel taxes will not be viable as the country’s primary funding source in 2006. Three years later, the National Surface Transportation Infrastructure Financing Commission proposed that a shift from fuel taxes to VMT charges should begin. There is a concern that the toll road industry has been virtually ignored by those working on the transition. This is ironic, since toll facilities are already being paid for by charges based on miles driven rather than gallons consumed. This neglect of the toll-road sector may disguise a possible threat to the tolled sector. If all roads become, in effect, toll roads, why would separate entities be needed that operate the minority of all highways that were developed using tolls? If a universal VMT charging system existed, wouldn’t all the state Departments of Transportation (DOT) become toll agencies? That certainly need not be the case because the kind of universal VMT charging that many people have in mind is unlikely to be feasible. Instead of a utopian system based on a costly global positioning system (GPS) box in every vehicle, a much simpler approach to replacing fuel taxes is suggested, one which also implies a larger role for the toll industry. The article discusses how the real value of fuel tax revenues has been trended generally downward for the last three decades, creating an ever-widening gap between highway funding needs and actual highway-user-tax revenue. This has occurred for two reasons: most fuel taxes are not indexed for inflation, and the average fuel economy of motor vehicles has almost doubled during this period. Moreover, federal policy is calling for reducing the carbon-intensity of the environment, so there will likely be increased government support for alternatives to petroleum-fueled vehicles.