Florida May Consider Pay-per-Mile Motorists' Tax

Facing a likely future of dwindling gas-tax income, some Florida transportation officials are promoting a new way to raise money for highways and bridges: charging motorists by the mile.

Called the VMT, or vehicle miles traveled tax, the idea is that drivers would pay depending on how far they go, rather than how much gasoline they pump into their cars.

The mechanics and pricing of the proposal are varied, but one experiment in Oregon used a global positioning device in a fleet of cars to track their mileage. That number was read by a device at the gas pump, which taxed the user accordingly.

The test resulted in more revenue than simply taxing gasoline partly because high-mileage cars ended up paying as much as heavy, fuel-guzzlers. The VMT has gained traction as the price of gas has soared, discouraging driving and spurring people to buy more fuel-efficient cars. In Florida, that has meant a drop of almost $7 billion in the five-year work plan, from $43.5 billion to $36.2 billion.

Getting policymakers to enact the tax, however, might be a hard sell.

Right now, Florida, in combination with local government agencies, levies as much as 52 cents per gallon in gas taxes. The federal tax is 18.4 cents per gallon and has not been raised since 1993.

A bipartisan congressionally created panel called the National Surface Transportation Infrastructure Financing Commission recommended the VMT earlier this year. The chairman, Robert Atkinson, concluded it would raise extra money in a fair manner because it follows the "user pays" principle.

But the Obama administration has rejected the idea on a national level.

The VMT could work, but the technology may be years away. The short-term solution is to borrow money for roads and pay it off over time, speed up approvals for road work and enter into public-private partnerships.

The problem is that only 60 cents of every federal gas-tax dollar goes to highways and bridges according to a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington. The rest goes for a variety of uses, from mass-transit systems such as trains and buses to bike lanes.

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