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You are simply wrong on this one. Moving to a mileage-based, user pays system for financing the transportation system makes a lot of economic sense.
Would you have cell phone companies base your cell phone bill on how much electricity your phone consumed?
It's aximomatic that you can get to an efficient solution only if the prices users face reflects the full marginal costs of their actions. We're nowhere close to that in transportation, as virtually all transportation economists agree.
Currently, the amount one pays in gas tax is almost completely un-related to how much of the transportation system one uses. This is particularly apparent in dealing with peak demand. You pay the same amount of gas tax to drive your car at the peak hour (when there is no excess capacity) as you do when you drive at 2AM (when there is plenty of excess capacity).
Almost all of the costs improving the transportation system are to deal with peak hour congestion. We do nothing through the gas tax to send signals to consumers about the high costs they are imposing on the the system (and on other motorists). With new technology, we could have a time and mileage based fee could charge consumers based on the capacity of the system. The total cost of the transportation system will decline if we send signals to consumers to use it wisely. Even the very primitive pricing system now in use in Central London has proved to be a dramatic success in reducing urban congestion.
What we need to do is replace the primitive analog metal license plate (a 19th century technology) with a new digital license plate (a GPS/computerized system). I agree that privacy concerns need to be dealt with--data could be encrypted and periodically purged. But keep in mind, the cell phones that a majority of Americans carry around with them, essentially enable the phone companies to monitor your location whenever they're turned on (i.e. their system records tell which cell you are in at all times now, phones are increasingly incorporating GPS technology; it will likely be universal in the future).
Your point about pollution is essentially a red herring. There is no perfect correlation between gas consumption and pollution--my daily driver 1966 mustang at 15 mpg puts out about 10x as much pollution as the worst 15 mgp SUV. An electronic mileage based system could also incorporate a factor for the emissions per mile generated by each car--an emissions fee--that would directly reflect environmental costs.
I don't know what the details of the optimal system of road finance are. It will probably take a fair amount of trial and experimentation to develop a good system. What is proposed for Oregon probably isn't perfect, but clinging desperately to the gas tax is clearly not going to get us there.
Joseph Cortright
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