Covering transportation policy now and again for NR, one of the things I’ve found interesting is how bipartisan of an issue it is. Ideas that libertarians and conservatives like — such as congestion pricing of highways and air-travel services — are often ones that environmentalists and other liberals can get behind.
The suggestion Kathryn noted, from Obama’s (Republican) transportation secretary, to tax people based on the number of miles they drive has been a very odd exception. Some on the right — like Jerry Taylor — have been supportive, while some on the left oppose it.
Lefty blogger Ezra Klein writes:
It requires the installation of a GPS chip to record miles driven and beam the information to centralized computers. Sorry, did that sound Orwellian? I meant a small transponder that informs the government of your driving habits.
Crap. This is hard to sell.
Klein notes that the idea behind the tax is to generate a more even stream of revenue than gas taxes do; gas-tax revenue fluctuates quite a bit. To which Think Progress’s Matthew Yglesias adds:
This is true enough. But . . . with a gasoline tax, you . . . reduce the quantity of gasoline burned, which has benefits for air quality and climate security. With a congestion charge, you . . . reduce the occurrence of traffic jams and ensure that your traffic flow is allocated more efficiently. In other words, both are methods of generating revenue that would have substantial social benefits. . . . A VMT tax [is] just discouraging driving as such. Which sort of captures some of the social benefits of a gas tax and congestion charges, but pretty indirectly and inefficiently. So I’m not sold.
I’m with Klein and Yglesias on this one. Meters that transmit information to the government are rather creepy on a gut level, whether or not that fear is justified, and state-level proposals for this system have been unpopular.
Also, I don’t share Taylor’s view that economically, an “efficient” tax doesn’t change behavior. The opposite is the case when an “externality” is present — that is, when one party’s behavior negatively affects another, non-compensated party. This is the case with transportation, where use of the roads causes both pollution and congestion. A gasoline tax may or may not be the right way to charge for pollution, but as Yglesias notes, gasoline use corresponds more closely to pollution than does miles driven. And as Yglesias also notes, variable tolls are an excellent way to charge for congestion.