A reasonable option

As the principal investigator for the National Evaluation of a Mileage-based Road User Charge I wish to respond to your Oct. 8 editorial criticizing the mileage-based charging concept.

We wholeheartedly agree that mileage-based road use charging is not ready for prime time. If it were, there would be no need for our study. Mileage-based charging is one of several options being considered as a possible long-term replacement for the motor fuel tax.

The purpose of our study is to address fundamental technical and user acceptance issues for mileage-based charging that will help to inform difficult future decisions regarding federal and state highway funding. As such, the concept deserves fair and careful consideration and should not be dismissed off-hand.

We understand that preservation of personal privacy is critically important. You raise the prospect that mileage-based charging might amount to filing a record of each and every trip with the government. The N&O news article that prompted the editorial made it very clear that our system does no such thing.

The only data reported is the aggregate number of miles driven and the total usage fee accrued in a given state in a particular month. Individual trip data is not collected and there is no information retained or reported by the system that could place a vehicle at any particular location or track the vehicle's movements.

Ultimately, the public will need to decide whether mileage-based charging poses an unacceptable threat to personal privacy, but it is fair to say that the amount of personal information revealed by the system we are evaluating is far less than that revealed by cellular telephones, credit card transactions, and numerous other aspects of our daily lives.

You asked, why not just raise the current gas tax? There is little disagreement among transportation experts that the long-term problems with the gas tax cannot be solved simply by increasing the tax rate. This has been reaffirmed by the recent reports of two independent commissions chartered by the Congress to investigate the future of transportation financing. It is safe to say that a decade or two from now the motor fuel tax will not be the primary funding mechanism for our highways.

There are various ways in which the funding burden might be shifted to other sources, such as income taxes, property taxes, drastically increased vehicle licensing fees. We believe that the concept of mileage-based road user charging deserves serious consideration as a more fair and flexible alternative to these options.

Jon Kuhl

Iowa City, Iowa

(The writer is with the Public Policy Center at the University of Iowa. The length limit on letters was waived to permit a fuller response to the editorial.)

Impractical plan

There is a big difference in raising the gas tax a few cents and the proposed mileage tax. In raising the gas tax, the state's only cost is reprogramming computers. Adopt this tax and the overhead will be huge. Start with the cost of the new in-car computers. Installing and maintaining several million of them will not be cheap. Then there will be a new bureaucracy, with many auditors.

An exemption will have to be provided for miles driven in other states. What about out-of-state residents who use our roads? Every hacker will be trying to reprogram the computer so that it registers less mileage, and every person with a screwdriver will try to bypass it or disconnect it.

As for the trial, I hope that the computer company, not the state, is paying for it. Otherwise it is an expense we don't need, like that $9 million state airplane.

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