From each according to his impact, to each according to his need.
Moving beyond the old paradigm of user fees to pay for transportation infrastructure
When my brothers and I are together, our conversation inevitably turns to the big differences in taxes and spending priorities in our disparate locales.
I’ll laugh when I tell one brother that my property taxes in Denver are half of his in Pennsylvania, even though my house would sell for more than his. He’ll parry that he doesn’t have to pay sales tax for a Reese’s cup or a can of Coke, like I do.
My Minnesota-based brother will roll his eyes when he hears my Atlanta-area brother complain about local schools, knowing that Minnesota spends 30 percent more per capita on education than Georgia. But he’ll acknowledge that he wouldn’t mind paying a lot less for snow removal.
Such diversity isn’t necessarily a bad thing. One of the beauties of our country’s political system is that people can fit their taxing and spending priorities to their local circumstances.
However, all too often, tax and spending systems that may have made sense decades ago quietly incentivize behavior that’s the opposite of what my brothers and I — and most of our neighbors — want to encourage today.
Take the matter of transportation.
I think we can all agree that, the faster we switch from gas-powered cars to electric vehicles, the better, especially when the electricity is generated by solar and wind power.
Georgia, where my youngest brother lives, was one of the first states to back its pro-electric vehicle (EV) rhetoric with real money. In 2001, it started giving a $5,000 tax credit to those who bought or leased an “alternative-powered vehicle.” As a result, the state became one of the hottest markets in the country for EVs. By 2014, when my brother and 10,539 of his fellow Peach Staters got electric cars, Georgia was second only to California in the number of registered plug-in electric vehicles,
But in 2015, the state did a big U-turn. Not only did the legislature entirely repeal the tax credit, they enacted an annual “road user fee” of $200 for electric vehicles.
The result? A 90 percent drop in EV car purchases in a single year.
When you look at it a certain way, the new regimen made sense. Why should taxpayers subsidize the expensive cars of well-off people, when children are going hungry and education spending has been slashed to the bone? Why should owners of electric vehicles get away with not paying the gas tax, which is the sole or main source for maintaining and improving the roads they drive on?
Good questions. But that paradigm has a fundamental flaw. It’s the belief that a transportation system exists in its own world, that only its users — mostly car and truck drivers — should reap the benefits and bear the burden of paying for the system.
That thought process was first enshrined a hundred years ago this February, when Oregon passed the first gas tax. At the time, automobiles were still a rarity. There was just one registered vehicle for every 13.9 Americans. I imagine my paternal grandfather, just returning from the Great War in France, saying “if those folks want some roads to drive around on, they should have to pay for them, not me.”
But I doubt my grandfather anticipated how ubiquitous cars would become (now about one per 1.2 Americans) and how much they’d be used (from 44 billion miles in 1919 to 3.2 trillion miles in 2018).
Having driven an ambulance in the war, he appreciated many of the car’s social benefits and its dangers. But the idea that cars had a big impact on the health and well-being of non-drivers (to speak nothing of plants and wildlife) was relatively foreign. The concept of smog wouldn’t exist for another 30 years. Nobody thought twice about greenhouse gas emissions. Even traffic fatalities — already as common as today — were seen as merely a nuisance compared to such scourges as the Spanish Flu, polio and tuberculosis. (Americans were then about as likely to die from measles as a car crash.)
The facts are a lot different today, but the philosophy has changed very little. As a result, three consequences of the old paradigm are becoming too much to bear.
- The concept of funding transportation primarily, if not solely, through gas taxes, tolls, fares and other user fees has come to mean that such funds should only be used on expenses directly related to making it easier to get from Point A to Point B. So, yes to spending those gas taxes on building a new road; no to getting gas guzzlers off the road. Yes to commuter rail lines to wealthy suburbs; no to medical care for asthma attacks.
- Many locales take it a step further by saying that users of a particular form of transportation should pay for all or most of its expenses, no matter who benefits from it. So, if one of the best ways to reduce climate change-causing emissions — something that benefits everybody — is to increase service on a subway line, officials often try to force subway riders to foot the entire bill. Not only is that unfair, it’s counterproductive. Increasing fares substantially more than inflation almost invariably create a vicious downward spiral. People switch from the subway to far-more-polluting cars, which drives down subway revenue, which leads to more fare increases. Rinse and repeat.
- Conversely, many states and localities are unwilling to devote funds raised through other means to highly valuable transportation projects. Efforts to create more transportation options — such as mass transit, bike lanes, pedestrian walkways and telecommuting — often run afoul of the “we’ve only got so much in our transportation trust fund” argument.
That paradigm was rejected long ago by most of the rest of the world.
Instead, their guiding principle is a tweaked version of the old biblical maxim (Acts 4:32–35): “from each according to his impact, to each according to his need” approach.
The basic idea is this:
1. When thinking about transportation, we first need to consider all of the impacts it has on our society and ecosystem. There’s no inherent absolute good in getting there from here as fast as possible. Some uses of transportation should get more priority (say, military ambulances) than others. Some methods, times and places should be given greater weight than others.
2. The costs charged for transportation should be weighted according to those impacts, to the degree possible. For example, driving through downtown Manhattan at 5:30pm should cost a lot more than taking the A Train at midnight.
3. Government spending on transportation should ideally come out of general funds; transportation projects should not get automatic priority over other needs. Let transportation needs compete with those for health care, criminal justice, education, housing, etc. After all, they’re all inter-related. If it makes sense to build EV charging stations for environmental, public health and economic reasons, our government shouldn’t be held back by a lack of funds in a special account. Worse yet is holding back because increasing the use of EVs will reduce future revenue from gas taxes to pay for road maintenance. And a billion dollars sitting unused in a gas-tax trust fund shouldn’t be an excuse for wasting it on a highway boondoggle.
It will be no easy task to replace the old “user fee/lockbox” paradigm with the “impact fee/general fund” approach.
Transportation planners have to think 20, 30, 50 years ahead — and they don’t like scrapping their long-term policies that took so much effort to put in place. The interest groups that now get billions of dollars via the current system aren’t prone to rock the boat. And, as Winston Churchill predicted 92 years ago when successfully opposing a proposal to dedicate the United Kingdom’s gas taxes to a “road fund,” many motorists have claimed “moral ownership of the roads their contributions have created.”
But the old paradigm has shown that it’s not meant for these times.
When my brothers talk about transportation, our stories are no longer those of our youth. I no longer brag about driving the 323 miles from my hometown to Boston in four hours in my ’67 Mustang or of Kerouac-style cross-country dashes. My car aficionado brother has given up his 30-year dream of restoring his ’72 Camaro and prefers spending his time training for triathlons. My lung doctor brother tells sad tales of asthma, bronchitis and cancer. My youngest brother geeks out on figuring out how to drive his 2012 Tesla through Appalachia.
And I talk of a different way of doing things, like the sales tax increase that helped pay for the new light rail ride I took from downtown Denver to the airport for my family’s most recent reunion.
That’s a new paradigm that our kids already embrace. If they’re to enjoy the health and environment I’ve been privileged to inherit, we all need to help them sweep out the old and drive in the new.
