How to fund road upgrades for self-driving cars

WASHINGTON -- Congress should initially tax automated-vehicle travel at a penny per mile to help fund future infrastructure improvements required for the safe operation of driverless cars, a leading transportation think tank suggests.

The cost to users would be roughly equivalent to the 18.3-cent-a-gallon federal gasoline tax (24.3 cents for diesel) and shouldn't dissuade people from using driverless vehicles, which are expected to rely more on electric drivetrains, according to a report from the Eno Center for Transportation.

Lead author Paul Lewis said a vehicle-miles-traveled fee on automated vehicles would supplement the gasoline tax and overcome a key sticking point of VMT schemes: how to track the distance each individual automobile travels and how to charge the driver. The authors assume that autonomous vehicles would operate mainly in managed fleets, where taxes could be collected along with the user charges.

"The politics is much easier than a traditional VMT," Lewis said during a web briefing. "If you were to put a VMT fee on automobiles today, it would require 150 million different accounts with all the cars that are on the road, not counting buses and trucks."

Identifying a revenue stream for future infrastructure programs is part of the Eno Center's 18-point framework for governments at all levels to implement policy covering automated vehicles.

Government preparations for automated vehicle technology lag private-sector initiatives. Officials are under pressure to quickly regulate automated vehicles to protect public safety and encourage innovation in an industry that could have commercially viable cars and trucks within three to five years, by optimistic estimates.

Last fall, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration released a draft policy statement with guidelines for how a federal framework policy would look.

The Trump administration has said it will reassess the guidelines as part of a broader review of the Obama administration's regulatory initiatives.

But states aren't waiting. They are enacting laws, making proposals and taking executive actions that define automated vehicles differently, with varying testing and reporting requirements -- resulting in an inconsistent landscape that makes it more difficult for developers to achieve commercial deployment.

The VMT fee is designed to help cash-strapped cities and states make roadway changes needed to create a predictable driving environment for artificial-intelligence systems that control automated vehicles, according to the Eno Center report.

It would also help offset lost revenue from parking fees and traffic fines if ride-sharing services come to predominate and automated vehicles cut down on human errors and violations, co-author Stanford Turner said.

Eno recommended that the VMT fee be applied to vehicles with Level 3 automation and above. Under NHTSA's classification system, Level 3 vehicles operate with minimal human intervention.

The VMT charge would net only $317 million a year if 1 percent of driving is done autonomously, the report estimates. It calls for investing the proceeds in projects that improve the safety and reliability of automated vehicles, including maintaining roadways and deploying connected infrastructure.

"The best and easiest thing states and cities can invest in right now is simply proper maintenance of public roadways," including clear lane markings, visible signage, uniform pavement with no potholes, and reconfiguring traffic lights, Turner said.

Congress hasn't warmed to previous proposals for a VMT fee as an option for raising revenue to address shortfalls in the federal Highway Trust Fund, the repository for fuel tax collections that are distributed to states for highway and infrastructure projects. Among the concerns are the politics of approving new taxes, and how to track the miles traveled.

An automated-vehicle per-mile fee would be easier to administer because developers' business models are based in part on owning their own fleets and offering ride-sharing services that they would charge customers for.

The government could simply piggyback on that collection system, just as it collects fuel taxes from gasoline distributors, Lewis explained.

"And from a politics standpoint, this wouldn't be a tax on existing drivers nor would it be a tax on the middle class," he said.

"Automated vehicle technology right now is something that doesn't exist, and when it does exist, at least in the first round, it is only going to be for folks that can afford it."