An Economic Analysis of Oregon’s 2007 Road User Fee Pilot Program

Introduction and background For decades, gasoline taxes have brought revenues to the federal and state Road Trust Fund (HTF), but the tax rate is stagnant and leads to exhaustion of funds. HTF is responsible for funding road and public transport projects and maintaining federal and state level projects. In 2005, about 80% of all projects were covered by gasoline tax (Kim, Porter, Whitty, Svadlenak Lareson, Capps, Imholt & Person 2008, pg).

Most of Highway 1's plan comes from royalty, which is a special tax used by automobile operators when using roads. The government used most of the highway royalty revenue for highway expenditure ($ 85 billion out of $ 107 billion recovered in 2004) and partly to transit ($ 11 billion in 2004) I used it. Fuel tax generates most highway royalty income (64% of the whole in 2004); other royalty income comes from automobile registration fee, truck sales and consumption tax and toll

The Oregon State Road User Cost Task Force Proposal and the new way of road user billing quoted in Chapter 1 are designed to replace or substantially supplement the fuel tax as the basis for transport projects in the United States It is the most famous road usage fee and billing plan. Revenue Sources The two proposals are conceptually similar but some important design details differ. They raised a series of design questions that need to be evaluated together. In addition to these two proposals, the Puget Sound Regional Council announced plans to test the road usage metering and mileage accounting system of 500 cars in Seattle, Washington in 2005. This test is funded from the federal value pricing pilot program. This technology is related to the German Toll Collect track tariff system (described below) and is provided by a company developing German applications (Inside ITS 2005).

There are three provisions in the Task Force's recommendation (Road User Task Force 2003, 25): Mileage fee, collecting new fee instead of existing fee including congestion fee), and all new roads, bridges or Initial fee, during which the state runs mileage and fuel tax for 20 years, and preliminary examination of mileage and hardware and administrative arrangements as the first step of implementation. The proposal is introduced in detail in Chapter 5.