Gov. Dukakis (now a distinguished professor of political science at Northeastern Unversity) regularly speaks and writes on what he calls a steel interstate. He sees terrific economic benefits.
Immediately, he says upgrading and augmenting our rail system locally and intercity would be a great jobs move at a time we need that the most. He speaks to the environmental sanity as well as the economic development that would accommodate this.
Moreover, he is deeply troubled that as a nation we have long lost our ability to build and sell the engines and cars in use throughtout the world. He laments being unable to find a single American vendor when he was pricing rail equipment. In that vein, he's trying to work with the current governor of Michigan (Jennifer Granholm) to convert unused and underused auto facilities to this purpose.
For manufacturing as well as infrastructure expansion, he says he has no doubt we have the capacity. “The question is, do we have the will?”
See: Hacks pocketing $2.5M in get-out-of-jail fees
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I support raising the gas tax, but you can’t do that politically without hitting some of the symbolic bullshit at the MBTA — the second “driver” on trains, the 440+ employees who pull down six-figures, etc. The retreads at the MassDOT board dont have the capacity or the inclination to do what needs to be done: break the Carmen, gut middle management, make resource decisions based on rider vs. political needs.
the problem is in the details.
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p>Consider the two driver trains: Ever ride on the Green Line during rush hour? Two drivers are needed to control the doors since so many people are practically falling out when the doors are closed. Some platforms are rounded, which means that the driver in the front can’t even see the back door of the second car. This doesn’t even touch on the safety angle — the E Line shares tracks with autos, and the B and C have a number of at-grade crossings. Each Green Line car can fit almost 100 people when crammed — is one driver really sufficient to handle an accident involving that many passengers?
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p>The same arguments, or variants, apply to the Blue, Red, and Orange lines. I don’t know what the right number of operators are for each set of cars, but I do know that I feel a hell of a lot better with two operators than with only one.
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p>I think the single issue that frustrates most folks is the “23 and out” followed by the length of time projects seem to take. Neither of those fixes are easy, and even when fixed won’t net massive savings. It’s really more a matter of perception, and that alone makes it important.
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p>As for streamlining the organization, I’m not arguing against it — but that’s not where their real costs lie. Their real costs are tied to three things: rising energy costs, rising health care costs, and the massive debt they carry. There’s little they can do about the energy costs since they’re already pretty dang efficient. As for health care costs sure, streamlining operations cuts down on the number of employees which would help, but these are the same health care costs dogging every employer who provides health, public or private. The third one is the backbreaker — the amount of their budget that goes to debt financing is huge, and frankly it’s not really because of MBTA management — the Big Dig and the Lege threw that anchor to an otherwise treading water MBTA.
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p>So, what to do? I think if the governor and lege could somehow come out with a plan which
(a) added a nickel to the gas tax, straight to public transit (MBTA and others!), and
(b) showed how in addition to providing better service,
they’d be able to steward the money better by (i) revising 23-and-out to something more palatable, and (ii) improve construction scheduling so that projects get done quickly and correctly, while simultaneously ensuring that the MBTA of the future will be better than the MBTA of today, not worse.
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p>It still wouldn’t be popular to large chunks of the population, even if they really believed both (a) and (b), but it is a proposal which could line up supporters across the aisle, from liberal Dem to conservative Dem to GOP. Well functioning infrastructure is essential for business, so if the trades, the big businesses, and the riders all got behind it, that really would be a lot of support.
In the show, Dukakis did not have kind words for recent T management. He is not happy with the maintenance and fiscal direction. He looks to the new guy, Mullan, to address the shortcomings.
Needs to be evaluated for long term sustainability.
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p>The issue, as I see it, is that as vehicles transition from gasoline to either hybrid or 100% electric the funds available to the state or federal governments will continue to decline. This will happen while the need to maintain roads and bridges will remain, if not grow. This is because while electric and hybrid cars do not use much gasoline (and hence pay relatively low gas taxes) they do still use the roads and bridges. It is possible that their impact to roads and bridges may be equal to or greater than traditional gas fueled vehicles given their relatively heavy vehicle weight.
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p>This means that you will have a shrinking tax pool from which to maintain both roads and public transportation infrastructure. Therefore, any increase in the gas tax would be a temporary fix at best.
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p>I think now is the time to develop an approach to fund both transportation infrastructure and public transportation infrastructure. It will not be easy and will require a combination of various measures (gas tax, miles driven tax, vehicle(s) owned tax, vehicle weight tax, etc.) but if we do not come up with something that will be long lasting otherwise we will be having this same discussion every couple of years.
I’ve heard it floated at the national level. The premise is to equip each vehicle with the ability to squawk (using RFID or something similar) its vehicle ID and odometer reading at each gas pump, and then charge for miles driven since the last reading. The premise is that vehicle miles are taxed in the way that an electric or gas company taxes consumption.
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p>I think it addresses the legitimate concern you raise.
I think the key to dealing with the concern is twofold:
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p>1. Go from “gas tax” to “carbon fuel tax”. This therefore captures all carbon based fuels as a function of carbon, not mileage, damage (mileageweightweight*weight), etc. The more miles (or weight), the more fuel you’ll use of any given type, so this does grow linearly, just as the gas tax does (which doesn’t really capture mileage or damage either).
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p>2. When we start EVs (PHEVs, EVs, whatever) they almost certainly won’t be plugging in to 60 Hz 120V plugs. They’ll be more like the specialty plugs for washers and refrigerators. There’s no reason why the special plug can’t have it’s own meter, just like irrigation water meters are often separated from water+sewer meters. It’s not hard to capture the average carbon load from the grid when charging, either overall average (total CO_2 over a year divided out) or more precise (say, total CO_2 during the 15 minute interval plugged in, divided out). You simply pay a different rate on the electric bill for your plugged in vehicle, including the vehicular fuel tax.
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p>3. What about renewables?! What about ’em? The fact is that solar currently makes up 1/4000th of our electrical generation nationwide. Are you worried that suddenly folks are going to install $20,000 worth of PV to avoid paying something like $0.20 a mile in tax? I’m not. And, if they do, awesome! We’ve just cross-subsidized the installation of renewable power in a distributed manner without requiring the installation of more power lines, transformers, and the like.
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p>All of this ignores two realities:
A. As mpg goes up, just raise the gas tax accordingly. It isn’t hard from a technical point of view. If the fleet mpg goes from 32.5 to 33.5 (roughly a 3% increase), then raise the gas tax 3%. Pretty straightforward.
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p>B. We’re already not paying for our roads with gas tax. Sure, federal highway money comes from gas tax, but local money doesn’t. My town spends $2,000,000 a year on roads — about 1% of the total town+school budget. That’s coming from property taxes, not from gas taxes.
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p>Maybe someday this problem of eroding tax revenue for roads will be a problem, but right now simply transitioning to a carbon vehicular fuel tax and raising the corresponding rate to pay for the roads gets the job done without the government tracking where I’m traveling by auto all the time and not just when I go through an intersection with surveillance cameras and sufficient fidelity and software to read license plates or when I go through toll booths (with FastLane or not, they’re still shooting the license plates for enforcement methinks). As a side benefit, maintaining the current system provides yet another financial incentive for people to choose vehicles with higher mpg, something a mileage tax doesn’t quite do.
the concern that I think is legitimate is a desire to directly measure and tax highway consumption. I support a carbon tax, and I see it as a proxy for carbon consumption.
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p>It seems to me that at the moment we are using the gas tax as a proxy for “highway consumption”. Vehicles consume highways when they use them — wear and tear, outright damage, right-of-way acquisition and maintenance, all of that. I like the idea of directly measuring the use that each vehicle makes of the highway system, and doing so in a way that accurately reflects the impact of each specific vehicle (the odometer tax rate of a heavy truck can and should reflect the increased impact of that truck in comparison to a light personal auto).
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p>An advantage of the contemplated odometer tax is that it does not violate the privacy of the owner or driver of the vehicle in question (any more than current fuel transactions). An odometer reading, unlike a sequence of electronic toll collections, does not contain any information about where the mileage was accrued; it simply says that the vehicle consumed X miles since the last reading. No private information is collected by the meter, and therefore none can be disclosed when the meter is read. The actual location of the fill-up is already revealed when any non-cash form of payment is made. Even in a cash-only transaction, the odometer tax (when collected) does not need to retain in the reader any information about the vehicle identity, just as a cash transaction does not collect or retain information about the vehicle that received the gas.
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p>I therefore like the odometer tax, especially when implemented in addition to a carbon tax and differential rates for electricity used as vehicle fuel. I contemplate the odometer tax as an alternative to far more intrusive electronic tolling systems that do exacerbate the privacy issues that you correctly identify. I only support the odometer tax if it replaces tolls.
The electronic odometer does not need to emit the vehicle ID. Instead, it needs to report only the number of miles consumed and the weight or weight-class of the vehicle.