Washington unrolls pay-per-mile pilot program

OLYMPIA — Drivers across Washington have started tracking their mileage and voluntarily sending the information to Olympia, as the state buckles down to see whether a road usage charge is feasible.

The state transportation commission’s 12-month pilot study on how a road usage charge might replace taxes at the gas pump is in its second month, and the program’s 2,000 participants have turned in their first surveys describing the ease or difficulty of the commitment so far.

Their responses won’t be analyzed until June, but until then drivers will receive sample invoices that describe how much they’ve been “charged” in comparison to how much they would’ve paid in gas taxes, said Jeff Doyle, a partner at D’Artagnan Consulting, the firm helming the project.

Of the 2,000 participants enrolled, the consulting firm aimed to have at least one person from every county and a demographic makeup that reflected the state’s own population, Doyle shared with members of the transportation commission at a meeting Wednesday in Olympia.

“We were able to achieve close balance geographically,” Doyle said. “When we used the batching process (to invite people), we were able to prioritize certain categories.”

The participants were culled from more than 5,000 people across the state who signed up to volunteer, and the final makeup of the group includes 1,200 people from the Central Puget Sound counties of Snohomish, King, Pierce, Thurston, Mason, Grays Harbor and Kitsap.

The pool of participants more or less reflects the racial and ethnic demography of Washington state, within 1 to 2 percentage points per group, though there is a 14 percent overrepresentation in the group of people who identify as Caucasian or white, compared with the state population.

Among the participants, there is also an underrepresentation of Hispanics, with only 4 percent of the participants identifying by that ethnicity, compared with 12 percent of the Washington population, Doyle shared.

The majority (63 percent) of the participants have a household income of between $25,000 and $100,000, and 78 percent of them have gasoline-fueled vehicles. Another 13 percent have electric or hybrid-powered cars.

“These types of vehicles and their owners are perhaps taking on the greatest policy shift if a gas tax is implemented,” Doyle said of electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles and their owners. “We were happy to see their numbers participating in the program.”

As more people purchase fuel-efficient vehicles, gas tax revenues decline, so the state is eager to find a more sustainable source of revenue.

The state’s gas tax rate is now 49.9 cents per gallon, second highest in the country after Pennsylvania. 

The break-even point is around 22 miles per gallon — drivers whose vehicles get 22 miles or more per gallon would likely pay more in road usage charges than they do with gas taxes, while drivers who get less than that would pay less in road usage charges, Doyle said.

The road usage charge pilot program doesn’t study how much the state could charge drivers to offset the decline of gas tax revenue, but rather it tests how difficult or easy the program would be for drivers to understand and for the state to implement, Doyle added.

Participants could choose one of two service providers, DriveSync or Emovis, to track their miles and invoice them a “charge,” and the providers also offer a variety of optional additional features, such as a Find My Parked Car or a Trip Scoring feature.

Some drivers use GPS to track their miles, others use a plug-in device and still others use an app provided by the pilot program, or some combination of all.

Early feedback indicates that all of the options and customization might be off-putting, but the survey results will shed more light on the process, Doyle said.

“We were wondering whether it is meaningful to have two service providers in a pilot project,” he said. “It’s costly and potentially very confusing to participants.”

The pilot program also sets up a mock scenario where, if multiple surrounding states or provinces also had a road usage charge program, how Washington could bill its drivers one invoice and then pay a share of the funds to a neighboring jurisdiction and vice versa.

Oregon, California and Colorado have undergone their own road usage charge pilot programs, but only Oregon has actually implemented the road usage charge, though it is voluntary and is capped at 5,000 participants. 

Oregon residents can choose whether to pay the gas tax or the road usage charge.
In Washington’s mock scenario, about 30 Washington drivers and 70 Oregon drivers will record the miles they drive, and the pilot program will assign Washington drivers fake charge cards to “pay” their invoices, so the state can test how it would pay Oregon.

The entire pilot program will allow the transportation commission and eventually legislators to assess what is important to them if a road usage charge is implemented.

“What rate the Legislature would choose, we don’t know,” Doyle said.