Examining the impacts of a vehicle miles traveled fee for daily weekday travel : a case study of Oregon

Mileage-based taxes have been suggested as a long-term solution for collecting fees from highway users. Clustering was used to group respondents to an Oregon traveler survey based on daily travel characteristics. State fuel tax and equivalent VMT taxes are assessed to evaluate the change in revenue associated with a switch to a VMT tax structure and potential impacts upon respondent groups. The difference in revenues were evaluated on a per trip, daily trip, and annual basis. Results show that there is little difference in yearly revenues associated with a switch to VMT fee, with all user groups seeing less than 5% increase compared to fuel tax. The VMT fee is found to be marginally more regressive than the fuel tax. Relative to urban households, rural households were less impacted than urban households resulting from a switch to a VMT fee. Alternative fee structures were developed based on state gas tax revenue distribution and yielded results that when accounting for demand responses showed improvements in the regressivity of the VMT fee.