North Carolina to Consider Vehicle Miles Travelled Fee

“[One] day you might pay X cents a mile to the federal government for the 100 miles you added to the odometer last week – plus state taxes at different rates for the 80-mile share that took place in North Carolina and the 20 miles in Virginia. Meanwhile, Raleigh might claim a piece of the action, too, because you spent 50 of those miles on city streets,” explains Bruce Siceloff in an article for the News & Observer.

Later in the article, while explaining the problems with the gas tax that require other forms of revenue generation for transportation and road infrastructure maintenance, Siceloff seems to imply that the shortcomings of the current taxing scheme are partly the fault of the Obama Administration’s 2013 Corporate Fuel Economy standards.

Siceloff also recommends a number of alternatives to a VMT tax as possible revenue generators for the state:

• Virginia’s recent decision to collect more of its transportation money from new sales taxes and eliminate its gas tax.
• Pennsylvania’s decision to “raise the state gas tax by about 27 cents a gallon over the next three years.”
• A proposition to “[add] a percentage point to the highway use tax on car sales.”