OpenMarket: Automobiles and Roads

In recent years, there have been increasing calls to raise federal fuel excise tax rates in order to address what many have called an infrastructure crisis. To be sure, there are very real infrastructure needs in the U.S., but they are not uniform across infrastructure asset classes and are not primarily the result of a lack of federal funding.

Today, the Competitive Enterprise Institute sent a letter to Congress urging members to preserve and strengthen the users-pay/users-benefit highway funding principle and to establish a nationwide, interoperable mileage-based user fee pilot program.

Today, I submitted comments to the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) on behalf of CEI in response to a notice of proposed rulemaking on promoting innovation in the use of patented and proprietary products. This may sound like an esoteric transportation regulatory issue, but it has very serious real-world implications.

CEI had a busy year in the transportation policy trenches. We worked at the federal, state, and local levels on a variety of projects. Below are selected examples of the work we did this year to inject free-market ideas into the generally command-and-control world of transportation.

The bipartisan AV START Act would create the first national highly automated vehicle regulatory framework in the U.S. This legislation is necessary to speed deployment of lifesaving self-driving cars, which offer the promise of greatly reducing road fatalities by eliminating the driver error and misbehavior that is currently responsible for more than 90 percent of automobile crashes.

Cathy Chase, now the president of the lobby group Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, was previously a strong supporter of the Senate’s bipartisan AV START Act (S. 1885)—before she was against it. The AV START Act is companion legislation to the House’s SELF DRIVE Act (H.R. 3388), which unanimously passed the House by voice vote in September 2017.

In a sweeping effort to change the way Washington regulates both fuels and vehicles, Reps. John Shimkus (R-IL) and Bill Flores (R-TX) of the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Environment have released a discussion draft of new legislation entitled the 21st Century Transportation Fuels Act.

Today, the Competitive Enterprise Institute submitted comments to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) in response to its advance notice of proposed rulemaking on the Pilot Program Collaborative Research on Motor Vehicles with High or Full Driving Automation.

In August 2017, I wrote about the municipal government cronyism and monopoly franchise agreements driving the controversy over unsubsidized dockless bikesharing companies. In the rapidly evolving world of privately financed urban micromobility, electric scooters have now joined dockless bikesharing at the center of the debate. Here, municipal cronyism also appears to have evolved from protecting subsidized monopoly providers into classic shakedown efforts.

Could the 116^th Congress be the perfect storm for mileage-based user fees? With a divided Congress and with the current surface transportation law expiring at the end of September 2020, shoring up the Highway Trust Fund with user fee alternatives to fuel taxes could be a bipartisan affair.