House Ways and Means Committee Holds Infrastructure Funding Hearing
AASHTO Journal cited Senior Fellow Marc Scribner’s testimony at the House Ways and Means Committee hearing on infrastructure funding.
In the future, Marc Scribner, a senior fellow with the Competitive Enterprise Institute, suggested to the committee in his testimony that that as “fuel consumption is becoming an increasingly poor proxy for highway use,” a VMT fee should be considered as a replacement for the federal fuel tax.
“Looking toward the long-run where motor fuel tax increases would be both ineffective in raising revenue and highly regressive, a number of states in recent years have been piloting new mileage-based revenue collection technologies and practices, which are variously known as mileage-based user fees, road usage charges, and VMT taxes,” he said. “All refer to the same approach where users are directly charged based on the distances – and perhaps weight of the vehicle – they drive, which is as close to optimal road charging that current technology permits.”