ARC ponders ditching gas tax

The board of the Atlanta Regional Commission is studying the idea of eventually axing the federal gas tax, the main source of transportation funding, as it looks for “sustainable” transportation funding. The gas tax doesn’t rise with inflation and gets weaker every year.

The ARC, metro Atlanta’s planning agency, hasn’t approved a final statement on the issue and has no authority to implement it. The agency is giving its recommendations to Congress, as it begins to look toward renewing the multiyear federal transportation funding law.

The gas tax is charged as cents-per-gallon instead of cents-per-dollar, so the same size tank always reaps the same amount of money in taxes, no matter how much the price of gas goes up.

In addition, as people get more fuel-efficient cars, they use less gas, and so pay less gas tax.

The ARC suggests more research on one of the more talked-about ideas, an odometer charge, or vehicle miles traveled.

Such a charge would tax drivers by the amount of miles they drove. The idea is to pay for the amount of wear they put on the roads. Depending on how sophisticated the tracking is, it could send the tax paid directly to the jurisdictions whose roads the driver used. To avoid getting weaker every year, as the gas tax does, it would have to be designed to rise with inflation.

The ARC’s draft also suggests that earmarks should be “minimized.”