‘Is High-Speed Rail Really The Be All End All?’: Doug LaMalfa Presses Witness About Transit

3 months ago

During a House Transportation Committee hearing last week, Rep. Doug LaMalfa (R-CA) questioned witnesses about mileage fees and taxing and high-speed rail.

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Transcript

00:00Mr. LaMalfa. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Scribner, in talking about the electric vehicle and the

00:06highway trust fund situation, you know, the trust fund has been backfilled by about $280 billion

00:12since 2008, bailouts during the COVID era, all sorts of issues along that line with the bailout.

00:21So, with the huge push on electric vehicles, there really isn't a good mechanism yet for them to

00:29be taxed in a way that's commensurate with what combustion vehicle cars are doing.

00:37What do you see, from your viewpoint, would be the fairest way of doing that? I mean,

00:42I'm looking at, there's ideas for taxing everybody by the mile,

00:47or maybe just do that with electric vehicles, or some other method. What do you see as the best

00:54way for making the EVs be part of the solution? Thank you very much for that question. I do

01:02believe the future is shifting our revenue collection from per gallon taxation to per

01:10mile charging, where the method of propulsion of the vehicle doesn't matter. So, the Infrastructure

01:19Investment and Jobs Act did reauthorize a state technical assistance grant program for states to

01:27conduct pilots on these kind of mileage fee approaches, and it also established a national

01:35pilot, which is yet to get off the ground. But I do think, and that's something Reason Foundation

01:40has worked on for a couple of decades, is that the long-term shift will be away from per gallon

01:47toward per mile charging, and I think that not only does that incorporate electric vehicles,

01:54and in fact, the declines we've seen in fuel tax collections per vehicle mile traveled have

02:01primarily come to date from improving fuel economy. That's the perverse thing in that,

02:07is that everybody's been incentivized or shoved into getting better mileage vehicles,

02:12and so government then says, like, heck, we're not getting enough out of even gas tax dollars,

02:16so we've got to hit you another way now. What do you think about, though, with the possibility of

02:22how intrusive keeping track of people's mileage is going to be? I mean, such as GPS or the meters as

02:30you drive past, like on toll roads. How do we do that in a way that isn't in people's business

02:37personally on, you know, tracking where they're going and such? Right, so that's an excellent

02:42question, and privacy is a top concern and a major focus of the research right now. The

02:48simplest way is to simply not collect location information. Hawaii, for instance, recently

02:54established what will become a mandatory mileage fee program, and what they do is they leverage

03:03their annual safety inspections and collect odometer readings, which they already were.

03:07They were collecting odometer reading information, and they are simply then applying a

03:13right fee to that. Not every state has an annual requirement. You have to go visit somebody and

03:19take time out of your day or week to do that, so some have two-year smog checks. Newer vehicles

03:24don't have to go for their first smog check for six or eight years, so now we have another trip

03:28people have to make to go report something. Is there a way we can do this on an honor system

03:32where I can just fill out a form annually if I can afford it or quarterly if I want to pay quarterly

03:36or an estimate? How about that? Well, perhaps not, maybe not quite the otter system, but there

03:42are applications. There are, you can take a picture of your odometer reading with a cell phone and

03:47then be subject to occasional random auditing, so there are ways to implement. A picture of my

03:54odometer or maybe my neighbor's odometer? I mean, at what point do you decide you trust people or

03:58not? It gets these mechanisms, and there is a trade-off between privacy and auditability for

04:05any of these systems. I'm pretty big on the privacy side, sir, so, you know, I think let's design a

04:10system where people aren't being followed around even more so just for the government to

04:16take money from them, right? So let's shift gears to high-speed rail in California, one of my

04:23favorite things to talk about since it's such a boondoggle and a rat hole in my home state. So

04:29what do you see is, let's just shift to, well, let's keep you as Mr. Scribner. Now, you've seen how

04:36that thing has been a estimated $33 billion to begin with, was what the voters were sold when

04:42they agreed to $9 billion worth of bond money, and it's net since risen to $128 billion and counting,

04:49and it's many, many years behind. Please expound on the idea. Is high-speed rail really the be-all,

04:55end-all, or is there other forms of public transit that can be helpful? I think, you know,

05:02the system that is being built very, very slowly in California has suffered a number of

05:09many predictable problems, some less predictable, but this is something we've also worked on at

05:15Reason Foundation for the past two decades, predicting many of these problems that turned

05:22out to be a little more optimistic than reality. I do think that high-speed rail may serve some,

05:29but potentially some, niche routes in the United States, but given the geography

05:36and population density, it's unlikely to serve nationwide, you know, customers, and I think that

05:45it's a mistake to oversell the potential of high-speed rail. Thank you. I appreciate it.

05:52Yield back, Mr. Chairman. The gentleman yields. Mr. Larson. Thank you.

‘Is High-Speed Rail Really The Be All End All?’: Doug LaMalfa Presses Witness About Transit

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