The article published in your April 2017 edition, “Gas Taxes are Doomed — But Road Usage Charges Won’t Solve the Problem” presents a bleak vision of future transportation funding. It includes a litany of ominous obstacles to implementation of mileage-based road usage charging (RUC) as a successor to soon-to-be-obsolete state and federal gas taxes. I disagree with this vision and, based on progress in the field over the past decade, find the obstacles grossly overstated.
The article fundamentally mischaracterizes RUC research as a coordinated effort to replace all transportation funding sources with a mileage charge that is invasive of privacy, complicated to use, costly to collect, and permanently unpopular with the public. Were any of that true, then I would agree, we should stop now. But none of it is true.