The co-chairs of the Oregon Legislature’s Joint Committee on Transportation have released a “starting point” for negotiations around a major transportation funding bill. The Oregon Transportation Reinvestment Package (TRIP) seeks to raise about $2.2 billion per biennium (every two years) from a combination of increases to existing fees and taxes and a few new ones. Among them is a 63% increase to Oregon’s bicycle excise tax.
The Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) says the “structural revenue issues” they face — a drop in gas tax revenue, high inflation, and restrictions on available funding — have become so severe that they are $354 million short in their current budget. Without new funding this legislative session they’d have to fire nearly 1,000 employees and ODOT says the impacts to Oregon’s roads and people who use them would be “devastating.” Oregon last overhauled its transportation revenue programs in 2017, when lawmakers sought $5.3 billion in revenue over 10 years.
To avoid further cuts, ODOT and its oversight body, the Oregon Transportation Commission have spent two years building their case and garnering feedback from experts and road users. Last summer they organized a statewide tour of town hall-style listening sessions to hear and see first-hand what Oregonians want and need. All that discussion and feedback has brought us to this “starting point.”
Where the money will come from
Of the $2.2 billion funding total, the TRIP proposal (full text here) would raise $1.5 billion (note that all numbers in this story are per biennium, which means every two years, because that’s how ODOT budgets) through increases to the fuels tax and various vehicle registration fees. It seeks to raise the existing, 40-cents per gallon fuel tax to 60-cents per gallon. The 20-cent increase would begin with an eight cent increase in 2026 and would be staggered in four cent increments every two years through 2032. The TRIP also seeks to index the fuels tax to inflation, “to ensure future solvency of the revenue stream.”
The motor vehicle registration fee (currently starts at $126) would go up by $66 dollars and the cost of a title ($101) would go up $90. The weight-mile tax, paid by freight haulers and based on a percentage of the weight of their truck, would increase by 16.9%.
The TRIP also seeks to increase the existing Vehicle Privilege Tax (currently 0.5% of vehicle price) by 0.3% (for a total tax of 0.8%) and invest the funds into the Connect Oregon program that funds rail, aviation, and marine projects. (Revenue estimates are $44.8 million per biennium.)
The most significant new source of revenue in the package is what lawmakers are calling a “one-time system use fee” that would raise an estimated $486 million be levied on all vehicles at the time of purchase and be based on 1% of the sale price.
A new “tire pollution tax” would place a 3% increase on car and truck tire purchases (they say “vehicle tires” but “vehicle” can sometimes apply to bicycles and in this case they aren’t taxing bicycle tires) and is estimated to raise $50 million.
Another new revenue stream proposed in the package is a mandatory Road Usage Charge (RUC), also known as a pay-per-mile system. This would be a phased-in mandate that would apply to all existing electric cars in July 2026 and all new e-cars in 2027. It would hit plug-in hybrids in July 2028 and all new vehicles with 30 mile-per-gallon or greater in July 2029. Vehicle owners could enroll with the RUC program — which is already in place and known as OreGo — or pay a flat annual fee. (To learn more about this program, listen to a recent interview with ODOT’s finance director on Oregon Public Broadcasting.)
To fund transit, the TRIP would increase the payroll tax that funds ODOT’s Statewide Transportation Improvement Fund (STIF) from its current rate of 0.1% to 0.18%. This 0.08% would raise about $268.6 million. This increase is much lower than some lawmakers and transit advocates have asked for. In a letter sent March 28th to Oregon Senate and House leadership and members of the Joint Committee on Transportation, ten lawmakers asked for a 0.5% increase.
And last but not least, the TRIP proposes a 63% increase to the Bicycle Excise Tax. That $15 tax, which applies to new bicycles that sell for $200 or more, went into effect in 2018. Lawmakers want to add $9.50 per bike for a total new bike tax of $24.50 in order to raise about $1 million in revenue that would go directly toward ODOT’s Community Paths Program. Back in December I reported that some lawmakers felt it was a mistake to rush into the bike tax in 2017 and would seek to take a more nuanced approach this time around. So far, that’s not the case, and advocates have work to do on this front.
Where the money will go
As for how the funds will be distributed, about 90% of the newly proposed revenue would go into the State Highway Fund and be dedicated to maintenance and operations of the existing system.
Of the $1.9 billion the package raises from the fuel tax and vehicle registration fee increases, $1.7 billion of that will be distributed via the traditional “50/30/20” State Highway Fund formula that sends 50% of revenue to the state (about $850 million), 30% to counties (about $510 million) and 20% (about $340 million) to cities.
$250 million of the new one-time system use fee will be set-aside and spent on finishing highway expansion projects identified but not yet completed in the 2017 package (known as House Bill (HB) 2017. This is the “unfinished business” lawmakers have been talking about and includes megaprojects like the I-5 Rose Quarter, the Abernethy Bridge project, and so on. One source referred to this as a ” freeway project slush fund.”
While the TRIP dedicates $125 million per year to highway expansion projects, it makes no such promise for ODOT’s complete streets or Safe Routes to Schools programs. The package mentions those programs but does not specify any funding amount for them.
When it comes to passenger rail, the package would send $17 million to maintain Amtrak service levels. Half of the tire pollution tax revenue (about $25 million) will go to rail operations. The tire tax will also fund wildlife crossings and salmon restoration efforts to, “negate the harmful impacts of pollution runoff into Oregon waterways.”
Advocates with Move Oregon Forward (a coalition of climate, transportation safety, and environmental justice nonprofits) applauded the framework released today, saying it “provides a solid foundation.” Executive Director of The Street Trust Sarah Iannarone said, “We deeply appreciate the mentions of key safety programs.” Cassie Wilson, the transportation policy manager at 1000 Friends of Oregon, was a bit more pointed. “The money must match the mission,” Wilson said, referring to transit funding. “Now is the time to double down on popular but underfunded programs that benefit all Oregonians now and in the long term.”
With these proposals finally out in the open, the debates can start in earnest. This is just an opening salvo and it’s widely understood that what ends up being passed will be very different that what we have now. What parts change and how much they change depends on who’s able to influence lawmakers the most and bend the politics in their favor.
Stay tuned for more coverage and analysis. Read the text of the proposal here.
Thanks for reading.
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Oregonians: “dur, we love not paying sales tax”
Oregon leadership: “pay these ‘fees’ every time you buy a car that add up to 1.8% of the price”
Oregonians: “okay, at least it isn’t a sales tax”
As someone who believes we should have a tax system that relies much more on a sales tax and much less on an income tax, I fully support whatever naming shenanigans and obfuscations lawmakers can come up with to get “de facto” sales taxes passed. Privilege taxes, tourism taxes, sin taxes, gross receipts taxes, etc…these are all just sales taxes that don’t show up the receipt as such. Fine by me!
Why do you support this?
Probably thinks that rich people are paying too much.
> all new vehicles with 30 mile-per-gallon or greater in July 2029
That reads like a pretty blatant giveaway to fossil fuels. Everyone has to pay the road tax except people driving gas guzzlers?
I mean in theory gas guzzlers are paying gas tax, but I would support this tax being applied to all cars in 2029.
Ostensibly, the increase in gas tax is covering that. Having a hard cut-off at 30 mpg feels…suboptimal
Gas guzzlers pay their share through increased gas taxes.
Another way to look at it: If you drive a fuel-efficient gasoline-powered car, you’ll now pay BOTH the gas tax AND the road-user fee. In other words, you’ll be paying as much as the people driving the gas guzzlers.
So where’s the incentive to drive a fuel-efficient car?
You mean besides paying less to drive?
(I do think we should create additional incentives to burn less gasoline, but this budget is clearly not designed with that as a primary goal.)
You’re just looking at taxes. The incentive is that you have to buy less gasoline, obviously. A person driving a fuel efficient car will still save money, because taxes are a small percentage of the total cost of gasoline.
True, but the intent of TRIP is to make cars that get over 30 mpg pay the same tax as gas guzzlers. Incentives really do matter. The Tesla owners I know constantly remind me that they are not paying any gas tax and it’s a huge incentive to drive a Tesla.
Only if one stipulates that there’s no additional societal benefits to having folks drive smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles. A sensible policy would apply the fee equally to all vehicles and then the gas tax naturally scales according to the efficiency of the vehicle and the amount of carbon and other pollution it creates. Giving what amounts to a significant tax break to inefficient vehicles makes no sense at all in the big picture.
How do I reap the rather large societal benefit of not driving at all?
Get yourself a selfie karma?
You nailed it, Nate. Thanks.
Gas guzzlers have to pay the gas tax. The whole point of the mile-travelled fee is to make up for the gas taxes that fuel-efficient or electric car owners are not paying. Fuel-efficient car owners and EV owners are not paying their fair share, given the damage they do to the roads. EVs do even more damage than regular cars.
For the moment, at least, I’d prefer those using gasoline foot the whole bill, as an incentive to stop using gasoline. We shouldn’t be having this conversation until electrification is further along.
What, exactly, is their fair share?
Yes, but it still rounds to zero when compared to trucks and weather. There’s a reason we don’t even consider personal vehicle numbers when designing an asphalt section. It’s just freight trucks and weather.
Yep – the damage caused by studded tires alone dwarfs anything cars with regular tires inflict on roads. One car with studded tires is like 1000 cars w/o studded tires.
And exactly how to EVs do more damage than regular cars? Is it their outstanding torque?
There’s a notion that the heavy battery causes more wear, if the battery weighs more than an engine, transmission and fuel tank. From where I sit, cars is cars. Tax em on the space they take up.
Les Schwab is dead, but he still won’t let us tax studded tires, and the workers have to run across the parking lot. That said, if you must be in the car business, they’re pretty efficient. If your car has their brand of tire on it, it’ll be on the rack before you even go in the office.
We know that studs eat the roads, and there are perfectly good winter tires that don’t have them. All of Portland goes online when we get a couple of inches of snow anyway. Studs should be illegal. Chain up or stay home.
COTW. There is absolutely no justification for running studs in Portland.
If studded tires were illegal, and I lived in Government Camp, say, and had studded tires, would I be fined if I drove into Portland?
I think a ban would make more sense if applied statewide, but I really don’t know how that would impact people living at elevation.
The ban should be statewide, but there will always be boundary issues of the type you invoke. (Q: What about people driving from Alaska or Canada? A: they should get fined.) Also, studs are not needed in Govy, and using them is selfish.
There are way more people running studs on bare pavement in the valley than there ever would be homebound by lack of studs at elevation. I understand that modern snow tires without studs work pretty well. If I lived at elevation I’d probably use a vehicle compatible with tire chains, which are pretty easy to use in the events that make roads otherwise impassable. Or, maybe I’d snowshoe out to the plowed road where I park, or use one of many other workarounds.
I’d settle for an annual fee that is even approximately the cost of road damage. It can be zero if your mailing address is in the mountains, I don’t hate those people or anything. At a time when we seemingly can’t afford to maintain roads it is crazy to allow people to drive around striking little chisels into the bare pavement.
I have no personal knowledge or experience to judge whether or not studs are ever required for driving in the mountains, but I do know some people believe they are, and whatever policy we create around studded tires needs to account for that view somehow.
I have no problem with a fee or an outright ban as long as we account for the experiences of everybody.
You know, just my normal view that we should include those directly affected when making policy.
I’ve been skiing at Hood for 30+ years. Used studs for the first ten and I’ve been using studless for the last 20. I have never encountered conditions on Hood that require studs. The iciest days, the deepest snow. It doesn’t matter.
Studs are not necessary. Are they better on sheet ice? Of course, but those are extreme edge cases. The massive damage to the roads cannot be justified.
The biggest issue we have now is that they are cheaper than studless tires. The rubber and tread patterns are cheaper to make, and they don’t wear out as quickly as the studless tires. We need a statewide tax that increases the studded tires enough to match the best studless tires. That, or a full ban.
“…some people believe they are (required)…”
I think you have stated that part of the issue correctly. The externality cost of using studded tires is immediate, measurable and local. People don’t wear golf spikes in their houses, do they?
Maybe we should have the “are they really necessary” conversation with some of the people who believe studs really are. But as I said before, I have no problem with a fee or even an outright ban, so long as we reflect on the range of opinion.
And I really should apologize: I know how tedious it must be to talk with somebody who always wants to understand the larger context or hear different points of view before rendering an opinion.
My small sub-compact nissan leaf EV* cause so, so much more environmental damage than my neighbor’s lifted F250 super duty (diesel)?
* $3,300 lb, used, recycled battery
An F250 isn’t exactly a “regular car”. That said, claims that EVs are tearing up the roads sound a bit hysterical to me.
We need to stop burning gasoline and diesel ASAP, even if EVs damage the roads, and even if Tesla sells more cars. If you can get rid of your car by riding a bike or taking the bus, that’s great too.
In what world is an F250 not a mainstream vehicle? Ever been to Idaho? I think the F150 is Ford’s biggest seller, and it’s not THAT much lighter than the F250. I see F350s being driven around all over the place (even twee inner Portland). They probably weigh as much as two swasticars each. And then there’s the ubiquitous Sprinter van….
In the world that says it’s meaningless to say EVs aren’t heavier than gasoline powered cars because and F250 weighs more than a Leaf.
Besides, the comment didn’t say “mainstream vehicle” it said “regular car”, which an F250 is not.
In other words, that comparison is wrong on both technical and logical grounds. But, as I said, Soren’s larger point was right, so let’s focus on that and figure out how we can electrify more quickly.
The Ford F series is only the highest selling “car” in the USA according to Car and Driver:
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/g60385784/bestselling-cars-2024/
You mean that one magazine’s inclusion of the vehicle on a list of “The 25 Bestselling Cars, Trucks, and SUVs of 2024” means it’s a car? The one where they write “Ford’s lineup of light-duty and heavy-duty pickups is always in this top spot”?
But ok, sure. Your Leaf weighs less than a F250, so EVs do not weigh more than their gasoline powered counterparts.
Re: bike tax increase. What if instead of raising the tax on bicycles, which probably affects small local bike shops the most that are already struggling and closing, we revise the language to also include micromobility small things with wheels, like one-wheels, e-scooters, EUCs, etc, in the original tax. These are primarily sold online, are surging in popularity, and use off-street paths also. That way all users are paying, and local bike shops don’t have even more pressure.
Great idea, which leads me to another great idea, proposed by PS in the first comment:
What if we just had a sales tax that raised revenue from all sources equally and was really easy to administer and collect? (at the point of sale)
That’s what mature, grown-up states (and countries that have VAT) do.
Sales tax is regressive and punishes poor people the most so no!
Mr. T just implemented a sales tax for all imports, including parts for domestically produced products like cars, as well as imported oil and other fuels, of a minimum of 10% and often over 50%. The only items exempt are those that are produced entirely within the USA with materials produced entirely in the USA. The tax is collected at the point of entry, so manufacturers and importers will no doubt pass the increased costs on to consumers. This hits cars, fuel, bike parts, bikes, even domestically produced custom frames that use foreign steel and aluminum, most clothing, pretty much everything we consume except bread and milk.
Thereby reducing consumption and increasing the price of driving, things many here claim to want.
Nice try. No one here has stated they would like a worldwide recession to reduce consumption.
Who are the ‘many” you speak of?
You never miss a chance to give a little credit to your Cult leader, no matter how ridiculous you sound.
So all of the European Union “punishes” poor people? All of Canada “punishes” poor people? All of the US States with a sales tax “punish” poor people. Really?
Sounds like a great bit of testimony you should provide to the Joint Committee on Transportation and to your specific legislative delegation.
I’m fearful that the focus on new taxes (instead of wasteful spending reduction to fund needed programs) is going to negatively impact the tax base of Multnomah County which has some of the highest taxes in the county. Governor Kotek already called for a moratorium on new taxes here and people are currently leaving the County for lower tax locales. I’m concerned the doom loop will only accelerate….
https://www.oregonlive.com/business/2025/02/economist-warns-of-portland-doom-loop.html
This is an article about state taxes. Since we are in a multi-state metro area, there’s some reason to be concerned about arbitrage, but the primary driver of that has historically the complete lack of income tax in Washington. And for what it’s worth, in 2022 a family earning $100,000 in Portland paid $725/year in auto related taxes – exactly the median for largest cities in US states (page 20).
Do you have a list of ODOT-funded programs you think should be cut to save money? Can you specifically indicate how you would cut $300M from the budget? Or are you just posturing about “wasteful spending”?
Abandon the highways!
Perfect response. If they just abandoned building more highway capacity, they would cut a lot more than $300m from the budget.
I know, right? The solution is so simple.
Bottom line is the more local and state taxes that are placed on residents in Oregon the more that will move to lower tax locales. It’s already happening and additional taxes (state, county, city) will only accelerate that trend.
https://www.wweek.com/news/city/2025/01/16/high-taxes-are-hurting-portland-job-growth-and-prodding-wealthy-people-to-leave-report-says/
This is a myth. Oregon is right in the middle of the distribution of states in terms of tax burdens according to most national organizations that study such things. Here is just one example: https://taxfoundation.org/research/all/state/2025-state-tax-competitiveness-index/
That article makes some legitimately insane leaps of logic, though they seem to mostly stem from the insane leaps of logic made in the report they are reading. Am I supposed to take this seriously?
This is not a strong argument in favor of their thesis. In 2015, Multnomah County had a little over 400,000 jobs, compared to 450,000 in 2024. Clark County had a little under 200,000 jobs in 2015, compared to 225,000 in 2024. I’m no expert, but I’m pretty sure 50,000 is greater than 25,000. The number quoted in the article is also just flat wrong, and clearly makes no sense (a 100% increase in jobs would be double – something we all know to be false). I’m sure if you looked at the rate of job growth change between Manhattan and Suffolk County in New York you could draw the same conclusion, but that would be misguided at best.
Every article about high taxes in Portland, or Oregon, talks about how xyz is so high, but then says nothing about not having a sales tax. If you aren’t saying the entire picture of tax burden, it does not make sense to talk about residents moving.
You meant “country,” and your point is a great one. I don’t think anyone is going to move out of MultCo b/c of these new taxes since they will hit everyone in Oregon, but what really needs to be addressed is the injustice of high earners – and no one else – paying the homeless services tax. That injustice is really galling to high earners I know (not me – not a high earner) and they have the resources to move out of MultCo and they are doing it.
If MultCo residents think it’s worth having a tax, then EVERYONE should pay something.
Lol yeah like we don’t have a huge issue with income inequality and poor people being punished and no more safety net to help. What world are you living in ffs
Yeah, this is “let them eat cake,” levels of willful ignorance and selfishness.
Really it’s not. The rich have lots of options and will choose to move, as they are now doing. MultCo tax base is already suffering and the county can’t afford to fund the services it already has. These are facts.
The taxes MultCo voters put upon others will come back to haunt them. I’m just telling you what I’m seeing and hearing.
One option that rich people have taken, and will continue to take, is to hire tax accounting specialists to minimize the amount of taxes that they pay. One reason that people hate some of the local taxes is that they are strongly progressive, simple, and not subject to loopholes.
You can insult the “evil rich people” but the bottom line is they are voting with their feet. Eventually you either cut services or tax more of those that are left.
https://www.oregonlive.com/business/2024/08/affluent-people-lead-the-way-among-those-leaving-multnomah-county.html
Yes, If you are in that income bracket, you watch and move around your investments around like a hawk, if the county just lops off 1.5% every year, don’t expect them all to stick around for ever. Maybe double the top income thresholds, or better yet a tiered system so the high earners aren’t singled out at an arbitrary income…..say start at 75k per……10%. .20%, .30% and on up through the multi-million annually maybe around .75% for the privilege of living in the county.
The Bike Excise Tax is a hot mess because it discourages bike sales, a social good, while hampering bike shop operation, to collect an amount of money that doesn’t weigh in the balance of the Oregon Department of Roads budget. As a regular bike rider, this tax will never catch me at all because I have too many bikes already and at my time of life will likely never buy another new one.
OreGo is ridiculously cheap. It’s 2¢ per mile. A moderate motor vehicle operator would only pay $200.00 per year, less than the cost of two months on TriMet. If they have studded tires the whole thing is a wash.
I’m going to register my ebike on OreGo, and pitch a fit if there aren’t roads to ride on.
Good for you and I mean that sincerely. The Orego is IMO an interesting idea poorly actualized, and I fully support the addition of an Ebike to mess with their numbers. Kind of a modern-day antigovernment/corporation monkey wrenching (thumbs up emoji).
I used their comparison calculator and for a normal month it would cost me more to use Orego than to simply pay the fuel tax and not be beholden to all the byzantine reporting procedures.
Some funny bits from the various Orego websites_
*A road usage charge is that solution. This new funding model weans us off fossil fuels using a modern, technology-based solution that combats climate change while assessing drivers fairly for their road use.
You know what would wean people from using cars? Not being able to afford gas. Raise the gas tax if you want to cut down on emissions and raise money while also taking the risk that people won’t consider that a tax too far and vote with their feet. No need to create this bizarre system.
*OReGO drivers of electric and high-efficiency vehicles (40 MPG or better) can save money on registration while they are enrolled in Oregon’s road usage charge program.
You know what would save me even more (other than swearing off owning a car altogether)? Purchasing a used Honda econobox that uses proven technology and gets mid 30’s to the gallon for a lot less than the latest and greatest that uses too much rare earth metal in its construction.
* While personal identification information is needed to set up an account, OReGO account managers, by law, may not disclose that personal information. Further, location-based data (GPS) and daily miles driven (if applicable), collected through account managers is destroyed within 30 days of payment processing.
I guess they have never heard of data breaches. Participants have not actual hope of privacy. If you don’t care, than its not a problem. It just seems disingenuous to claim that the government doesn’t know or keep info when the vendors do.
*Why not charge by weight?
Weighing passenger vehicles is impractical. Passenger vehicles like cars, pick-up trucks and vans weigh much less (under 10,000 pounds) and produce less wear and tear on the roads than freight.
Oregon ensures that freight vehicles (26,000 pounds or more) pay their fair share for this extra burden through the weight-mile tax, where vehicles are taxed on their weight and the miles they travel in Oregon.
If they can ensure that freight vehicle use a weight-mile tax, then obviously they can exempt them from a passenger vehicle pay by weight scale. LOL, this is getting painful to read. They could pay by weight taken at registration time and not create this all new system to track vehicles.
Lacking registration and/or a VIN, it might be hard to pull off, but I can try. I’m not willing to commit fraud just to make a point.
The bike tax is a hot mess, but it’s useful as a counter to the ‘skin in the game’ argument. It’s well worth tolerating the misguided tax on bicycles to get at desperately needed 50% increase in the gas tax.
But it’s not at all useful for this because it has done virtually nothing to stop claims that “bikers” do not pay their fair share for all those fancy bike lanes that are always empty*.
* /s
Soren is right.
My epidermis is my “skin in the game”, it’s an appalling argument and I’m going to ignore it. The bike excise tax is just not an effective way to collect revenue.
I agree that the “skin in the game” argument is BS.
Unfortunately, I believe it stems from the view that our transportation system should be a user pay system, which is a view I commonly hear expressed here. I believe transportation is something we all benefit from whether or not we are on the roads at any given moment, and trying to parse out who benefits how much and what they should pay for that benefit is a fool’s errand.
The context of this discussion is a legislative proposal to fund the state transportation systems. The gist of my apparently ineffective comment was that the usefulness of the bike tax is to help secure a gas tax increase. I agree that the bike tax will raise diddly squat. I further agree that it will not prevent randos on the street from claiming that “bikers” do not pay their fair share. What it does do is give policymakers in republican circles a way to argue that the package is ‘balanced’ and some political cover to allow the gas tax increase to become law.
This is the exact opposite of the “skin in the game” argument. One could agree that transportation is a common good and conclude that it should be funded by a variety of mechanisms. I think a lot of people feel like they buy a lot of gas to facilitate their employment and that “other people” should contribute in a similar manner to the common transportation system — precisely because everybody benefits even if they don’t pay the gas tax (or VMT for freight). So I find the squealing in response to a proposed increase to a sales tax even “bikers” largely did not notice to be missing the forest for the trees and typical of center left politics. We’ll fight among ourselves over a bike tax at the expense of shaping bigger trends in state transportation development.
Who thinks a $25 dollar bump on new bike sales will advance the argument for an increase in gas tax? The real logic for taxing ourselves, bike riders or car drivers or Amazon buyers or gig economy users, is that transportation is a damn public good and we like to travel and we need stuff and also, it sucks when people die in the street.
We shouldn’t have to “give political cover” to anybody. Good transportation creates wealth. Lousy transportation wastes time and money and hurts us. It pumps out dirt where Bike Portland comment writers breathe in necessary air.
If we could agree that an extra hundred dollars, or two, is not too much to spend on good transportation then we could just move on to the question of how to spend it.
How are we going to get money to spend on transportation? From the legislative process, of which this TRIP nonsense is some kind of weird mating dance that esoteric committees do before they get to the actual bills that will determine how much is spent and what it’s spent on. The bike tax is clearly included as a symbolic acknowledgement of the skin-in-the-game argument. ODOT doesn’t think it’s going to generate serious revenue. I presume they are counting on the gas tax in the short-to-medium term and some kind of mileage tax in the long term. But to get that sweet gas tax revenue they have to get their proposals enacted. You and soren and Watts have all commented on how stupid the bike tax is. I disagree. I think the bike tax proposal in this TRIP document gives ODOT something to say to the offices of the many legislators whose constituents are not going to be thrilled about another $.20/gal at the pump. “THe TRIP proposes a balanced set of revenue sources that spread the burden across different user groups blah blah blah….” Of course I hope the bike tax increase is not implemented. But really I don’t care that much. I do hope we get (at least) a $.2 hike on the gas tax, which will make a bigger difference.
I love how they do townhalls, hear overwhelmingly that people want more public and active transportation funding and then raise $2B for highways. That’s what I call a “state department of transportation” moment
Townhalls, community outreach, etc. are performative. Typically, the Project Managers of public projects already know what they are going to do and are just playing lip service to the public.
For my neighborhood recently, Parks did exactly that. Came out asking for community input and ignored it all. The Park was designed with the features they wanted and they even pulled a name for it out of thin air which is not what the neighbors wanted.
But lets face it, in the case of big transportation project, that means large construction companies and those companies make hefty donations to political campaigns. So honestly, which project do you think is going to happen? Public transportation or shovels in the ground for highways?
1000%. Don’t waste your time on them.
50% of the money that goes into the state highway fund is then disbursed to counties and cities for operations and maintenance on non-state-highway roads. So it’s not $2B for highways, it’s $1B for highways and $1B for non-highways. Seems good to me.
The state Highway fund aggregates funding and disburses it for maintenance to ODOT, cities and states. I get people want more active transportation but increasing the state and local maintenance deficit and allowing roads to fail and need full rebuilds doesnt at all help with your goals, in fact it runs counter to them.
The state Highway fund is divided up and used for maintaining state, county and city roads.
Increasing the bike excise tax is stupid, but it allows McLain to say “Everybody pays” so that’s useful.
The really sad thing about TRIP is that it strengthens the status quo – doesn’t at all create conditions for the paradigm shift we really need. We’re all doomed, basically. In the meantime I’m going to enjoy riding my bike as much as possible.
Why not just apply the weight-mile tax to all motor vehicles? Charge cars and trucks for road use based on distance travelled x weight, regardless of fuel source. Meanwhile, set the gas tax to increase 2 cents per year for the next decade, then 3 cents per year after that.
The bike tax is stupid. It discourages bike sales while raising almost no revenue.
While I agree in principle, tracking the miles driven specifically in Oregon reliably is something that many folks in the consumer space are rightly not very excited about (in the freight space, it simply makes more sense, since there aren’t the same privacy implications of tracking freight vehicles).
Here’s one idea: toll state highways all over the state, as well as bridges and tunnels. Make the tolls pretty steep. Give people a choice: pay the tolls, or pay a weight-mile tax.
install a transponder in the weight-mile vehicles. They are charged per mile of travel in Oregon, based on the weight of their car, but all tolls are automatically waived for them.
Generally, it should be substantially cheaper to travel with the transponder. Anyone who wants to travel in Oregon regularly can set up an account and install one in their car. That might also be a good deal for freight haulers, as long as they are okay with having their travel charged under an imputed default weight (all vehicles treated as 75% full at all times, for example).
People who are seriously dedicated to avoiding both systems can work out long, circuitous backroad routes that get them to their destinations while avoiding as many tollgates as possible.
The climate-arsonist democratic party canceled tolls.
You can sign up for OreGo and see how your miles are tracked. It’s just like your iPhone – completely routine. The tech bros already track your mileage.
I did it for years and it was 100% accurate.
Not if you still use a flip phone. 🙂 You should try it…..very liberating!