An Iowa-based research center is looking for 450 Baltimore-area motorists willing to have their every driving move tracked by satellite to test a system that could theoretically replace the federal gasoline tax with road use fees.
The federally funded study will use a global positioning system satellite to track not only the mileage driven over eight months, but also whether each road traveled is funded by the state, federal or local governments.
Participants will receive a simulated bill each month for the road use fee owed to each level of government. Volunteers who take part in the study will get $895 for their services. It's all part of a $16.5 million study in six states to test the technology as well as motorists' reactions to the concept of road use tracking and fees - an idea that has received the outspoken support of U.S. Transportation Secretary Mary E. Peters and other critics of the federal motor fuel tax.
Opponents of what is known as the gas tax say it's a dwindling source of revenue that is only crudely related to how much someone drives and where. Supporters of the road use fee argue that it would allocate money more precisely than the tax. But critics doubt that citizens would ever accept a system that gives the government specific information about their traveling habits.
Jon Kuhl, principal investigator with the Iowa Public Policy Center, said the information collected by the system would not include the specific locations to which the vehicle has traveled. Rather, he said, it would place a periodic automated call to a data center reporting how many miles have been driven on different categories of roads.
"There's no way this system could be used to track vehicles in any way," he said.
But Lillie Coney, associate director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said the notion of creating such a system raises many red flags.
Coney said that even if the information transmitted to the billing center is stripped of specifics, at some point the underlying digital information is being collected.
"No matter how it's sold, it is a surveillance system. It is a locational tracking system," she said.
The test is being driven by a debate in transportation circles about how America's roads will be funded in the 21st century.
For about 70 years, the principal source of federal transportation revenue has been an excise tax on motor fuel. That federal tax on gasoline now stands at 18.4 cents per gallon. The states also rely heavily on fuel taxes, with Maryland taxing gasoline an additional 23.5 cents a gallon.
