Illinois has to pay for its roads, but not at the cost of invading everyone’s privacy.
Since vehicles powered by electricity and fuels other than gasoline and diesel started appearing on the highways, urban planners have worried about how it might affect the amount of money available to build and maintain roads and bridges.
It’s time to come to a consensus on the best way to support road maintenance, but that consensus should not be a Big Brother system that tracks people every second they are driving their cars.
At the moment, state, federal and sometimes local governments charge a motor fuel tax on every gallon of gas or diesel people buy at the pump. So the more someone uses the roads, the more they pay. The Illinois motor fuel tax is 47 cents per gallon for gasoline. The federal motor fuel tax is 18.4 cents per gallon of gasoline and gasohol. On top of that, motorists in Illinois pay sales taxes of 6.25%. Cook County charges an additional tax of 6 cents per gallon, and Chicago adds a sales tax of 1.25%. All those taxes together add up to the second-highest total in the nation.
But as George Wiebe reported recently in the Sun-Times, vehicles that run on electricity and charge up at home don’t pay motor fuel taxes. Moreover, some gasoline-powered vehicles are more fuel efficient than in the past, which means their owners buy less gas and therefore pay less for roads and bridges.
In Illinois, owners of electric vehicles pay an extra $100 each year for their vehicle registrations. That does provide some money to help pay for roads and bridges.
But some lawmakers say that’s not enough.
A sea of surveillance
A bill introduced on Feb. 6 by Sen. Ram Villivalam, D-Chicago, would create a pilot program to charge owners of electric vehicles by the number of miles they drive, something called a vehicle miles traveled tax. That could be done through a vehicle transponder or by sending odometer photos to the Illinois Department of Transportation. In theory, it also could be achieved by a regular odometer inspection at a state facility. A Transportation Committee hearing is scheduled for Tuesday.
A similar bill introduced in 2019 went nowhere in that legislative session.
Transponders already are used on tollways, where they track locations when motorists pay a toll. But any system used to record miles driven for the purpose of paying taxes should not needlessly add to the amount of surveillance that tracks us in our daily lives.
Illinoisans live in a sea of surveillance. Already, there are roadside automatic license plate readers, cameras and cellphone towers that track the location of mobile phones. It’s hard for the public to maintain privacy when all those systems know where we’re going.
All that data already paints a pretty good profile of a person, and any additional system would raise a lot of questions. How will the data be protected? Who will have access to it, and will it require a warrant? Will a DOGE-like agency be in a position to use the information? What are the risks of a data breach?
Besides, what about fairness? Here’s an example: Low-wage workers who might have to drive because of shift work or other reasons will end up paying more than middle-class workers who have more ability to work from home.
Moreover, any new revenue program shouldn’t penalize electric vehicles, which don’t impose the same costs on the environment that gasoline-powered vehicles do because they don’t directly burn fossil fuels. In 2019, Consumer Reports reported 18 states were on a track to levy higher fees on electric vehicles than on their gasoline-powered counterparts.
A pilot program is a sensible way to allow lawmakers to gather information about what works, and no one is forced into the pilot program. And it would shed light on a knotty problem that needs a good solution: How does the state set up a fair system that generates needed revenue for roads and bridges — which are, after all, a public good that benefits all of us — and doesn’t add substantial new administration costs?
Four states already are in the early stages of implementing a vehicle miles traveled tax. Illinois needs to think long and hard before it decides to join them.
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