A REAL WORLD TEST OF ROAD USER FEES: EVALUATING MINNESOTA'S MILEAGE-BASED USER FEE TEST

摘要

The increasing fuel efficiency of modern vehicles is decreasing the revenue collected by stateagencies for use on roadway maintenance. Due to this loss of revenue, there is growing interestamong the transportation community in exploring the possibility of implementing mileage-basedfees to replace or supplement fuel tax revenues. This study pilot tested the use of a commercialoff-the-shelf smartphone device outfitted with custom software to assess mileage-based userfees. A total of 500 participants were involved in test, each participating for a period of 6months each. To simulate a real world deployment, participants were invoiced for their fees.This paper highlights findings regarding participant perceptions of the fuel tax, mileage-baseduser fees, the in-vehicle smartphone device, and privacy concerns. This paper focuses on datagathered through surveys and one-on-one interviews.Results from this test indicate that participants believe that revenue generated from the fuel taxbenefits them as drivers and they understand the obligation to keep roads in a state of goodrepair. The majority of participants believed that varying a road fee based on location and timeof the day was appropriate; however, participants favored varying the fee based on location.Participant perceptions throughout indicate that as their experience using a mileage-based systemincreases, so does their understanding and trust of the system and mileage-based user feeconcepts. Furthermore, a large percentage of participants indicated they would prefer a mileage-based user fee to the traditional fuel tax.