Matchmaking, Better Place and the Mileage Fee

June 21, 2009

Here's a little marriage that wants to be arranged: the Mileage Fee and Better Place's software platform.

The Mileage Fee offers a unique opportunity to put the traffic jam on a diet, and it is gaining traction as a way to deal with dissappearing gas tax revenues as people drive less, drive more fuel efficient cars, or eventually drive cars that don't use gas at all (read the preceding link commentary to feel the gaining traction part). To be deployed broadly, however, the mileage fee needs GPS systems to be manufactured into new vehicles.

Better Place describe themselves as "the world’s leading electric vehicle (EV) services provider, catalyzing the transition to sustainable transportation. We deliver services to enable confident adoption and use of EVs. We build and operate the infrastructure and systems to optimize energy access and use." Better Place relies on an "onboard software platform" to ensure efficient, seamless use of their charging station network. This platform "will provide subscribers with advanced navigation and other telematic services."

So, do this, Better Place: tuck a few lines of code into your software platform to accomodate the mileage fee, and you'll make the better place even better. Give the mileage fee a little kiss.

Photo: Alexis on flickr

Comments

[stomv]

We have a mileage fee. It's called the gas tax. The more miles you drive, the higher the tax. If it's not high enough to pay for roads, you raise it. If it's not high enough to discourage driving as much as you'd like, you raise it. If MPG improves dramatically or suddenly everyone starts taking the train, success(!), and then raise the gas tax to pay for the roads because payments have shrunk.

In the mean time, the mileage fee only provides incentive for fewer miles driven. The gas tax provides incentive for less gas consumption -- which is the real goal here, and that can be done with fewer miles driven, more efficient vehicles, or any combination of the two.

[Chris Davis]

one potential problem with a gasoline tax is that we could find it being applied to an increasingly shrinking tax base if drivers migrate to electric vehicles, leaving governments short of funds to build and maintain roads, and disproportionately burdening the gasoline fueled segment of the roads' users.

the mileage fee can be shaped to provide incentives to reduce gasoline consumption--it be anything we want it to be, as long as the voters support the way it is shaped.

the killer app, though, is that the mileage fee can do something, ubiquitously, that the gas tax can't, which is disincentivize driving during rush hour.

[Jim Whitty]

Integrating mileage counting devices within all-electric vehicles (EV) is an obvious public policy decision but policy makers across the nation have yet to embrace it. Rather, they indicate they want to provide an incentive for motorists to purchase the coming updated electric vehicles and regard a requirement for embedding a mileage counting device into an EV as the opposite.

Actually, they could do both; provide a income tax incentive for purchasing an EV while charging a mileage fee for road use a well This would encourage market acceptance for EV purchase but also ensure the EV operators pay their fair share of costs for road use. So far, this reasoning has not worked, neither with legislators nor with EV manufacturers and EV system providers.

At some point, after EV market acceptance has taken root, it will dawn on gasoline vehicle operators that the group of EV motorists taking up the same amount of space pay nothing for operating their vehicles on the roads. Recognition of the unfairness of this condition will alter the political regard for imposing mileage charges upon EV operators. If this awareness takes a long time to emerge, we will find ourselves behind the curve of change rather than in front of it.