(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 441: Paying by the Mile

This week we’re joined by Mike Warren, Senior Vice President at WSP. Mike chats with us about road user charging including how the discussion has changed over the last decade and the idea of treating roads as a utility by paying for driving by the mile. We also discuss policy considerations including reducing driving and congestion, privacy considerations, and replacing existing use taxes.

To listen to this episode, listen in at Streetsblog USA or find it in our hosting archive.

Below is a full unedited AI generated transcript:

Jeff Wood (1m 21s):
Well, Mike Warren, welcome to the Talking Headways. Podcast.

Mike Warren (1m 40s):
Thank you so much for having me. I’m really looking forward to this discussion.

Jeff Wood (1m 43s):
Well, thanks for being here. Before we get started, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Mike Warren (1m 46s):
Yeah, so I am a management consultant, strategic consultant, project manager, technologist, innovator for all things transportation. I’ve been involved in road usage charging, which we’ll certainly talk about in more detail, but I’ve been involved in that since, really for the past 12 years, doing everything from systems design all the way through project management, policy development, outreach, communications, operations. I’ve testified to legislatures before. I’ve presented findings. I’ve written reports, thousands, thousands of pages of reports in states. Everything ranging from Oregon, California, all the way to the east coast.

Mike Warren (2m 29s):
So I currently live in northern Colorado about 45 minutes north of Denver, and I’ve been with WSP, my current employer for six years, just helping promote this concept across the country.

Jeff Wood (2m 40s):
Awesome. And how did you get interested in transportation initially? Was it something that you found out early on or is it something that came from your education or just fell into

Mike Warren (2m 49s):
It? It’s very interesting. I, I really stumbled into it. My background prior to this was in the defense and communication space. I’m an Air Force veteran doing wireless communications, combat com, battlefield type scenarios, battlefield type deployments. And I had worked in the defense community for many, many years, started to look for something different and it just so happened that the Oregon Department of Transportation needed somebody that understood technical requirements and understood procurement than understood communication standards. So I got pulled into that, and that was back in, oh gosh, I guess it was 2011 with the Oregon Road Usage charge pilot project. We started that project and since then it just, it’s been kind of taking off like gangbusters at that point.

Jeff Wood (3m 34s):
I’m curious, since you’ve been doing this so long, what you know, the discussion is like now versus the discussion then, because obviously it’s advanced, I imagine precipitously

Mike Warren (3m 44s):
It has in certain areas. You know, what we have found is coming outta the first Oregon pilot and, and even moving into helping standup Oregon and, and helping California and some of our other states. But what we found is there’s really three major topics of conversation that come up with ruck. The first one’s privacy second is equity or fairness, and then third is complexity. And what we have found is, you know, those three tenants still remain, they still, they’re still in place and those conversations are occurring even with states that are, you know, that have deployed one or two or even three pilot projects. What we’re finding now though, are ways that we can use this information to better support the motorists, how we can use this information to better support EV adoption and how states can use this for congestion management.

Mike Warren (4m 31s):
For example, how we can use pricing to adjust congestion in certain, you know, in central business districts or along major freeways. We’re also looking at how we can use the technology that we’re using in rock to support other markets. Things like tolling or uses based insurance or even transportation network companies. And then carrying that one step further, how we can use the data for things like improved planning or emergency response or things like that. So the conversations have definitely evolved from just the simple plugin devices. You know, we’re now looking at how the OEMs can get involved and what they could bring to the table, but we’re still going back to those three core tenants, privacy, fairness, and complexity for any client.

Jeff Wood (5m 10s):
Are you finding the conversations are opening up to where people are with those three tenants that you talked about are more open to having the discussion rather than just kind of being closed off and saying, well, that’s never gonna happen.

Mike Warren (5m 20s):
Studies have helped. This concept has been around, actually r has been around in the US for almost 20 years now, and pilot studies have certainly helped, you know, participation breeds familiarity. So what we’re finding is people that get involved in these r pilots tend to ask more questions, they tend to ask more, I don’t wanna say intelligent questions, but more experienced questions and, and what that has done between that and then the conversations that have been occurring at both state and federal governments. The conversations are progressing. You know, it’s, it’s not this immediate, absolutely not, we don’t wanna pursue this. It’s, well, let’s explore this because another state’s done this, Oregon’s done this, Washington’s done this, California’s done this.

Mike Warren (6m 3s):
Let’s explore what they have found and how we could apply it to our own state.

Jeff Wood (6m 7s):
So let’s go back a little bit and just kind of go to the basics. So can you explain what a road user charge is and maybe why it’s being discussed at all? To start off with?

Mike Warren (6m 17s):
Yeah, so simply stated, road usage charge, it treats roads like a utility. You pay for every Mile you drive, and instead of paying for road use based on the number of gallons that you put in your vehicle or the gas tax that’s assessed on those gallons, you’re paying based on every Mile you drive. And what really started this here in the US was the influx of electric vehicles, the increase in vehicle fuel economy, and the decline purchasing power of the gas tax. The federal gas tax, for example, hasn’t been raised sincerely, nineties. Many states haven’t raised their gas taxes since then as well. So what we’re finding is the purchasing power is declining as well.

Mike Warren (6m 59s):
So with this influx of EVs, with the declining purchasing power of the gas tax and with the increased fuel economy, states are starting to explore innovative methods to fund their transportation infrastructure. We’ve looked at a lot of different options, but what we’ve found is ruck really provides one of the more fair and future focused solutions.

Jeff Wood (7m 21s):
What does that fairness look like? You know, I, I know a lot of people think that property taxes cover road building in the US but that’s not really necessarily true because there’s property taxes, they’re general fund transfers that have been happening at the federal level for a long time. Other mechanisms cover a lot more than people think. So I’m wondering about that fairness and you know, how this might actually replace the gas tax, but also why we think it’s an idea that works. And, and you just mentioned that obviously to a certain extent, but I’m wanna kind of get a little bit deeper into it.

Mike Warren (7m 48s):
What one of the things that based on a per gallon consumption model, vehicles that are less fuel efficient are purchasing more gallons of more gallons of fuel, which means they’re paying more gas tax, which means they are, they are effectively subsidizing those vehicles that have a higher fuel economy, not taking emissions into consideration, not taking weight into consideration. It’s just the vehicles that purchase more fuel are paying more for road use than a vehicle that is more fuel efficient. So what rut does is it levels that playing field. You have electric vehicles that some states have imposed vehicle registration surcharges, but what we have found in a lot of states is that still doesn’t equate to, you know, what an average vehicle would pay every month for road use.

Mike Warren (8m 34s):
So ruck level’s, the playing field, regardless of whether you’re driving a less fuel efficient vehicle or you’re driving an electric car, you’re theoretically going to pay the same per Mile rate.

Jeff Wood (8m 43s):
It’s interesting because I feel like, you know, another big discussion we’re having right now nationally is about safety and street design, vehicle sizes, vehicle weights because of now because of battery packs being so heavy in these electric vehicles. And one of the kind of features of the gas tax was that, you know, you were kind of penalized for having a larger vehicle that got a worse gas mileage. And so I’m, I’m wondering, you know, in, in places like Japan, we’ve talked about recently on the show even where vehicle sizes and engine displacement are the things that are taxed rather than necessarily the distances. So I’m wondering with the road user charge, do you kind of lose that disincentive to have larger vehicles that might impact safety or things like that?

Mike Warren (9m 18s):
You know, what we, what we have found is there’s not a considerable amount of difference in weight between an EV and a larger truck. You know, we’re looking at it from a vehicle, you know, how much degradation on the road it’s occurring from a safety perspective or you know, if you’re wanting to incentivize a certain vehicle type or disincentivize others, you can certainly do that through variable pricing as well.

Jeff Wood (9m 38s):
Yeah, I just think that’s an interesting topic just because of that discussion. I, I know we also find that from a pollution standpoint, a lot of particulates and things like that are generated from brake dust and tire particles, not necessarily just the exhaust from a vehicle. And so heavier vehicles are actually taking up 30% more tires to operate an electric vehicle the same as as a vehicle that would be gas powered. So those other considerations are interesting and, you know, using the distance-based charge rather than say a gas tax is, is kind of interesting to kind of put those things together and start to think about how they might mesh.

Mike Warren (10m 8s):
So one of the things that we’ve been doing is, you know, we start with what we call a revenue neutral rate and that’s what’s the average equivalency to the state motor fuel tax for a vehicle, you know, based on average fuel economy, based on the number of miles that vehicle will drive in a month or a year. And then we establish for these pilot studies, what we call the revenue neutral rate, and then stakeholders, policy makers, you know, they can evaluate that rate. We can do, you know, certainly revenue forecast can be done to determine what the financial impacts would be and you can adjust that rate based on one to many different criteria.

Jeff Wood (10m 43s):
One of the other interesting things that I found from reading some of your materials was that folks in rural areas are worried about road user charges because they feel like they might get charged more, but in fact that might not necessarily be the case.

Mike Warren (10m 55s):
So there’s studies going on with this right now. A lot of rural and tribal communities are topics of research for a lot of these current pilot projects. What we found is many rural residents, while they live further away from urban centers, they tend to change trips together. They may drive to town, do grocery shopping, drop their mail off, dry cleaning, all of those things in a single trip as opposed to someone in an urban or a suburban area where, you know, I may make five trips a day in my vehicle to do five different things at one. You know, five different things are spread out across the day. So what we’re finding is the rural communities, absolutely. Initially the thought of a Paying by the Mile is certainly not well received.

Mike Warren (11m 38s):
But if you start looking at driving patterns, if you start looking at how people are engaging in this or how they drive, you find that they’re not paying any more than they would under the gas tax.

Jeff Wood (11m 48s):
I’m wondering if we can talk a little bit also about how it works in terms of reporting the miles driven, because I think that’s a a, a major sticking point for a lot of people as well in terms of how people actually tell whoever’s collecting the funding, et cetera. Whether it’s a government or a special agency or anything like that. How do they report their mileage to, and how do they figure out which roads they’re driving on or, or do they?

Mike Warren (12m 7s):
So there’s multiple options out there to report road use and they range from highly technical to even manual methods. You know, where some states, a motorist could go in as part of their annual smog check and have their odometer read and they just pay a ruck based on that change. In odometer readings, the most common solution is the OBD two plugin device or onboard diagnostic port plugin device. It’s a dongle, looks like the progressive snapshot that plugs into your diagnostics pour on your vehicle. It reports every Mile you drive. You can choose that option with or without a gps depending on, you know, if you want your location to be reported, it helps for out-of-state drivers or if we’re looking at variable per Mile rates between urban or suburban areas and having that differentiation certainly helps.

Mike Warren (12m 55s):
We’ve also explored options where you could use your cell phone. There’s a solution out there that allows you to take a picture of your otter at periodic intervals and that information is transmitted to what we call an account manager. The account manager’s, the one that’s responsible for collecting all the data, assessing the, assessing the R that’s owed, and then collecting those monies, aggregating those monies from all the users and then submitting those monies to the state. So what we have found is there’s third parties that do this, they do it on behalf of the states, so the state will contract with them to, you know, to do the account management for them. But what we have learned in our experience is these account managers provide, they don’t provide any personally identifiable information back to the state.

Mike Warren (13m 36s):
So no individual location, no individual driving habits, no behaviors, things like that. It’s just, you know, vehicle X drove X number of miles, here’s the amount of rock that’s, so

Jeff Wood (13m 46s):
That’s one of the three early pillars you talked about was privacy. You mentioned the collectors, but I’m curious, you know, is that something that really gets under people’s skin in terms of discussing this topic? I I, I imagine you’ve, you’ve heard a lot of different things from a lot of different people about it.

Mike Warren (13m 60s):
It certainly is. You know, we, we even have people come to us and talk to us about, you know, why should I get involved in this? You know, what data are you collecting? What type of information are you reporting on me? And we encourage people like that to sign up for pilot studies, participate in it, you know, see what information’s being collected. One information’s being collected by the account manager, one information is being provided to the state. And again, going back to that, participation breeds familiarity. Familiarity breeds acceptance. What we have found is our clients really have nothing to hide on this. It’s truly, we wanna fix a broken revenue system and here’s a way that we’re exploring to do it.

Jeff Wood (14m 39s):
Have you had folks come back to you and be like, oh, I changed my mind. This is really interesting and I hope that it goes forward.

Mike Warren (14m 46s):
What we find is most people who participate in pilots, their acceptance increases tenfold.

Jeff Wood (14m 51s):
And why is that? Just because they’ve practiced it, they’ve seen what they’ve been sending and they’re not worried about it.

Mike Warren (14m 56s):
They see what’s being collected, they see the information that’s being used and they see how that’s being used. And what they find is it’s not, it’s not the big scary monster that it was perceived to be.

Jeff Wood (15m 6s):
Another interesting idea, I think people have come up with, maybe it’s not so interesting, but you know, basically instead of a road user charge and kind of just replacing the gas tax as it stands, but with like an electron tax or something along those lines where you make people pay for the amount of energy that they’re using. I’m curious if that comes up in conversation as well.

Mike Warren (15m 23s):
It does actually. We’ve had clients that have explored, you know, comparing a, a ruck against a kilowatt hour charge, you know, against a charging tax. What we have found is, it’s certainly possible to be considered some of the issues that we’ve encountered is a lot of people charge from home. So being able to accurately report that information can be a challenge as someone charges their vehicle at home. The other thing that comes into play is how do you deal with out state motorists? You know, how do you deal with a vehicle that you know from California that drives up into Oregon or drives up into Washington State? You know, how do you address those things? So we’ve looked at kilowatt hour charging, it’s still a great topic to be explored, but we’re also looking at it with respect to a, you know, how those two can even play together for that matter.

Jeff Wood (16m 9s):
Have you found from some of this research that people change their driving behavior because of a road user charge?

Mike Warren (16m 14s):
Initially? They do initially and, and understand these are pilot studies, but what we have found is as people participate initially, there’s a lot of concern about reporting every Mile they drive and, and you know, do I really need, do I really need to drive to the grocery store? Do I really need to make that trip? What we found though is, is over time it just becomes, it becomes normal to people. Okay, well yeah, I really need to go to the grocery store. I’m not going to worry about the, the 2 cent per Mile charge to get there cuz I’m getting the motor fuel tax credited back to me.

Mike Warren (16m 54s):
So it’s, it initial reactions are rough and then as people start to participate it becomes a little bit easier to stop.

Jeff Wood (17m 1s):
Yeah, so one of the big discussions we have lately in, in our space in active transportation is the overall need to reduce V M T for, for climate change purposes and in order to reach all of our climate goals, our friends over at R M I in Boulder, I think near where you are basically have shown that this is the case. So we need other solutions and I’m, I’m wondering if road user charges are part of that toolkit of trying to reduce overall vmt.

Mike Warren (17m 23s):
It’s, so we have several clients that are exploring ruck as a congestion management tool or could you use pricing as a congestion mitigation tool? Could you use it, you know, to assign higher rates during peak period travel? Those are all policy levers that can be used. We have encouraged our clients don’t muddy the two, you know, understand that there is a need to create a sustainable revenue source. The per gallon funding model is antiquated and you know, while RU can certainly be used to manage congestion, mitigate emissions, improve environmental quality, you still have to create a sustainable, maintain transportation funding stream.

Mike Warren (18m 5s):
You know, what you don’t wanna do is you don’t want to reduce EMT to the expense of adding more potholes to your road or not, or being unable to repair those roadways.

Jeff Wood (18m 14s):
I’m curious about your phrase there, muddying the tube. Can you explain that a little bit more?

Mike Warren (18m 18s):
What we have found is the policy levers between rock and congestion pricing are very different. When we first started, rock Rock was originally intended to create a sustainable revenue stream for transportation that is predicated on a set vmt or predicated on vmt. As you start looking at congestion pricing, what you find is you have goals to reduce vmt, you know, so as long as you have clear goals and objectives upfront is to those two things, they can coexist, but you don’t wanna try to create a sustainable revenue stream all the while trying to reduce emt. Does that make sense?

Jeff Wood (18m 55s):
Kind of. I mean I, I personally would want to reduce driving from, from the perspective of most of my listeners. That’s something that I think is, is valuable in terms of trying to reduce emissions overall and you know, sprawl and those types of things. And so I appreciate the idea that it’s a policy lever that needs to be pulled, but it’s also something that if state dots are looking for specific revenue sources to be replacements, then maybe our goals are not aligned. And I think that’s probably the case with a lot of state dots and the folks maybe that listen to this show.

Mike Warren (19m 26s):
What we have found is we’re engaging MPOs, we’re engaging environmental advocacy groups. California Resource Board for example, they’re monitoring what’s going on with state R programs. They certainly are providing input into these state rock programs. What we’re finding is we want them to have an active voice. We want them to actually shape policy and work hand in hand with all the other stakeholders to create a sustainable revenue stream that either reduces VMT by moving people to Transit, it reduces emissions by increasing the number of electric vehicles on the road, but at the end of the day, it’s creating safer, less congested roadways.

Jeff Wood (20m 10s):
It’s interesting to compare. And CARB is another interesting case just because they’ve said even that there’s a need to reduce V M T, but then they’re gonna leave it up to everybody else to figure out how to do that, right? They’ve kind of passed the buck on that to a certain extent. But it’s also interesting when you think about California’s cap and trade program and how the more you reduce emissions each year, the prices go up and then eventually you’re gonna get rid of emissions and so you’re gonna run out of that revenue source, right? And so that’s an interesting kind of comparison that way in thinking about if you’re trying to reduce V M T and that means reduced revenue, does that mean higher prices or does that mean different taxes or you know, policy levers that you pull. And so I think that comparison also is kind of an interesting one too.

Mike Warren (20m 45s):
It certainly opens up the topic conversation. What we have found through all of our studies is communications is key and not just with the public. I, I think it’s, it’s creating a common set of language, a common set of understanding as to how transportation is funded and really getting the right goals and objectives to the table. Cause what you don’t want to do is you don’t wanna roll out a program and then have somebody have another group come in and say, oh, well what about this? Or what about this or what about this? You wanna, you wanna cast as wide net as possible in my opinion.

Jeff Wood (21m 14s):
I’m also interested from the insurance standpoint too. A lot of companies have started to do per Mile or at least low, low mileage policies for for users. And that’s really interesting. And we had actually David Heer on the show from the University of Sydney talking about this recently about Mobility as a feature and Mobility as a service, as a replacement. And he was discussing how it’s possible to create a suite of transportation options and promote sustainable and high capacity modes if everything was connected in the same system. And I feel like you all have had that kind of thought too, or at least been thinking along those lines, connecting insurance and Mobility writ large with the road user charge.

Mike Warren (21m 48s):
There are several states have explored what we call Mobility marketplace concept. And it’s really consolidating transportation services under a single platform where you can plan, reserve and pay for all of your transportation, all of your Mobility solutions, everything from tolling, parking, electric charging, ruck insurance, register, pay as you drive registration, all of these components under a single platform.

Jeff Wood (22m 11s):
It’s also interesting just because of the thinking from an insurance perspective, if you’re trying to say, not pay out as many claims, right? You’re gonna try to get more people to take active transportation or maybe get them on a bus or a train rather than drive their car more often. And so actually it makes sense to them to fold these in as incentives to promote other transportation modes than your car. You’re obviously gonna have a car if you live in certain parts of the country and you’re gonna use it, but then you can also incentivize ways for them to drive less. And I think that ties into the data that you all might collect and the, and then the information that you might get from a road user charge system.

Mike Warren (22m 47s):
Yeah, absolutely. I, I think what it really boils down to is better understanding how Mobility is being affected, understanding how pricing is affecting Mobility and then exploring what other options are out there. We did a study for a state where we explored all trips that were a Mile or less and we called it, you know, could they have taken Transit, could they have walked, could they have liked? And what we found was in exploring those trips, there were several intersections that they weren’t conducive for walking, they weren’t safe for, for pedestrians or there weren’t Transit routes that went by. So what we’re using is we’re using this information from these studies to help, to help better inform Transit planning, capacity planning on certain corridors, even emissions, you know, are there ways that we can alter trip patterns or alter time of day travel to help reduce emissions in certain communities.

Jeff Wood (23m 41s):
That’s interesting with what’s come up the pandemic and thinking about all of the work from home folks that more, you know, high income folks have been doing is that change in that switch in rush hour, the amount of congestion that’s actually happened in what time of day. I think that’s really fascinating to see how that impact has occurred and also what that means for any future research or actually policy that people might come up with.

Mike Warren (24m 2s):
Yeah, absolutely.

Jeff Wood (24m 3s):
What’s the most interesting thing about all of this to you? I mean, you’ve been doing it for such a long time. I’m curious if there’s something that really just get you excited or, or makes you think, wow, this is something that’s really on the edge of being super cool.

Mike Warren (24m 16s):
You know, I, with every state, with every new state I work with, it fascinates me the nuances of each state and even the nuances within each community. What we have found is, for example, we’re doing a study right now with rural and tribal communities and you know, how a could affect tribal communities and we’re finding some very interesting input from the tribes as to how a could affect them. I’ve also, you know, I geek out on the technology, so to me, finding ways we could use ruck technology to improve tolling, you know, to reduce tolling administrative fees or to help reduce congestion. We did a study in the Midwest where we actually explored assessing a ruck on an electric vehicle and ran it down a managed lane, determine if we could use the technology to determine what lane the vehicle was in and we could, so we started looking at could we use this per Mile methodology to support managed lanes, to support tolling, to support, like you said, uses based insurance and those types of mechanisms.

Mike Warren (25m 16s):
So, you know, there’s so many things that are exciting to this, but to me it’s meeting with these new clients, engaging stakeholders around the country, explaining what, this is obviously the, the initial reaction of the arms crossed and the furrow brow. But once you start explaining what it is you encourage people to participate in these initiatives. Seeing those, seeing those lights come on and saying, oh, this isn’t as bad as I thought it was gonna be.

Jeff Wood (25m 41s):
I imagine you’ve thought about the negative impacts too, maybe and what some of the nefarious things that state dots or, or folks could use with road user charges. I’m wondering if some of those have come across your, your platform.

Mike Warren (25m 52s):
No, I, you know, I think because it’s so new, you know, it’s still a relatively new concept. There really hasn’t been a lot of nefarious topics that have come up. You know, there, there’s obviously concerns about the type of data that the state collects and how they’re gonna use that information. What we have found is most people don’t understand how roads are funded. So the minute we start explaining how, how roads are funded, it becomes a question as to how the state is spending their tax dollars. And so then you start getting questions about inefficiencies and overlap and duality of services and things like that. But I, I think I, I wouldn’t say that’s necessarily nefarious, rather it’s just educating and it’s creating opportunities for the states to really disclose how they do things.

Jeff Wood (26m 38s):
That discussion about quote unquote double charging is, is I guess a, a really big deal now because the folks in New Jersey are really upset about, you know, and I know this is congestion pricing and not necessarily ruck, but folks in New Jersey are really worried about getting double charged and the few people that actually drive into Manhattan, which is a very low amount percentage wise. But I think, I feel like that’s a discussion that happens a lot when you talk about revenue and whether people are gonna get charged twice for something and whether if you know, you’re driving on a toll road and you’re paying a road user charge, are those things gonna overlap and are you gonna quote unquote double pay? And so I, I feel like that’s probably a big discussion you have too.

Mike Warren (27m 11s):
Its the first question that comes out is, am I going to be charged a per Mile charge plus the motor fuel tax? And you know, for a simple ruck program answer no, these account managers and and every account manager I’ve worked with clearly states this on the invoice they credit the, they credit the number of gallons consumed back times the motor fuel tax. So it shows as a credit on the invoice regarding whether someone pays, holds or pays any other types of charges. Again, that’s a policy lever. The ideal situation is you consolidate those charges under a single platform, but right now people are paying the gas tax to drive on a toll road already. So it’s not really a double tax, you’re just paying two fees, you’re paying one to operate your vehicle on a road and then you’re paying a premium to use that toll road.

Mike Warren (27m 53s):
Yeah,

Jeff Wood (27m 54s):
I, I feel like that’s an important thing to mention is that you’re paying premium to drive on a premium road because it might have, it might be a bypass of something or it might be a way to get to, you know, for example, we have tolls to get into San Francisco on the Bay Bridge and on the Golden Gate Bridge. And so that’s, you know, obviously that bridge is infrastructure. It needs to be maintained and, and so you’re gonna have to pay that in one form or fashion or another. Well, right now in San Francisco we also have a ton of electric self-driving vehicles running around and testing. And one of the negative impacts of these vehicles in, in, in the long run, in my opinion, is gonna be the zombie miles that they drive. And right now is all zombie miles too cause they’re not really carrying passengers and they’re just testing. And so currently to 10% of human driving is even zombie miles because as I think it was the fed’s research just showed that 10% of driving is actually searching for parking, circling around and looking for a place to park.

Jeff Wood (28m 42s):
So I’m wondering what the zombie miles, you know, if we do get to this autonomous future, which I’m obviously kind of skeptical of as well, but if we get to this autonomous future, we have zombie miles, how does that play into like a road user charge? Are, are they gonna be let off the hook or are they gonna be made to pay more because they’re creating more congestion? I guess that’s a policy question too. I’m curious about your thoughts about that potential future.

Mike Warren (29m 5s):
Sure, yeah, I, I’m talking about this strictly from an electric vehicle perspective. Obviously zombie miles with an emissions component and there’s a different play on that and I think there are ways that we can use technology to help people find parking spaces or to effectively go to a route instead of burning zombie miles trying to find a parking spot or trying to circle around the airport waiting for that ride. It’s certainly gonna be a topic of conversation. It’s certainly going to, where it should play is in the rate setting conversations, understand that there is going to be a per Mile charge and that per Mile charge is going to be assessed based on every Mile that’s traveled, regardless of whether it’s going to a destination or whether it’s circling around, you know, a central business district.

Mike Warren (29m 47s):
But how that rate’s set, those are really where those considerations lead come into play.

Jeff Wood (29m 52s):
What’s the tipping point for r and states and and at the federal level? What’s the thing that might actually bring more people on board?

Mike Warren (29m 59s):
Well I, I think it goes back to addressing those fir those three pillars that we started this conversation with. I think there’s a complexity component that needs to be addressed too. And what we have found is it’s really finding champions, whether it was in Oregon or Washington or Minnesota, all the states that are exploring these programs, legislative champions tend to gain, gain the most traction at the federal level. There’s been some tremendous legislative champions that have supported these initiatives. So to me that’s really gonna be key is finding those mouthpieces, finding those champions to set up and say this is a viable solution. Here’s all the work that’s been done to support it. Let’s explore this moving forward.

Mike Warren (30m 40s):
I, I dunno if you’re familiar with the national BMT trial that’s in the ija, that’s gonna be a great opportunity to showcase a lot of the accomplishments since been done around the country. I

Jeff Wood (30m 52s):
Was gonna ask you about kind of the most recent bills, the ija and then the Inflation Reduction Act and kind of how that’s impacted the discussion.

Mike Warren (30m 59s):
It’s definitely gaining some interest in states. Prior to this there was section 60 20 of the Fast Act, the Surface Transportation System Funding Alternatives grant. That certainly started the conversation. It was a six year 95 million grant program for states or groups of states to pilot ruck. And that actually, that opened the floodgates for these studies moving forward, the new state grant program and the national trial both offer opportunities for states to continue these studies. So, you know, that’s definitely the biggest, to me that’s breaking down the biggest hurdle is putting funding out there, putting opportunities out there for these clients to start studying what it would look like and everything from educating their public all the way through doing trials and and doing analysis.

Jeff Wood (31m 45s):
What’s next for you all?

Mike Warren (31m 46s):
You know, i I, I think the future’s bright, frankly. You know, we’re starting to look at how collecting real money affects driver behavior. How those monies, how ruck dollars would be collected, deposited and allocated. Are there federal systems like IFTA for example, that could support, you know, this type of process? On the technology front, it’s, it’s continuing to explore ways that we could use this technology to improve safety, to integrate with other data sources. On the education front, it’s, it’s really just continuing to reiterate the messages, how transportation is funded, understanding that the gas tax, there’s some, there’s a lot of elegance in the gas tax cause it’s been around for so long.

Mike Warren (32m 29s):
People put gasoline in their car and they don’t even think about that. It’s tied directly to road use. So we’re having to reeducate people on how that happens, how those funds are used. So long answer to a short question, I, I think the big thing for us is there’s a lot of opportunity for us to continue working with states to promote the concept and then starting to bring some of these examples forward on a national stage.

Jeff Wood (32m 55s):
Awesome. Well where can folks find more information about road user chargers or the work that you all are doing?

Mike Warren (32m 59s):
Yeah, absolutely. It’s www dot WSP do com and then if you search for road usage charge, we have a lot of information up there on a lot of the work. We’ve done a lot of the case studies that we’ve developed. But that’s www dot WSP dot com slash enus slash services slash road usage charging, or the best way to do, it’s just Google road usage charging WSP

Jeff Wood (33m 23s):
To get you guys a Bitly link. Yeah,

Mike Warren (33m 25s):
Exactly.

Jeff Wood (33m 26s):
Well, Mike, thanks for joining us. We really appreciate your time.

Mike Warren (33m 29s):
That was great, Jeff. Thank you so much.