DALLAS – The advent of self-driving cars on American highways holds the potential to significantly reshape how transportation infrastructure is funded, according to autonomous vehicle experts at The Bond Buyers Transportation Financing/P3 conference.
High-tech vehicles that are on the way will capture tremendous amounts of data as they maneuver about, including details on how many miles they travel and other potentially valuable information, said Paul Lewis, vice president of policy and finance at the Eno Center for Transportation.
"There is a huge potential for a vehicle-miles-traveled revenue system to replace the gasoline tax," he said. "That's been the dream of transportation policy folks for a long time, and this technology could be the answer. Everything we see points ahead for a realistic approach to VMT."
One of the main roadblocks for a VMT revenue model that could replace the gasoline tax has been the apparent need to obtain the fee from millions of individual motorist rather than few hundred wholesale gasoline distribution points, Lewis said.
This may be resolved by levying a per-mile fee through the technology providers, he said.
"Google or Tesla or whomever would need to collect data continuously from thousands or even millions of vehicles," Lewis said. "Google knows where the cars have been. States or the federal government could levy a fee of 1 cent per mile, get it from Google, and then Google would pass along that cost to consumers as an administrative charge."
States also could turn into revenue the information they capture from roadside sensors and other infrastructure technology required by autonomous vehicles, said Matt Smith, intelligent systems technology administrator at the Michigan Department of Transportation.
"There's a need for a new type of business model to make use of this very valuable data, and public-private partnerships could be developed that could package that information into something useful," he said.
"Autonomous vehicles will create an even bigger demand for better roads and bridges," Lewis said. "We need to take an extremely critical look at alternative revenue sources."
Registration fees that are a significant revenue source for most state transportation agencies could be in peril if Americans need fewer vehicles, Smith said.
"You won't need three or four vehicles per family," he said. "One autonomous vehicle would be enough, because most of the time a car sits idle 20 or more hours each day. That's going to be a great change for the automobile industry, and they realize that."
The ability of the car of the future to operate with only sporadic attention from the driver and with the capability to communicate with other vehicles on the road could reduce congestion by putting more cars into a limited space than can be accommodated now, said James Kuhr, a research associate with the Austin Center for Transportation, a unit of the University of Texas.
Other potential benefits are promising, he said.
"Our studies indicate that self-driving cars could reduce roadway accidents by 80%," he said.
The Office of Management and Budget is currently considering a rule proposed by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration that all vehicles made after 2025 be fully equipped with the hardware needed to communicate with other vehicles, Kuhr said.
The head of the NHTSA told members of a House Commerce subcommittee on Nov. 15 that the widespread use of self-driving cars will take several decades.
"We're a ways off," said NHTSA administrator Mark Rosekind. "In the last six months, people are realizing how hard that is." Mitch Bainwol, president of the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, cited a report by Moody's Investors Service that said it will take until 2045 for self-driving cars to outnumber conventional vehicles.
"It's around the corner, but deployment is going to take two generations," he said.
