DALLAS -- States will test innovative ways to pay for highways with $14.2 million from the first round of federal grants that seek a long-term alternative to the gasoline tax as the main source of transportation funding.
The Federal Highway Administration said Tuesday that it will fund eight projects with the initial grants for user-fee related alternatives authorized in 2015's Fixing America's Surface Transportation (FAST) Act.
The eight projects will test-drive a variety of revenue options, including onboard vehicle technologies that allow the state to charge a fee based on miles traveled as well as multistate approaches to road user charges.
The alternative funding grants will increase to $20 million per year in fiscal years 2017 through 2020.
The grants will allow states to experiment on sustainable ways to maintain the long-term solvency of the federal Highway Trust Fund, said Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx.
"Reliable funding is essential to ensuring we have a sound transportation system to support the economy," Foxx said. "More investment in transportation in greatly needed, and we must find new solutions to prepare for the travel demands of the nation's growing population."
Several of the states will evaluate the reliability and security of the technologies involved in mileage-based fees, said FHWA director Gregory Nadeau. All eight projects will face challenges to implementation of road user fees, including privacy concerns, he said.
Hawaii will receive the largest grant, with $4 million for a per-mile fee with manual and automatic odometer readings at designated inspection stations.
The Washington State Department of Transportation will use its $3.8 million grant to test a multi-jurisdictional revenue collection system in regions where state and local governments could levy separate user fees.
Delaware's DOT will serve as the lead for the five states involved in the I-95 Corridor Coalition's user fee program funded with a $1.5 million grant. Volunteer drivers in Pennsylvania, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Delaware, and Vermont will test a system of on-board mileage counters.
The five states said in their grant application that gasoline tax collections haven't kept up with expenditures as vehicles become more fuel efficient and some new models don't need gasoline at all.
"This means vehicles are traveling farther for the same amount of gas and the associated fuel tax, with some vehicles [electric cars] not paying anything for their use of the roadway," they said.
Oregon DOT will receive two of the FHWA's user-fee grants.
Oregon will use a $2.1 million grant to improve its existing vehicle-miles-traveled OreGO fee system. ODOT will work with the Western Road User Charge Consortium to develop a regional road user fee system with a separate $1.5 million grant.
The Oregon program is a fully operational system with 1,263 vehicles enrolled since it began in July 2015, said ODOT assistant director Travis Brouwer.
Participants pay 1.5 cents per mile rather than the state fuel tax of 30 cents per gallon. The information is collected by private vendors, which bill the motorists directly.
"We've learned how to run a road usage charge system using private sector partners, which no other state has done before," said Brouwer. "Leveraging the private sector makes the per-mile charge concept viable by injecting choice and innovation into the system."
State lawmakers who created the Oregon program were careful to include privacy provisions in the enabling legislation, said ODOT spokesman Tom Fuller.
Motorists participating in the OreGO program have several mileage recording options, but 75% use a GPS-based system, he said.
Strict privacy protections in the state's VMT law ensures that vehicles are never tracked, he said.
"Volunteers tell us they like the extra services and vehicle information they get with the GPS options," he said.
