WSDOT defends GPS tracking for pay-per-mile proposal

KTTH’s Todd Herman says he will never comply with putting a GPS in his car so that the state can track his driving and force him to pay per mile. In fact, he finds the idea offensive.

“It makes me feel like my government considers me a possession, a box to be tracked,” he said.

Lynn Peterson, Executive Director of WSDOT, explained to Herman why the state is considering a GPS-type option as a long-term replacement for the gas tax, but noted “we’re not there yet.”

A 25-member panel has been studying the idea of having people pay for the miles they drive rather than pay a gas tax.
Peterson said that each driver needs to pay his or her fair share for causing wear on the state’s roads, and, right now, that’s not happening. She said the state is looking into different ways of figuring out the actual mileage people drive and one option is to look at the tactic used by car insurance companies that provide a plugin that record a driver’s usage.

She said those plugins don’t record your place and time, but instead how much you drive, your average speed, etc. People are willing to use those devices in order to potentially reduce their insurance rates.

But Herman said that a GPS, by nature, would also be tracking where a driver is at all times.

“You don’t want to charge people for driving into Idaho, so it would have to keep track of where you are,” he said.

“It keeps track of the moment in time but it doesn’t keep it in its databases,” Peterson responded. “There’s a difference between keeping it for the long-term and tracking you like Strava, or any of those other apps that you actually want because you’re a fitness freak. It doesn’t actually keep track for the route or the time it just says here is the mileage. That’s just one form of being able to do this and the states that are moving forward and testing this, they’re looking for other ways to do that.”

But what about the people like Herman who will never use such a device? Peterson said the best way is for the WSDOT to continue thinking about these issues from the customers’ standpoint, and not just looking at it as vehicles on the road.

“The idea is to give you a choice,” she said. “So if you were going to move to a road user fee, what would you like to use. Here are the five different ways that you can do this. Choose one and move forward.”