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Because of concern about the declining purchasing power of gas tax revenue due to inflation, public opposition to tax increases, and the improved fuel efficiency of new vehicles, the 2001 Oregon legislature created the Road User Fee Task Force (RUFTF) to make recommendations for a potential replacement for the gasoline tax. This paper estimates the distributional impact of the statewide vehicle miles traveled (VMT) fee policy proposed by the RUFTF on individuals with different incomes and residential locations. The methodology employs both vehicle ownership and type choice models and regression-based vehicle use models. This allows an examination of both short- and long-run responses from the affected households. The measures of the distributional impact of the proposed VMT fee include changes in consumers’ surplus, fee-collection agency revenue totals, and overall welfare changes by income and location groups. The results show that the distributional effects of a $0.012/mi flat VMT fee are not significant in either the short or long run and suggest that distributional concerns should not be a hindering factor in the future implementation of the proposed VMT fees.

Empirical analysis of the motor carrier industry pre-and postregulatory reform reveals that deregulation resulted in signijicant changes in firm production structure and lower real average costs.Translog cost functions for firms operating in 1977 and 1983 were estimated and compared for "other specialized commodity" carriers. Fitted average costs were computed from these func- tions. The results indicate significant diflerences in the cost functions and real costs that cannot be attributed to technological changes but rather suggest e@ciency gains. The results also suggest that it is inappropriate to predict outcomes of deregulation using empirical analyses of firms in the regulated environment.* Assistant Professor, Colorado State University, and Associate Professor, Oregon State University. We thank John Tschirhart, David Glyer, Frank Wykoff, anonymous referees, and conference participants at the 1986 and 1987 WEA meetings for helpful suggestions. All errors are the responsibility of the authors.

Sponsoring Agency Code Supplementary Notes AbstractThis report reviews the existing state of the art and also the state of the practice of freight performance measurement. Most performance measures at the state level have aimed at evaluating highway or transit infrastructure performance with an emphasis on passenger transportation. Freight performance measurement ultimately requires evaluation of performance of the entire freight transportation system, which includes highways, waterways, rail, air, and modal connections. This requires considerable expansion of thinking beyond the traditional focus of state Departments of Transportation (DOTs) on highway performance. This project builds upon past and current work in the area of freight performance measurement and incorporates recent literature on the development of these measures. A thorough review of state practices is conducted by surveying state DOT web sites and reporting on the measures most frequently recommended and used by individual states for planning purposes. The emphasis is on the application of performance measures to freight transportation, and the usefulness and limitations of these measures, is discussed.Recommendations are made for potential freight performance measures for each freight mode (air, rail, trucking, and water/marine), including initial information on data availability, validity, and feasibility given existing data for Oregon.Future research needs discussed include additional data collection and development required to support performance measures, what is needed to track system performance changes over time, and testing of measures for their sensitivity and usefulness for policy and decision-making.

Motor carrier, market power, regulation reform,