Officials in Oregon saw the problem coming years ago: Fuel-efficient cars and electric vehicles would spell disaster for a state reliant on gas taxes to pay for road repairs.

So they asked some drivers to pony up at the pump in a different way. In 2007, they launched a pilot project involving 300 motorists, who had GPS devices installed in their vehicles to record miles driven. Whenever they filled up, the drivers would pay an additional fee of about one cent per mile travelled, based on the device’s information.

A system like this appeared on the short-list of ideas released Tuesday to help fund Metrolinx’s plan for beefed-up transit and reduced congestion. The transportation agency is considering a charge of 3 cents per kilometre, which could generate up to $1.9 billion in revenue per year, according to a report prepared for the agency by AECOM and KPMG .

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Some experts say charging by kilometre travelled is a good idea because it asks people who use the roads most to pay the most — and encourages transit use, too. But its combination of increased monitoring with a new fee is politically unpalatable.

“In the long term — we’re talking about (decades) from now — this would absolutely be the right tool for charging users for what they’re getting,” said Benjamin Dachis, an analyst with the C.D. Howe Institute, a policy think-tank. The challenge, “first and foremost, is public acceptance of it.”

How exactly the system would work is unclear, as the agency is still in the early process of figuring it out, said John Howe, vice-president of investment strategy and project evaluation at Metrolinx.

“We assume a variable rate system based on factors such as time of day, level of real-time congestion, route selected and type of vehicle. This would require a GPS-based vehicle tracking and charging system,” he said.

It’s an idea Bern Grush has long advocated . Grush is the mind behind Skymeter, a company once devoted to metering road usage, but now in receivership. You might chalk that up to the politics of the concept.

“I’ve been at this for 10 years and there have been so many reports,” said Grush. “There’s been a huge inability of almost any government anywhere to actually make progress in this area.”

The technology worked, but proposing to put it into practice was a political hornets’ nest. Now he focuses on using the technology to help administer parking costs — something he says is less politically volatile.

Grush, who said he holds patents for these GPS devices, noted there is a potential for them to violate privacy, but that can be prevented by design.

“The device itself doesn’t report anything to anyone unless it’s been set up to do that,” he said. It’s possible to design a GPS device that would calculate distance and location, then submit only a dollar figure to the billing authority.

In the Oregon pilot, more people accepted the system if they were given options for metering, said James Whitty, a state manager involved in both pilots.

The original program made drivers install a government-issued GPS device. The second pilot featured a tiered system with three payment options:

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Drivers pay a single per-kilometre rate and have their odometer checked periodically. Drivers install a GPS device and pay a variable rate depending on where they were driving. Drivers pay a single flat-rate fee, designed to lighten the load for heavy users.

The pilot showed the tiered system was preferred, but Whitty is still cautious when asked about the potential for implementing the idea more broadly. It’s still being piloted in Oregon and hasn’t been put into legislation.

“The momentum is increasing, is what I see,” he said. “Once people understand that the public has to be comfortable with this and they have to provide mechanisms that the public accepts, then you’ve got a better chance of passing legislation.”

Some countries charge fees to heavy vehicles per kilometre travelled, but nowhere has a blanket provision been applied to passenger vehicles, Whitty said.

A per-kilometre fee is just one in Metrolinx’s short-list of 11 “revenue tools” that could help generate $2 billion a year in funding for the Big Move transportation plan. It got little attention from civic leaders, most of whom reacted positively to the short-list in general but focused on the unsuitability of another proposal: higher property taxes.

Toronto Mayor Rob Ford responded to Tuesday’s announcement with a retching noise and suggested casinos are the answer to the need for transit funding.

Metrolinx’s final investment strategy is slated to be released June 1.

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