A
citizen who is active in subregional
transportation and land-use issues recently
asked, “What about the commuter tax?”
Here is how a fair and equitable tax on
commuting fits among the strategies to create a
sustainable future.
The
overarching goal must be to create sustainable
human settlement patterns that support a
prosperous, safe region.
This means creating Balanced
Communities. By
definition, Balanced
Communities have a relative
balance of jobs, housing, services,
recreation and amenity.
A balance of jobs and housing means there
would be few traditional “commuters.”
So!
Let’s create tax-based incentives to
reduce commuting.
To help achieve Balanced Communities and
vastly reduce the need to commute, the four
entities listed below should share responsibility
in the National Capital Subregion:
The
following summary of who should pay what to whom
may seem complex.
However, creating Balanced Communities is
a complicated task.
Citizens and their representatives need
to start solving the core problems rather than
patch over deficits with new taxes and other
stop-gap remedies.
Reducing
the commuting problem to help create Balanced
Communities in the National Capital Subregion
will be far easier than living with the
consequences of current practices.
The citizens of the subregion cannot
continue to do things the way they have been
done and hope to resolve the economic, social
and physical impact of dysfunctional human
settlement patterns.
As Will
Rodgers noted, doing the same thing over and
over and expecting a different result is an sign
of insanity.
Jurisdictions
An
equitable commuter tax would be structured to
encourage all communities to become more
balanced. If
communities were balanced, the location-variable
services that citizens must have to achieve a
quality life would cost much less.
Over time, there would be fewer
traditional commuters, and the commuter tax
would
revert from a revenue source to a reminder of
why communities must be balanced.
The
largest commuter tax burden should fall on the
jurisdictions which have a surplus of jobs
over housing accessible to job
holders.
Communities
with more jobs than housing should pay a
commuter tax to those communities with an
abundance of housing and paucity of jobs.
The concept is similar to the luxury tax
in the National Basketball Association: It
levels the playing field.
Communities with more housing than
jobs now are forced to provide residential
services for those with excess jobs and
insufficient housing.
The
goal of all jurisdictions should be to create
Balanced Communities by matching jobs with
housing and providing quality services,
recreation and amenities for all who live, work
and seek services in the community.
This will be a relative balance,
and there will always be some cross-boundary
movement, but the goal should be to achieve a
balance, not compensate for imbalance.
Overcoming
transport dysfunction (aka, imbalance) that
results from random distribution of jobs and
housing cannot be overcome by building new
transport facilities. (See
“Too
Little, Too Late,” December 23, 2002, and
“Access
and Mobility,” June 30, 2003.) The
National Capital Subregion’s jobs/housing
imbalance starts in the Federal District, which
has the greatest disparity.
However, there are imbalances that should
be addressed throughout the Subregion.
A
fair commuter tax would mean that a community such as
North Arlington (the Rosslyn-Ballston Corridor
is the core of this community) would pay
communities such as West Prince William
(Manassas is the core of this community) to help
cover costs such as education, fire and police,
etc., for those who work in North Arlington but
must live and seek services elsewhere such as in
West Prince William.
The tax would generate significant
revenue flow from North Arlington to West Prince
William only until North Arlington created the
housing necessary for it to qualify as a
balanced community.*
Federal
Government
When
we consider the commuter tax that the municipal
government in federal District of Columbia is
currently suggesting, it turns out that this
jurisdiction has many more jobs than houses for individuals who work in the
jurisdiction. So, why are those in the District
raising the commuter tax issue?
Municipal
officials in the federal district are calling
for the opposite of a fair and equitable
commuter tax. The
federal district’s commuter tax proposal
would reinforce dysfunctional job and housing
relationships.
The municipal government in the
District of Columbia needs money because the federal
government does not pay the taxes and fees for
federal facilities and workplaces that a private
corporation would. To add insult to injury, the federal
government also provides free or subsidized
parking for many of its employees, which
encourages them to rely on single-occupant
vehicles.
Some
federal agencies now support shared-vehicle and
telework programs.
An active program should be mandatory for
the entire federal government.
Penalties should be assessed if an agency
program falls under X percent of workers who
live outside the community in which they work.
In
addition, under federal management (aka, federal
oversight), the federal District of Columbia has
become a place where a few very rich and a lot
of not-so-rich people live.
The current spectrum of residents is inadequate
to support Balanced
Communities in the federal district.
Federal "oversight" has
resulted in some of the most unbalanced
communities in the United States. Places such as
these have very high service demands and high
service costs. Thus,
the federal district’s municipal officials are
calling for a new tax.
The
sorts of folks needed to create Balanced
Communities in the federal district have been
leaving for six decades in order to find
acceptable places to live. They will not come
back until education, fire and police, health
care, parks, potholes, pollution, rats and
politics are fixed, and there is an equitable
distribution of costs and benefits for those
living there. Many
workers are unable to find suitable housing in
the federal district because the costs are too
high and/or housing does not exist due to
municipal misallocations of land and fiscal
resources.
In
the context of eliminating commuters, Joe
Passonneau, a nationally respected
transportation facility designer, cites a 1944
Federal study that advocated keeping houses
close to jobs in the federal district.
The study was ignored while another 1944
Federal study advocating an “interregional”
(sic) highway system was implemented in 1956.
Many former residents of the federal district
now rely upon the Interstate (nee, interregional)
expressway system to
commute from new homes far from their jobs.
A
partial solution is for the federal government
to provide the federal district’s municipal
government with a more equitable payment in lieu
of taxes and fees.
The federal government also should pay an
annual liquidated damages penalty to compensate
for its bad oversight in the past.
These payments would be made only if the
federal district’s municipal government agrees
to pay its share of a fair and equitable
National Capital Subregional commuter tax
program. (The
alternative would be for the Federal government
to help the whole region switch to a tax system
based on consumption and user fees.)
A
significant amount of the federal payment to the
federal district’s municipal government would
go to communities which currently are forced
to house and service the federal workers but do not have a revenue stream sufficient to
pay for the services they require. Core
communities within the federal district would
pay the jurisdictions now faced with servicing
their workers.
The
communities that are all or partly located
within the federal district would use the rest
of the enhanced federal payments to do the
things that are required to make those
communities desirable places to live and seek
services as well as to work.
If they
addressed the problems listed above, more people
would want to live and seek services in
the communities within the federal district --
leading to a greater balance within these
communities.
One
of the significant problems associated with
creating Balanced Communities in the
District of Columbia is that those in control of
the federal district –- both in Congress and
in the municipal government -– could not be
more satisfied with the status quo.
After all, they now are in control.
Many who hold leadership positions in the
Federal District want more money to do what they want to do. That does not
include assisting in the evolution of Balanced
Communities.
Fundamental change would benefit all
the citizens but not the current
“leadership.”
Employers
The
next group to whom a commuting tax would apply
are large companies whose employees commute outside the community in
single-occupant vehicles.
Taxing
employers will encourage them to locate new jobs in
communities with adequate housing, hire
workers who live close to the job locations, and
encourage employees to support shared-vehicle and
telework programs.
One
action that employers could take immediately
would be to eliminate subsidies of free parking.
This subsidy, in effect, lowers the wages of those
who now walk, bike or use shared-vehicle systems
to get to work.
Commuters
Finally,
some individual commuters would be taxed.
Before that can happen, however, there
need to be significant changes in public policy
and programs so that citizens have realistic
alternatives to long-distance commutes. This is especially true for those who
work in the core of the National Capital
Subregion.
To
implement a fair tax directly on individual
commuters, there must first be a region-wide
land-use and transportation plan. This plan must balance
transportation-system capacity with land-use
travel demand. An important element of this regional
plan would be detailed strategies to create a
balance between METRO station-area land uses and
the METRO rail system’s capacity. Under current conditions, many METRO
station areas are wasted with vacant and
underutilized land including parking lots and
uncovered roadways. For this reason, the METRO system’s
station-area land uses do not balance with the
transit-system capacity.
Proof of this condition is that while
some METRO trains are overcrowded at some times,
most trains leave most stations most of the time
essentially empty.
With
these substantial changes in place, it would be
possible to tax single-occupant-vehicle
commuters who travel over ‘X’ miles.
In addition, the tax could be broadened
to cover workers who hold jobs outside the
community where they live and do not use
available shared-vehicles systems to get to
work.