I have been researching the Road Usage Charge Pilot Project for about a year and am now a participant. The Pilot is a simulation of what it would be like to be taxed for every mile we drive, rather than for every gallon of gas we purchase at the pump.

It has been about two weeks since I installed a GPS-enabled device in my car to track my mileage, the most invasive of the five methods of collection I was able to choose from (none of which were palatable).

I’ve learned a couple things about the program in the last couple weeks, the most notable being that I am, apparently, a terrible driver. It has been surprising to see that not only is my mileage collected, but my driving patterns are evaluated and scored based on braking, acceleration, cornering and speed.

Just in the last two weeks, the transponder reported to a connected app on my phone that I drove above the speed limit 176 times. I did something called “harsh cornering” four times, and hard braking twice. Each time I crossed over 60 miles per hour was counted as speeding (or a separate violation).

So, if you are a reckless driver going 80 miles per hour for 15 straight minutes, the app marks this as a single violation. If you are a careful driver and you fluctuate between 58 to 68 miles per hour, you could accrue many violations in a single trip.

As a simple exercise, I decided to see what 176 speeding violations might equate to in traffic tickets if this information were to be used by the Washington State Patrol (and, to be fair, the Washington State Transportation Commission has said it won’t be). However, if this were the case, and traffic citations could be issued based on the information collected from my car - I would owe roughly $20,240 just for speeding violations in two weeks of driving.

A few assumptions are made. I am assuming tickets would be filed against the registered vehicle owner, as they are with red light cameras (I am both owner and driver of my vehicle). Additionally, my speeding is in the mid-60’s. In Washington, for posted speed limits faster than 40 miles per hour, going 1-5 miles per hour over the speed limit is a $105 ticket, while going 6-10 miles per hour over the limit is $125. I used the average ticket amount - $115 – in my calculation.

For now, this is all theory. The Washington State Transportation Commission’s executive director says “the state is not collecting [the] additional data…and the private company is not allowed to collect or share it during the pilot either.”  But, as she also points out, “in official practice…lawmakers would have to decide if and how that data could be used.”

That it is open for debate whether lawmakers could choose to leverage private travel data for different purposes unrelated to mileage collection naturally raises red flags. In Washington state, we are all too familiar with politicians making promises, and changing their minds later.