A pilot program for Kansas.

CDM Smith | Pilot Study

The gas tax, hidden in plain sight.

For over 100 years, drivers in the US have been contributing to highway infrastructure through a “gas tax.” At gas stations across the country, customers pay an average of 29.15 cents per gallon of gasoline or diesel in taxes—it’s embedded in the price at the pump, so most people aren’t aware of it. The gas tax, managed individually by each state, has been a vital source of funding to build and maintain their roads.

Though the roads are still dominated by fossil-fuel powered vehicles currently, electric car ownership has climbed astronomically in the last 5 years, and the fuel efficiency of new cars is better than ever. These trends are positive for the environment, but they present a conundrum: If states continue to rely on funding tied to gasoline usage, eventually, the fund may not have enough money in it to adequately pay for highway infrastructure and repairs.

Through user experience research, Teague has helped investigate the future of transportation funding with a right-sized approach to individual states.

Given this issue, transportation agencies around the country have taken the initiative to research and develop alternative approaches to the gas tax system. One of the alternative approaches considered is the Road Usage Charge model (RUC), a pay-per-mile system that treats roads similar to public utilities, regardless of vehicle type.

Over the past five years, Teague’s researchers and designers have collaborated with CDM Smith and their State Departments of Transportation clients across the US to better understand the potential of a RUC replacing the gas tax. Through user experience research, Teague has helped investigate the future of transportation funding with a right-sized approach to individual states.

Our work with the Kansas Department of Transportation (KDOT), for example, was a qualitative research project that utilized user-centered design to give voice to Kansans who may be impacted by a RUC program in the future. KDOT leadership understood that their residents perspectives on road usage and funding should be heard, respected, and incorporated into any future RUC pilot design. CDM Smith brought in Teague to conduct the pre-pilot research; collecting and synthesizing Kansans viewpoints into actionable information that KDOT then used to create a customized, user-centered RUC pilot focused on local needs.

APPROACH

User-centered design in the field.

Research Strategy

We began with a series of strategy workshops with KDOT stakeholders to align on objectives and strategy before starting research activities. This collaboration was used to define and prioritize two seemingly simple but critical aspects of the research effort: “What should we learn?” and “Who should we learn from?”

Research Design

Teague believes that research itself should be designed to generate rich user perceptions and thus maximize the quantity and quality of data we gather. We developed a toolkit for participants to design their ideal version of RUC policy step-by-step. While we knew participants won’t be experts at policy design, they are experts at what they want and the environments in which they live. The intent of this “build-your-own-policy” approach was to better understand their underlying assumptions, concerns and individual priorities that can sometimes be hard to articulate otherwise.

Ethnographic Research

For two weeks straight, Teague’s research team drove over 2000 miles—through every corner of the state—to meet research participants. Kansans warmly welcomed us into their houses, farms, and trucking business offices. Over the course of each 90-minute interview, we had the privilege of listening and observing how Kansans perceive and engage with current transportation policy and how they might engage with a RUC.

Our team wrapped up field research with 63 hours of video and 2,335 observations to synthesize and report back to KDOT.

Solution

Robust research leads to great design.

After analyzing all the research data from the field alongside prior research we have done in other parts of the country, Teague provided KDOT a comprehensive report. The report summarized several perspectives from the research that are representative of Kansans' views toward a RUC program. The report also offered evidence-based insights and actionable recommendations, some of them contrary to what we expected to find at the outset. KDOT shared these research findings with key stakeholders and integrated them into a pilot program deployed in 2024 to gather feedback from Kansans on the specifics of how a RUC program might be implemented.

By investing in robust user research before launching a pilot, KDOT has mitigated risk, heard directly from Kansans to understand their values to support a pilot program, laid the groundwork for efficient integration with their existing systems, and ensured a more intuitive user experience. User insights gathered from Kansans put KDOT in a better position to approach RUC from a midwest perspective and establish the core experience requirements for a pilot that would best meet the needs of their traveling public.

TEAGUE + CDM SMITH

About the partnership.

Kansas was not our first RUC project, nor our last—through our CDM Smith partnership, we've helped design, prototype, and test the future customer experience for state DOT clients and their constituents across the country. Together with CDM Smith, Teague has directly supported RUC pilot research and design in Hawaii, Utah, Washington, and Kansas—and thanks to an early collaboration with RUC America—we have collectively advised over one third of the United States.