ALBANY—According to Chris Ward, the former executive director of Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, transportation planners searching for ways to plug multi-billion dollar holes in their capital plans need to think about cell phones.

“More and more of transportation is going to have to be linked to personal technology and the ability to make pricing decisions. … One person, one vote, one single paradigm to make a pricing decision, and I also think it’s about a growing sense among Americans [that] if I know what I’m paying for, if I know what I’m getting, I’m willing to pay for it,” Ward said during a speech last week. “I was really skeptical about this, but I do think we’ve reached the point where road utilization and vehicle miles traveled, given the amount of personal technology, and not just the E-Z Pass but our phones themselves, are going to create an opportunity for a whole new pricing structure.”

It would work something like this: An application would turn your cell phone into a tracking system, activated whenever you drove and logging how far you traveled. That data would then be sent to the relevant government entity, which would impose a tax for the number of miles traveled, possibly with variable prices depending on the time of day.

Ward was concluding a generally dour 45-minute address to more than 100 transportation officials, lobbyists and planners organized by the Empire Center for Public Policy, a fiscally conservative Albany think tank that until recently was the Capitol beachhead of the Manhattan Institute.

Ward says he only arrived at his prescription came after a lack of progress on other proposed solutions, including the Move NY plan, a variation on congestion pricing schemes of the past.

The brainchild of former city traffic commissioner Sam Schwartz, Move NY would impose tolls on East River bridges and also reduce the fare on crossings elsewhere in the outer boroughs. It has won the backing of the Automobile Club of New York as well as the state’s Motor Trucking Association.

“The ideas of restructuring these tolls now have, under the Move NY plan, a way of politically dealing with some of the opposition,” Ward said. “So the Move NY plan is beginning to gain momentum among stakeholders—particularly people on Staten Island—but I think it’s lacking the key political support it would need.”

He was similarly skeptical about public-private partnerships that are “a form of financing, not funding,” and the idea that officials could raise tolls again on bridges operated by either the Port Authority, Metropolitan Transportation Authority or the New York State Thruway Authority’s Tappan Zee replacement project.

These ideas are better suited to “greenfield … regions that do not have a mature fee or toll structure,” he said.

“As a mechanism to extract wealth … we appear to have hit a ceiling, and elected officials and the public have similarly reached the point where they no longer see it as a democratic way to raise revenue. Clearly, the dilemma Governor Cuomo faces with the Tappan Zee Bridge is that on the micro level, the mid-Hudson Valley has experienced below-market tolls for a long time, and on the macro level, the Thruway can no longer afford to cross-subsidize from the rest of the system to fund the bridge,” he said. “We have to acknowledge that the very thing that made the M.T.A. and the Port Authority strong—which was its toll and fare structure—is probably, likely coming to an end. The amount of incremental increases you can get will be vastly out-stripped by their capital needs.”

The idea of a vehicle mile tax is not entirely new, but hasn’t been the subject of serious discussion in New York.

In Oregon, officials are asking for volunteers to test a system that would track their driving by G.P.S., or diary, or odometer, charge them 1.5 cents per miles and rebate them what they spend on gasoline taxes.

The rise of dynamically priced systems like Uber, Ward said, show people’s willingness to pay based on congestion, and the availability of alternatives in the metropolitan area—commuter trains, subways, buses and even ferries—should blunt some arguments against the inequities of the system.

“Ironically, having been somewhat down on innovation in the Northeast, I do think it will be cities like New York were these schemes can be effectively implemented,” he said. “The reason why is because there are so many transportation alternatives to keep the pricing real. Paying for monopoly service, like a single roadway, is not a pricing decision. But not driving to work, and taking the subway, is.”

“The technology is clearly there,” he concluded. “Newer generations are more and more comfortable with the concept and it has the foundation of a personal pricing decision that is made [by us], not for us.”

© 2014 Capital New York