How should we pay for highways?
The question of how to pay for highways has been floating below the surface of the debate on transportation and infrastructure, or the lack of it, over the last couple of years. The problem is simple and twofold. The principal mechanism to pay for highways today is the gas tax, both federal and state. Problem a: the federal gas tax has been the same since 1993, 18.6 cents. Unsurprisingly, that has meant that there is less and less money every year since inflation has been roaring in construction since then. So the net effect is that 18.6 cents go substantially less far today than 1993. It took a while for this to become a problem because there is a budgetary mechanism called the Highway Trust Fund where that 18.6 cents has been deposited for all of these years. As long as the trust fund took in more than it paid out, no problem. But Congress since 1993 has steadily increased transportation spending, without raising taxes to pay, thereby slowing draining the trust fund. Problem b: exacerbating the problem is that people are driving less and buying more fuel efficient cars. Therefore less money is coming into the highway trust fund than ever.
So what to do?
Well the easy answer is to raise the gas tax. Overall, this is the best idea both because it raises the revenue, and taxes a fuel that causes global warming. But there are even more reasons to want to raise the gas tax. Because it taxes behavior that causes sprawl and bad planning. So its an all around win. Except for that group of the population that believes that they should be able to continue to get better infrastructure and more government services without paying higher taxes. They are called Republicans. And they have so scared the democrats regarding taxes that the democrats are now completely scared of offering any new taxes, even when, like the gas tax, it is so obvious that it needs to be raised.
During the eight years of the Bush administration spending was increased while taxes were kept flat, a familiar strategy. So, of course, now the highway trust fund is out of money. Its a damn shame that it finally ran out when it did and not three years earlier when Bush would have been forced to act. Instead, now it has to be done sometime in the next year. So its the democrats problem. And the democrats do not want to raise taxes. Stalemate. What next?
Congress could see the writing on the wall about the lack of revenue for highway programs years ago, and so multiple blue ribbons panels were convened to look into how to raise more revenue. They all came up with the same set of answers. 1. Raise the gas tax in the short term. 2. Move to a distance traveled based revenue system. 3. public private partnerships (to be dealt with in a future post).
What is that you ask? Well it is a way to charge people for the miles they actually travel, and eventually charge based on time of day, type of vehicle and type of road. The ultimate solution to the gas tax question. To do this you need basically an ezpass type device in every car. As you can imagine, this brings up all sorts of privacy and technology issues. But it is clearly the right way to go, and ultimately the only fair way.
Up until recently there were limited systems around the world, but now the Dutch are moving in that direction in a big way.
They are now installing a system across the whole country to do just that. Ahhhh….. The Netherlands, home of so many good things. Check out the article below, where the whole system is described in detail. Basically, public transit and taxis are exempt, and then everyone else pays based on kilometers traveled, with prices varying based on the type of vehicle. And once the system is in place, it will be easy to switch to charging based on the time of day that you drive, type of road, etc. The possibilities are endless. And that is great news, because the only way to drive good planning (no pun intended) is to hit people in their pocketbook.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5ggzUbQMWph8GplMdWzjDEnKD7ZJQD9BVD87O1
