According to a report issued Wednesday by the Center for American Progress (CAP), the long-held idea that highways can pay for themselves is really little more than a myth. In a country that has seen 179 million more vehicles on the roads since the 1960s, what is of surprise is that this is, in fact, of surprise at all.
“Highways are incredibly important, but we have spent decades trying to solve every mobility need with big roads, and it hasn’t worked,” said Kevin DeGood of CAP, who co-authored the report. “What we need is a system that provides people with real choice. While roads have never paid for themselves, there was a time when user fees covered a larger share than they do today.”
As U.S. DOT Secretary Anthony Foxx prepares his outline for the country’s infrastructure future, discussions in Congress on the topic of sustainable funding packages for roads and bridges is building even more steam. May’s expiry deadline looms and there exist a general concern that another “band-aid” funding bill is only going to delay the inevitable, which is systemic failure of the nation’s infrastructure.
“The growth we’re having in this country can’t be met with current resources,” Foxx said in a recent interview. “The idea that we’re looking at the system comprehensively is the thrust of [my] report,” he said. “Transportation is a system of systems. They connect, and they’re related. What happens if we mesh these trends?”
The Eno Center for Transportation last month suggested a shift from the gas-tax-based Highway Trust Fund to a system that draws transportation money from general tax revenue. The CAP report concurs, advising the fund should be renamed the Transportation Trust Fund, which would to reflect an expanded scope covering all modes of transportation.
“Renaming the fund would powerfully reinforce the broad mandate of the federal program,” DeGood said. “We need to make smart investments across surface modes, including highways, transit, freight and passenger rail, and multimodal projects.”
According to the report, 40% of U.S. roadways don’t generate enough gas-tax revenue to pay for their maintenance, a fact that DeGood uses as ammunition for an alternative choice. “In many urban areas, transit, passenger rail, or other multimodal projects are the most effective means of achieving an efficient, economically productive, equitable and environmentally sustainable transportation system,” he writes. “Beyond the issue of funding, transit provides significant benefits for people who exclusively drive, as public transportation lowers roadway congestion.”
The CAP report further states “rather than starting with a narrow review of existing transportation assets and lists of project requests from local communities, scenario planning asks more fundamental questions about what a community should look like 10, 20 or 30 years in the future and then works backward to find the appropriate mix of projects to achieve that vision.”
Yet as the feasibility of gas-tax revenue as a primary source of roads funding continues to be debated—and now with the Democrats “Infrastructure 2.0” plan thrown into the mix, not to mention the sustained low price at the pump—concern seems to be giving way to cautious optimism. Debate is after all an invitation to exposure toward foreign ideas. The hope couched in the coming months’ discussions is that a compromise can be found and found quickly, one that will not be second-guessed in the near future.
