Roads aren’t free

Add comment March 9th, 2009

(Below is my column that appears in Monday’s newspaper. I reference the National Surface Transportation Infrastructure Financing Commission report. You can download it here or the executive summary here.)

Roads aren’t free.

Critics blast Amtrak, and mass transit in general, for not being “self-sufficient.” They decry massive government subsidies and say the services should pay for themselves.

But the federal government spends billions a year on roads, and state and local governments spend plenty as well.

Federal funding comes from gas and diesel taxes — taxes that haven’t risen since 1993. In fact, because of inflation, those taxes bring in significantly less money than they once did. State highway funding faces a similar situation.

Something’s gotta change. Roads are getting worse, not better. Congestion chokes urban arteries, wasting time, increasing pollution and wearing down vehicles and roads.

The genius of a fuel tax directed solely to transportation projects is that it puts the burden of funding on the users, while providing an incentive to cut down use. But not raising the taxes over time means less funding and more driving.

But an alternative to raising the fuel tax has been gaining steam — a vehicle-miles-traveled tax.

Instead of being charged for the fuel your vehicle consumes, you’re charged for how much you drive.

At first, I was dead set against this. I thought increasing the fuel tax and indexing it to inflation would be enough, while avoiding privacy concerns of tracking how far people drive.

We could even calibrate a rising fuel tax to offset dropping demand in fuel. If electric cars become more popular, we could … OK, this is where my idea sputtered and stopped.

I’m growing to understand the benefits of a VMT tax the more I read about it. Privacy concerns aren’t huge for me — we already allow GPS in our cars and phones. For a VMT tax to pass there would have to be assurances that only mileage is sent to the government, not specific routes.

Here’s where they started to sell me (by they, I mean proponents like Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood and the recent report by the National Surface Transportation Infrastructure Financing Commission): You could calibrate a VMT tax to time of day, size of vehicle, cleanliness of fuel used, etc.

Basically, you could keep the incentives of fuel tax toward smaller, cleaner vehicles while retaining a stable funding mechanism. That’s key to me — a big SUV affects the highway system more than a small car, and should pay for that.

This doesn’t have to be “another tax.” It could just be a shifting of a tax (and, lawmakers, don’t try to keep both and use the fuel tax for something not transportation-related.) But it would have to be a tax increase, because what we’re paying now isn’t cutting it.

And if you don’t believe in government subsidies, would you prefer building the roads yourself? If we privatize them, companies won’t give us a free ride either.

Again, roads cost money. We can’t get away from that. We can only figure out the best way to pay.

Contact staff writer Thomas V. Bona at 815-987-1343 or tbona@rrstar.com.