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The gas tax hobgoblin -- the roads demand
more billions, the voters hate to pay -- is triggering migraines
for politicos from Washington, D.C. to the 50 state capitals.
The U.S. Department of Transportation reports that without
new revenue there'll be a mounting gap -- rising to $30 billion
annually by 2009 -- in available funds for maintenance and
"necessary" upgrades of the nation's highways.
But does that open the way to raise the
revenue? No way. Some transportation leaders in Congress favor
a several-cent hike in the federal gas tax, now 18.4 cents.
But with the country's big transportation law up for reauthorization,
predictable fights are breaking out again between "donor"
and "recipient" states. And neither the Republican
House leadership nor President Bush seem willing to tolerate
any kind of tax increase anyway.
Resistance to gas tax increases are almost
as high at the state level, even though a handful (Ohio, Indiana,
Wisconsin, Washington and Maryland among them) have recently
debated and in some cases already voted increases.
With dollar signs in their eyes, road contractors
lead the lobbying for gas tax increases. And they have a case.
In California, for example, the gas tax has risen from 6 cents
in 1957 to 18 cents today. But if it had kept pace with inflation,
it would be 32.5 cents today. On average, fuel taxes across
the states would have to rise 11 cents to recoup their 1957
buying power.
And need? Road delays (travel times in excess
of free-flow conditions) increased 8.5 percent from 1993 to
1997, consuming needed fuel and polluting the air. But from
now to 2020, the Federal Highway Administration now projects
congestion to increase another 42 percent.
Another argument for hiking gas taxes: higher
pump prices might help curb our appetite for SUVs and other
gas-guzzling (and polluting) vehicles.
Yet it's a danger for us to be fixated on gas taxes alone,
University of California-Berkeley Professor Martin Wachs warns
in a ground-breaking analysis of our highway funding dilemmas
published by the Brookings Institution (http://www.brookings.edu/es/urban/publications/wachstransportation.htm).
Gas taxes are critical right now, reports Wachs, but in fact
they're covering only 35 percent of our governments' cumulative
spending on roadways, from big expressways to meandering country
roads.
What? Weren't we always told highways are
sort of self-financing through the gas tax? Not true, says
Wachs. Even when you add in vehicle taxes (another 20 percent
of road funding) and tolls (4 percent), it turns out auto-
and truck-user-related revenues are larger, but only slightly,
than the billions flowing in from local property taxes, bond
issues and governments' general fund appropriations.
So much for the tired argument public transit
depends on "subsidies," and roads don't!
Wachs reports a rush to special local option
taxes or for state borrowing for roads (politically expedient
for term-limited legislators but incurring massive interest
charges). Inevitably, funding for schools, libraries and other
vital local functions suffers.
Wachs argues we'd be smarter to rely more
on user fees. Short-term, that means additional fuel taxes,
tolls, vehicle registration charges, truck weight levies and
the like. The truck issue alone is significant: if heavy weight
trucks had to pay their true cost in roadbed wear and tear,
costs would get allocated more equitably among all types of
vehicles, and the advantages of switching a larger share of
long-distance freight to rail lines would be a lot more apparent.
Long-term, as petroleum supplies dwindle
and biofuels and hydrogen propulsion methods get perfected,
gas taxes won't work at all. So it's not too early, says Wachs,
to consider equipping each vehicle -- auto or truck -- with
a responder that calculates cost by time of day, charging
the user more for use of crowded roads and access to congested
areas, less for use of open ones.
Electronic toll collection is actually quite
functional and successful now. Millions of motorists are using
"EZ Pass" on the East Coast, "Fastrak"
on the West Coast, and a variety of similar devices in between.
Even so, there are lots of thorny questions left to resolve.
Even Wachs seemingly clear-eyed analysis doesn't suggest what's
the right "mix" in our transportation future for
bus, commuter and light rail lines, for transit-accessible
nodes of new town development across metro areas, or for bikepaths
and pedestrian ways.
However rational proposed new planning and
transportation systems seem, raw old politics is very much
with us -- and unlikely to fade away. A big concern is that
Americans, caught up with mini-issues like paying 12 versus
16 cents tax a gallon, will miss the big picture of pitfalls
-- and immense possible breakthroughs -- in our transportation
plans for the new century.
CORRECTION: My April 6 column on the country's burgeoning
indicators movement -- "Past Talk Radio: Assessing True
Futures" -- reported the National Neighborhood Indicators
Partnership, grown from six model efforts to 20 across the
country, was housed at the Brookings Institution. In fact,
it's located and led by the Urban Institute under the guiding
hand of Tom Kingley, principal research associate there. For
full information, check http://www.urban.org/nnip/.
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