The National Transportation Infrastructure Financing Commission is leading the way in re-thinking federal highway funding strategies. There is a consensus among the commissioners that the status quo is not sustainable, reports Ken Orski, publisher of Innovation Briefs, a transportation policy newsletter. The federal gasoline tax served well to fund construction of Interstate highways, but now that the highway system is complete, the United States needs a financing model responsive to new priorities. Writes Orski:
Specifically, the new financial model must allow the nation to compensate for years of underinvestment and deferred maintenance, modernize existing highway facilities, improve system performance, relieve highway congestion and expand road capacity in high growth areas and critical commerce corridors. …
The Commissioners appear prepared to recommend reducing future reliance on petroleum-based fuel taxes in favor of a more diversified revenue model involving road user fees, tolls, private capital, congestion pricing, public-private partnerships and the use of new revenue collection technology. There is also a sentiment among the Commissioners that fees paid by road users should reflect more closely the costs they impose.
With Congress addicted to pork barrel politics and transportation earmarks, there’s no assurance that NTIFC ideas will ever be implemented at the national level. But the Commission’s logic applies equally well to the financing of state road programs. The user-pays financing principles articulated by the NTIFC would have been vastly preferable to Virginia’s recently enacted hodge-podge of taxes, levies, fees and General Fund surpluses by drivers are subsidized by non-drivers.