Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
State’s gas tax is going up again
The price to fill ’er up is going up again in Pennsylvania.
Starting Sunday, the nation’s highest gas tax will increase by another 8 cents per gallon.
Drivers will pay about 78 cents per gallon in tax, up from just under 70 cents this year. The state’s wholesale gas tax funds road construction and infrastructure maintenance.
In 2017 the state gas tax portion will be about 58 cents per gallon, while federal tax will take up 18.4 cents per gallon and an underground storage tank fee will be 1.1 cents per gallon.
Gas stations will almost certainly pass the increase to motorists, Patrick DeHaan, a petroleum analyst with fuel monitoring firm GasBuddy.com, told The Times-Tribune of Scranton.
Pennsylvania has the nation’s fifth-largest road network, with more road miles than New York, New Jersey and all the New England states combined, according to James May, a spokesman for the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation.
He said PennDOT has fixed thousands of structurally defi-
cient bridges and boosted road construction spending by about $1 billion, paving the way for about 25,000 new construction jobs.
Kay Nealon, who was gassing up in Scranton last week, said road conditions are still poor.
“Gas prices are going up, and it feels like a rip off, I can tell you that,” said Nealon, a former Scranton business owner who now lives in Florida but returned to the area for the holiday. “The roads are as bad as they ever were, that’s for sure.”