The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Report: Hike gas tax to fix roads
Current 18.4-cent tax per gallon hasn’t risen since 1993.
As much as $70 billion annu ally will be needed over the next two decades to upgrade U.S. interstate highways, far above the $25 billion now being spent, according to a report that proposes raising federal fuel taxes and allowing more tolling to help make up the difference.
The report, commissioned by Congress and released on Thursday, comes as President Donald Trump and Democrats taking control of the House of Representatives in January vow to pursue major public-works legislation in 2019 — but with no consensus on how to pay for it.
Congress should create a program modeled after the original interstate construction effort and increase U.S. fuel taxes — currently at 18.4 cents a gallon for gasoline and 24.4 cents for diesel — while allowing them to increase with inflation, the report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine concluded.
The authors didn’t recommend an amount but said the gas tax would have to rise to almost 30 cents a gallon within 10 years, and the diesel levy to about 40 cents, to generate $20 billion annually.
Other recommendations incl ude lifting the current restriction on adding tolls to existing general-purpose interstates, and preparing for new funding and financing mechanisms such as charging motorists per mile traveled as well as accounting for the rise of automated vehicles and climate change.
“We recommend a course of action that is aggressive and ambitious, but by no means novel,” No rman Augustine, the former chairman and chief executive offi cer of Lockheed Martin Corp., who led the study committee, said in a statement. “Essentially, we need a reinvigoration of the federal and state partnership that produced the Interstate Highway System in the first place.”
The 2015 federal highway bill called for a study of how to upgrade the system, which was authorized under President Dwight Eisenhower in 1956. Most of its segments are decades old, have much heavier traffic than planners expected, and are operating longer without upgrades than they were designed for, the report said.
About $ 25 billion in federal and state capital funds are spent on the system annually, the study sa id — and $45 billion to $70 billion a year over 20 years is needed, depending on estimates of increased traffic.
The committee said those e stimate s could be low because they don’t include the funding needed for rebuilding or reconfiguring many of th e 15,000 interchanges, or to make the system resilient to weather.
Trump campaigned on a promise to invest more than $1 trillion to upgrade U.S. roads, bridges, and other public works. But the plan his administration released in February lacked a defined funding source, and stalled after a few hearings.
The president and incoming Democratic House leaders have said an infrastructure measure is something they could accomplish on a bipartisan basis in 2019. The Transportation Research Board, which helped produce the report, has started briefing staff of key congressional committees about the findings.
Business groups including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the American Trucking Associations have backed an increase in federal fuel taxes, which haven’t been increased since 1993 and have lost purchasing power with inflation and the increased fuel efficiency of vehicles.