The U.S. Department of Transportation wants to reverse a 58-year-old ban on interstate highway tolls that could let cash-starved states suck in more revenue and fill a void in the federal Highway Trust Fund.
The proposal, part of a four-year transportation bill submitted this week by DOT Secretary Anthony Foxx, claims new electronic tolls would add $87 billion to the Highway Trust Fund, set up by President Eisenhower in 1956 to fund the then-new Interstate system. At that time, the fund was supposed to pay for federal highways and Congress passed a ban that same year restricting states from enacting tolls to use them.
Last year, when Congress proposed a national 2.2-cent mileage tax and the first increase in gas taxes since 1993, the fund’s $3.8-billion balance through September 2013 was down 61 percent year over year and more than $15 billion short from the same time in 2010. The Transportation Department says that even with $8.4 billion in the bank by the end of March, the fund will go dry and need to be bailed out again by Congress in August, as is typical practice to keep the highway dollars flowing.
But like most government programs, use of the Highway Trust Fund has strayed from its original intent to keep the nation’s interstate system toll-free. Congress has funneled money away from it for years to pay for non-highway projects, such as bike lanes and public transit, and most states divert toll revenue they collect on their own roads—New York City’s double-digit bridge and tunnel tolls being a prime example—so that a significant portion of the Fund doesn’t actually pay for maintenance and repairs.
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Billions and billions of dollars are needed to address the backlog of needed repairs for the nation’s highways and bridges, 11 percent of which have been called “structurally deficient.” By and large, our roads haven’t kept up with growing vehicle traffic—and they’re certainly not maintained to proper levels—but with new tolls, there may be nothing to stop states from getting greedy and drawing up plans to fund initiatives that have nothing to do with the highways they’re collected on. Hopefully some legislators will actually see to it that the money goes to the right place.
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