Half of American drivers want to pay higher federal gas taxes while assuming the government will use all of that extra money to repair the country’s neglected roads and bridges.
In a new poll by AAA that interviewed more than 2000 drivers last month, 52 percent said they were willing to pay more per month for “better roads, bridges, and mass-transit systems.” More than two-thirds of drivers said the federal government needed to spend more money on transportation, and 21 percent said they’d have no problem shelling out another $10 or more each month to help. (To illustrate the wide swing in results, in a Gallup poll last year asking similar questions on raising state gas taxes, two-thirds of Americans were against the idea.)
At issue is the Highway Trust Fund, established in 1956 to maintain our then-revolutionary interstate highway system founded by President Eisenhower. The fund is entirely paid for by fuel excise taxes that haven’t been raised since 1993. They’re currently set at 18.4 cents per gallon for gasoline and 24.4 cents for diesel, and due to the rising fuel efficiency of new cars, inflation, and ever more miles traveled, the fund is in trouble. By late August, the Department of Transportation estimates that the roughly $8.7 billion balance will drop to zero unless Congress bails it out once more, which is what always happens. AAA is lobbying Congress to support a gas-tax hike, which is what Representative Earl Blumenauer (D-Oregon) has been trying to get passed since December. By 2016, Blumenauer wants to set gasoline taxes at 33.3 cents and diesel taxes at 39.3 cents. The bill is sitting in a committee.
But whether out of naiveté or ignorance to what the Highway Trust Fund actually funds, everyone hoping for suddenly improved roads and freshly painted bridges from a big cash infusion is mistaken. Since 1970, the fund has been split in two to pay for mass-transit programs and has since been ransacked for unrelated projects that haven’t and won’t do anything to fix federal highways and bridges. Beyond money for subways, bus depots, and bike lanes, the Highway Trust Fund is a one-stop shop for government billboard PSAs and media buys, all-important $1 million studies on why headlight glare bothers our eyes, and racial-profile training for police officers that alone cost $7.5 million per year from 2005 to 2009.
That’s not counting the $566.5 million guaranteed to the DOT this year for motorcycle safety campaigns, driver’s ed programs, and the National Driver Register that lets police track your infractions anywhere in the country. Then there’s bonus money passed to states for seat-belt and child-seat usage, plus more cash for ferries, fuel-cell-powered buses, public transport on Indian reservations, and so forth. While all these programs probably help in some way, they don’t directly maintain or improve the physical condition of our federal highways and bridges—the very core argument of those in favor of higher gas taxes.
Does the Highway Trust Fund need more money? Sure, it does—and frankly, so do we. AAA says higher gas taxes will “prevent severe maintenance delays” if they’re “spent wisely.” But with hundreds if not thousands of non-highway projects siphoning off the account, that promise isn’t an innocent assumption, it’s misleading.
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