Highway funding: It's time to brainstorm
Published April 6, 2014
Editorial by Winston-Salem Journal, April 5, 2014.
These are not happy days on the state transportation front. Drooping tax revenues, higher construction costs and congressional dysfunction are straining the Department of Transportation’s ability to maintain roads and expand infrastructure.
For many decades, the gas tax was a reliable source of transportation funding. But those days are ending as vehicles become more fuel-efficient.
The beauty of the motor fuels tax rested in its logical correlation with road use and wear. The more one drove, the more one paid. The heavier one’s vehicle and, thus, the more wear it exacted on roads, the lower its gas mileage and, consequently, the more its operator paid in gas tax. State and federal gasoline taxes provided for about 70 percent of all road costs here until recently.
Just to throw in another complication, state motorists have changed their auto buying habits. Revenue from the highway-use tax, a sales tax on motor vehicles, dropped precipitously during the recession when car sales were down. They have improved, DOT officials note, but people are keeping their vehicles longer, and that means less highway-use tax revenue.
In the past week or so, the looming transportation funds crisis led to two developments.
First, Gov. Pat McCrory rallied state business leaders to lobby Congress to avert the bankruptcy of the U.S. Highway Trust Fund. It could happen as early as summer and, McCrory warned in remarks reported by The News & Observer of Raleigh, it would cost North Carolina billions of dollars in lost federal funds. Political paralysis in Washington is to blame, he said.
Second, an N.C. Board of Transportation committee began research on a new mileage tax for vehicles. Such taxes use GPS technologies to record the miles a car drives and to then tax it accordingly. With such a tax, motorists would get a regular bill from their home state and maybe hometown, charging them for every mile driven.
Transportation money is running out, and the day is coming when we will either raise new revenues or watch our roads deteriorate. New ideas are needed.
