Peters hammers tax-&-grant as "broken," calls for direct road pricing

US transport secretary Mary Peters in an interview with Traffic World lambasts proposals for enlarging the present federal tax-&-grant programs, pitching the case for its replacement by direct pricing of roads. Excerpts from the interview follow:

"(T)he current system just does not work. It is not working to make sure that our transportation system is running well and producing efficiently the throughput of traffic that we need to get through the system. The result has been the failure of performance in a very major area and that's congestion.

"Despite the fact that we've increased funding 100 percent over the last 10 years, congestion has gotten 300 percent worse in that same period of time. Now, some people say it's just a matter of money, and that if we had more money everything would be fine, but I do not believe that at all.

"I believe the current system isn't functioning well. It's unsustainable, it's unresponsive, it's based on a fossil-based fuel tax, a commodity that we as a nation want to use substantially less of going forward because of energy, environmental and security issues. Where do we go in the future?

"There's also an erosion of public confidence. I call it a failure of investor confidence. We haven't increased the federal gas tax since 1993. I assure you, if the public were clamoring and beating up on members of Congress to increase the gas tax it would have happened. But the fact is that they're not. They've lost confidence in the system because of the substantial amount of earmarking and special programs that have been added layer upon layer since the Interstate Highway System was authorized."

Eisenhower wanted the interstate system toll financed

"Go back to Eisenhower. What Eisenhower intended - he actually wanted to toll the system, by the way. I don't know if you know that. He actually wanted a toll system, but at the time technology just wouldn't have enabled that.

"So ultimately he settled for a system in which the gas tax - a user fee, indirect, but a user fee - would pay for the building of the Interstate Highway System in the United States. And Congress increased that fuel tax incrementally over time to equate to what it was going to cost to complete the system.

"The system has been virtually complete since the mid-1970s. But Congress, instead of saying, 'OK, Americans, now we're going to either quit collecting this tax or we're going to turn it over to the states,' Congress said, 'Whoa, wait a minute. There's some other things we can do with this money.'

"And over time, these 108 different programs have been built up and they all take money away from the highway and the transit portion of the funds and don't necessarily deal with what I think is the major problem in our system, which is congestion.

"So this system is broke(n), and there's no fixing in my opinion this system by simply increasing the gas(oline) tax or tweaking around the edges of it.

"So what we have to do in the next surface transportation reauthorization is take a fundamentally different approach..."

"We need to wean ourselves off the gas(oline) tax and move to a more direct pricing mechanism for paying for our transportation system in the future.

"The gas tax is unreliable, it's unresponsive, it's the most hated tax according to recent surveys. Public dislike of the gas tax has now exceeded even that of property taxes, which used to be the No. 1 hated tax in America..."

see http://www.trafficworld.com

TOLLROADSnews 2008-07-13