This chart was included as part of a brilliant blog post by our friends at TransitLabs, which analyses the various issues surrounding the perennial shortfalls that dog the highway trust fund (aka Gas tax). Highly recommend reading the entire blog titled “Why the Trust Fund Keeps Running Out” and explore the beautiful visualizations that accompany the story.
Image courtesy: Transitlabs
This position is located in the Technical Services Branch of the Eastern Federal Lands Highway Division, Sterling, Virginia. The Civil Engineer (Transportation) serves as the Federal Lands Highway (FLH)-wide technical expert and authority for promoting, coordinating and implementing the various highway traffic operations, Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), and traffic monitoring activities. In this capacity, you will promote the development and implementation of innovative and state-of-the-art technologies, practices, and products to meet the FLH transportation related needs. The deadline for applications is January 21, 2011.
http://jobsearch.dot.gov/getjob.asp?JobID=95298113
(Source: The Boston Globe)
(Photo Courtesy: Suzanne Kreiter/Globe Staff)
A group of five major Massachusetts business organizations said today that the state needs a 25 cent per gallon gas tax hike — higher than Governor Deval Patrick’s 19 cent proposal — to fix the state’s transportation system.
“The political stakes are high, but the leadership here is necessary,” said Paul Guzzi, president and CEO of the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce.
Guzzi was joined at a press conference in downtown Boston by leaders from the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation, the Massachusetts Business Roundtable, A Better City, and NAIOP Massachusetts, a commercial real estate development association.
Comparing a transportation overhaul with the state’s new comprehensive healthcare law, they said the state faced a rare political opportunity to fix problems that have been simmering for more than a generation. A 25-cent increase in the gas tax would generate more than $600 million a year in taxes, the group estimated.
Click here to read the entire article.
(Source: Greenwire via New York Times)
A blue-ribbon federal transportation panel called today for a temporary gas-tax hike followed by a move toward charging drivers directly for every mile they travel — two ideas that have been soundly rejected by the White House in the past week.
The controversial road-pricing scheme would become the dominant funding mechanism for road construction and maintenance by 2020, with drivers being charged an average of 2 cents per mile, according to the report released by the 15-member panel created by Congress in the last highway bill authorization.
The National Surface Transportation Infrastructure Financing Commission says the shift is necessary because the current funding mechanism — federal fuel taxes — has failed to raise the necessary revenue for needed roadwork and runs counterintuitive to national environmental and energy goals.
“The more successful U.S. transportation policy is at increasing fuel efficiency and reducing both foreign oil dependency and carbon emissions, the faster its primary funding source, the gas tax, becomes obsolete,” said Texas state Rep. Mike Krusee, a commission member.
Increases in fuel economy, coupled with the fact that the current federal tax on gasoline has remained stagnant at 18.4 cents a gallon since 1993, have already taken their toll on federal revenues to fund road construction and maintenance. The Highway Trust Fund, which receives the bulk of its money from federal fuel taxes, would have run empty late last year if it were not for an eleventh-hour transfer of $8 billion by Congress to keep it solvent.
“With the expected shift to more fuel-efficient vehicles, it will be increasingly difficult to rely on the gas tax to raise the funds needed to improve, let alone maintain, our nation’s surface transportation infrastructure,” said commission Chairman Robert Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a nonpartisan think tank.
Click here to read the entire article.
(Source : Thanks to Robert Puentes @ The Brookings Institution for sharing this article)
Already, we have had not one—but two—national commissions on the topic, and the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) recently added transportation financing to its annual list of high-risk areas suggested for oversight by the current Congress.
Why the high anxiety?
Put simply: the money flowing out of the federal transportation trust fund (often referred to as the “highway” trust fund) is greater than the money flowing into it. This past September Washington was forced to shift $8 billion from the general fund to cover a shortfall in the transportation account. Estimates for how short the fund will be this summer hover around $9 billion.
Despite the sharp, and perhaps simplistic, rhetoric of late, the origins of the shortfall are the result of multiple trends converging.
For one, the federal gas tax—generating nearly 90 percent of the federal transportation revenue—has not been raised in nearly 20 years, not even to keep pace with inflation. So, as the rate effectively declines, so does the purchasing power of the trust fund. The current 18.4 cent per gallon tax in the U.S. is far less than in European competitor nations.
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