To Pay for Roads, Official Foresees Higher Gas Tax
Sep. 9–With all the hoopla about the need for toll roads across the nation — a controversial path that eager Texas officials are blazing — the revenues they generate won’t come close to being enough.
Elected officials will have to do something that most have so far refused to do: index either the federal gas tax or state gas taxes to inflation, said David Laney, a former chairman of the Texas Transportation Commission who now chairs Amtrak.
Without tolls and steadily rising gas taxes, officials won’t even be able to maintain existing highways, he said.
“That is the challenge that threatens our highway system as we move into the 21st century,” Laney told an audience Thursday at the San Antonio Regional Transportation Leadership Forum.
And that’s just the short-term problem, he said. Gas taxes are fast becoming obsolete, with the pinch starting in about 10 years. Cars getting better gas mileage and untaxed energy sources will eat away bigger chunks of funds.
The likely replacement for gas taxes is a mileage-based charge, perhaps a meter to gauge the amount of driving, Laney said. Others have speculated that a satellite-based tracking system could work — an idea that strikes fear into privacy advocates.
Charging drivers on a per-mile basis is an interesting, complex and technologically challenging approach that has no solid implementation plan, Laney said.
“That eventually is the elephant in the living room that nobody wants to acknowledge,” he said.
Indexing the federal gas tax would raise $300 billion over 20 years, and toll roads could bring in an additional $67 billion, buying time for political wonks and planners to figure out what to do next, Laney said.
But if officials plod along as usual, they can expect to see $3.4 trillion in federal, state and local highway money over the next two decades — $400 billion short of what’s needed to keep roads from falling apart.
Keeping up is already a losing battle, Laney said.
Since 1980, the amount of driving nationwide nearly doubled while road lanes increased just 2 percent.
“Luck doesn’t just happen,” he said at the end of his talk. “You make your own luck.”
Texas doesn’t fare any better than the nation, said other speakers at the forum, which had 550 registrants.
Two-thirds of the state’s roads were considered to be in very good shape in 1995, according to the Texas Department of Transportation, but that plunged to 10 percent in just five years.
Like Congress, the Texas Legislature has chosen not to index the gas tax to inflation. But in recent sessions, state lawmakers did overhaul laws to let the transportation department sell bonds and partner with private companies to build toll roads.
The state now envisions a 4,000-mile network of toll roads, rail lines and utility lines to be built over 50 years for $184 billion. Also, $12 billion will be added to a $68 billion pot of money to fight traffic congestion in eight cities over 25 years.
“Texas transportation is at a crossroads,” said Transportation Commission member Hope Andrade of San Antonio. “The challenges before us are significant, and accordingly, our plans are rather ambitious. Our future will be largely what we make out of it.”
There are other options to raise money, but nobody seems to like any of them.
Local officials estimate that $1 billion, enough to fund two-thirds of a planned 47-mile tollway on Loop 1604 and U.S. 281 on the North Side, could be generated by creating a county gas tax of 26 cents per gallon, or increasing the city sales tax by 3/4 cent or boosting city property taxes 56 percent.
“I don’t think anybody’s willing to do that here,” said Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff.
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