Pay for What You Use: A Bedrock Principle for Highway Funding

In a year-end column on The Huffington Post, IBTTA Executive Director and CEO Patrick Jones points out that the United States is moving farther from a bedrock principle for highway funding: If you use it, you pay for it.

As federal legislators gradually abandon the user-pay system that served the country’s highway system in the past, he says tolling is emerging as a solution to help many cash-strapped states build up their budgets for highway repairs and maintenance.

“As every consumer knows—whether it’s water, electricity or heating oil—what you pay is directly proportionate to what you use,” Jones writes. “It’s the same concept federal policymakers relied on in 1956 when they created the federal gas tax to fund the Highway Trust Fund that built America's highways.”

The Gas Tax Erodes

But along the way, something changed. “Congress has not increased the gas tax since 1993—an entire generation ago. If that tax, currently 18.4 cents per gallon, had been indexed to inflation, which it is not, it would be nearly 33 cents today.”

Although the five-year highway bill that Congress adopted late last year contains modest good news, for transportation and for tolling, it “once again leaves the gas tax untouched—and instead draws billions of dollars of funding out of the federal government’s general fund,” Jones notes. That funding is made possible by “offsets” from other parts of government that won’t be sustainable over the medium to long term.

Worse still, it’s a practice that further erodes the user-pay principle, while “sending the states a clear message: the federal government is gradually moving away from providing a dedicated source of funding to support state transportation programs.”

Tolling Has Never Been Better

The good news is that it’s hard to imagine a better time for states to adopt tolling as one funding and financing strategy that rebuilds the connection between highway costs and highway users.

“As anyone who regularly travels today’s toll roads can attest, tolling is becoming more convenient as tolling authorities move to faster, all-electronic tolling systems that permit a freer flow of traffic and ease congestion,” Jones writes.

And “tolling operators are embracing new technologies and business rules to make traveling on toll facilities even more convenient. They are creating a network that allows motorists to drive on any toll facility in the country—with one account and one transponder,” and with the assurance that the tolls you pay will be invested to maintain and improve the highways you use.