Not to mention the cost of defending the sources of oil..

It is true that drivers pay more than what gets spent on road construction. But road construction is not the only cost of driving. Drivers will likely never pay enough to remedy the health effects of the air pollution they generate.

Road pricing is a great idea, but it needs to be combined with an overall tax system that is progressive and far more transit than is being funded and planned. Right now, if you add up all of the taxes people pay, it is regressive. Having the poor subsidize the rich and then making it too expensive for them to drive is a terrible overall policy.

If you compare the total (Fed+State+Local) annual (capital + ops) expenditures for roads to the sum of all the tax payments made by drivers to government as a necessary condition (de facto or dejure) of their use of automobiles on roads, (i.e. user fees by any common understanding of the term) the tax payments exceed the road expenditures by amounts of most recently, in 2004, $66 billion. Thats a 45% government PROFIT from its roads operation.

Chances are you don’t believe this. Check out the details and why at .

Jack

on’t

Senator Hilary Clinton’s infrastructure policy statement several months ago called for increasing funding for that program. Let’s hope that more Congressional leaders and the next President will step forward to expand these kinds of performance-based funding strategies, rather than looking to just allocate more money without asking what results will flow from it.

We can no longer afford to throw ever more funding for road and transit investments without first considering if these will help meet our goals, whether to reduce greenhouse gas emissions or to cut congestion and expand travel choices.

It’s unfortunate that DOT Secretary Mary Peters has at times alienated many transit, bicycling, and smart growth advocates. Under her leadership, DOT has too often overlooked the role transit investments can play in economic development and how transportation policies and planning can help reduce greenhouse gas emissions and sprawl. But if the Urban Partnership Program suceeds in helping Mayor Bloomberg implement congestion pricing in New York, it will be a major advance for sustainable transportation policy in America.

Gabriel Roth
[Editor of "Street Smart — Competition, Entrepreneurship and the Future of Roads", which was included in Planetizen's list of the Top 10 planning books of 2007.]

In addition, our Urban Partnership grants are designed to reduce traffic, improve the environment and enhance transit in five of America’s most congested cities. In New York alone, congestion pricing will generate over $350 million a year to support new transit facilities and services while significantly reducing CO2 emissions.

Imagine that over the past 100 years all that government road building, most of it paid for by general rather than gas taxes (especially at the state and local level) and some of it funded by taxes paid by private transit companies, had not taken place, and instead roads had been privately funded.

Private companies would have done what they do in other cases — offer discounts to encourage use at off peak times, higher prices at peak, and volume discounts. Rather than continuing to build to try to meet demand until it became impossible and congestion soared, they would have built less and tried to manage demand.

So at peak hours, you would have had billionaires and buses on the road, the latter (perhaps operated by the road owners) getting a volume discount based on their low road and parking space per passenger, the former paying through the nose.

I chose public service as a career early on, but have become disillusioned — not that I have much better to say about business. The era when government intervened to increase equality and opportunity was a brief one, and has come to an end. Public institutions are entirely captured by the placard holders, the way business has been captured by rapacious executives to sit on each other’s boards and up each other’s pay.

If the rush hour motorists won’t pay for the roads, then I and others far less off will have to. As in education, health care, social security, etc. we’ll be taxed more and more and get less and less.