Calculating Transportation Subsidies

Highway subsidies averaged 1.7 cents per passenger mile in 2016, an increase from 1.2 cents in 2015. The increase was due to a massive infusion of general funds into the federal Highway Trust Fund, which was necessary because Congress doesn’t know how to keep spending within its revenues.

This calculation was based on table HF-10 for the 2016 Highway Statistics, which the Federal Highway Administration finally released last week. (The table is dated August 2018, but I check regularly and it hadn’t appeared before last week.) This table shows where highway money comes from, and in 2016 $118 billion came from general fund appropriations and other taxes such as income or property taxes. To calculate subsidies, I deduct from this the diversions of gas taxes and other highway user fees to mass transit and other non-highway uses, which in 2016 totaled to $33 billion.

The result is a net subsidy of $85 billion, up from $59 billion in 2015. The 2015 table shows that 97 percent of the subsidy in that year was at the local level, which is typical of most years. But in 2016, more than half the subsidy was at the federal level. The states, meanwhile, actually diverted nearly $6 billion more from highway user fees than they spent out of general funds. Continue reading

2016 Road Fatalities Increase by 5.6 Percent

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) released its final calculation of 2016 crash fatalities, finding 37,461 traffic deaths, compared with 35,485 in 2015. The only good news is that the 5.6 percent increase was less than 8.4 percent increase from 2014 to 2015.

This is the highest number of traffic fatalities since 2007. After that year, there was a dramatic decline in fatalities to a low of 32,367 in 2011. Though fatalities had remained roughly constant at about 42,000 per year from 1995 to 2007, they suddenly declined by 10 percent in 2008 and another 10 percent in 2009. Fatality rates — deaths per billion vehicle miles driven — had been declining for more than a century, but traffic experts could not explain why there was a large decline in total fatalities in that two-year period. Continue reading

Congestion Coalition Wins in Virginia

The urban mobility discussed here yesterday found that the Washington DC urban area has the fourth-worst congestion in the nation, costing more than $4 billion a year. That congestion will continue to get worse thanks to the efforts of anti-highway groups who appear to have successfully stopped the construction of high-occupancy/toll (HOT) lanes along I-395.

HOT lane opponents convinced Arlington County to oppose the new lanes, arguing that they would increase air pollution. In fact, by relieving congestion, they would reduce air pollution.

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