The Federal Highway Administration has posted most highway finance spreadsheets for the 2019 Highway Statistics, which means we now have almost all of the data we need to calculate transportation costs subsidies for airline, highway, Amtrak, and transit passengers. A couple of airline numbers are only available for 2018, but those numbers don’t change much from year to year so should be a good estimate for 2019.
Americans spent an average of 25.0 cents per passenger-mile driving their cars, light trucks, and motorcycles, while highway subsidies averaged 1.1 cents per passenger-mile. Subsidies to highway trucking, incidentally, averaged 0.8 cents per ton-mile. Continue reading
