Taxpayers United is releasing a report today in opposition to raising Illinois gas taxes to fix supposedly crumbling infrastructure. Illinois highway infrastructure is actually in good shape, the report argues; the real infrastructure problems are with Chicago’s transit systems.
Over the past three years, nearly 30 percent of Illinois gas taxes have been diverted to transit, mostly in Chicago. The state’s remaining highway infrastructure problems could be solved by ending such diversions. Despite the subsidies, Chicago transit ridership declined by 9 percent since 2014 and is likely to continue to decline in the foreseeable future.
As noted here yesterday, a new report from Moody’s found that the Chicago Transit Authority had more debt and unfunded obligations than any other transit agency, which measured as a percent of each agency’s annual budgets. This doesn’t even count Chicago transit’s state-of-good-repair backlog, estimated to be $36 billion.
The Taxpayers report points out that the median income of Illinois workers who commute by car is under $40,000 a year, while the median income of Chicago workers who commute by transit is $46,600 a year. Any plan to spend more gas tax revenues on transit will result in lower-income, downstate workers subsidizing higher-income Chicago workers.
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As an alternative to spending the $36 billion needed to rehabilitate Chicago’s aging rail infrastructure, the report proposes to replace it with buses. Buses running on exclusive busways can move as many if not more people per hour than the Chicago El, and probably do it faster. A 2014 report from the Cato Institute calculated that bus-rapid transit could bring as many workers into downtown Chicago as rail transit does today.
In lieu of exclusive busways, the city and state can create high-occupancy/toll lanes on existing freeways and expressways, allowing buses and carpools to use them for free and single-occupancy vehicles to use them by paying a variable toll.
In any case, raising gas taxes to spend more on transit is a recipe for waste and futility. Transit is not going to recover from recent ridership losses and Illinois taxpayers should not pay billions to rehabilitate obsolete infrastructure.
