Still No Infrastructure Crisis

Another year, another spate of stories about how America’s infrastructure is crumbling and how we need to raise taxes to repair it. Here’s the reality: Infrastructure that is funded out of user fees is in good shape; infrastructure that is funded out of taxes is not. Those who benefit from tax-supported infrastructure want the people who use user-fee supported infrastructure to pay more taxes so the former can continue to enjoy their obsolete systems at little cost to themselves.

Oregon Representative Earl Blumenauer wants to increase gas taxes by 15 cents a gallon–nearly double what they are now–to fund transportation infrastructure. But America’s highways, which support the users who pay those gas taxes, are in good shape. The number of structurally deficient bridges is rapidly declining and the average smoothness of pavement is improving.

It’s not hard to see that doubling gas taxes also doubles the money going into rail transit and other slush funds. The Federal Transit Administration said in 2010 that transit agencies suffer from a $78 billion maintenance backlog, and the total has likely increased since then since the agencies were spending less than necessary to keep systems in their current state of poor repair.

Will Congress use an infusion of money to repair or demolish obsolete rail lines? It doesn’t seem likely, since Congress had the opportunity in 2012 to rededicate money it was spending on new rail transit lines to rehabilitation, and it specifically wrote in the law it passed that none of the money could be spent on such rehabilitation. So it seems probable that a doubling of gas taxes would simply lead to more grants to transit agencies to build new rail lines that they can’t afford to maintain.
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We don’t need to take care of infrastructure by increasing taxes; we need to find better ways to pay for infrastructure with user fees. A year ago, Representative Blumenauer actually introduced a bill that would do so by replacing gas taxes with vehicle-mile fees. But he seems to have lost interest, perhaps because there’s no guarantee that transit advocates will be able to steal 20 percent of vehicle-mile fees to subsidize their obsessions.

The Reason Foundation’s Robert Poole is a little more worried than the Antiplanner about the future of the Interstate Highway System. He points out it was built with a 50-year design life and much of it is about 50 years old now. But that doesn’t mean it faces a financial crisis, and in fact the interstate system is, on average, in the best overall shape of any part of our highway system.

Poole wants Congress to allow states to electronically toll the interstates so they can raise money to restore and improve the system as needed. This would also cut out the federal middleman in the funding system. While the Antiplanner certainly supports that idea, I don’t see it as part of a crisis; merely the opportunity to take advantage of new technologies (electronic tolling) that weren’t available when the system was first built.

Congress has a bad habit of acting only when there is a crisis. This gives interest groups, bureaucracies, and political leaders incentives to manufacture such crises so they can provoke changes that benefit them. Taxpayers should always be wary of claims that any kind of crisis exists, for they are almost always going to be the losers when the bureaucracies and interest groups agree on any solutions.