Tag Archives: highways

Section 13002 of the infrastructure bill that the senate passed last week calls for the secretaries of transportation and the treasury to create a pilot mileage-based user fee program. The last transportation bill, which was passed in 2015, offered states grants to create their own pilot programs, but only six states did so, and some of them are not currently active.

The proposed infrastructure bill extends the state program (in section 13001), but also creates a national pilot program. If passed, the Secretary of Transportation would first create an advisory board that would take up to a year to design the program. Then the Secretary of the Treasury would set fees, which could differ by size of motor vehicle. Then the two secretaries would do a “public awareness campaign” to try to find geographically and economically distributed volunteers to participate in the program.

Fees could be charged via smart-phone apps, third-party GPS devices plugged into the diagnostic ports of cars (which is one way Oregon does it), data collected by automakers (such as GM’s OneStar system, which keeps track of vehicle locations in case of an accident), data collected by insurance companies (which can charge people by the mile using a similar GPS device in at least eight states), or “any other method that the Secretary considers appropriate.” Continue reading →

The House-approved INVEST Act included a provision requiring states to insure that all existing roads were in a state-of-good-repair before building new roads. I called that a “poison pill” because it poisoned the idea of using federal funds to promote mobility. This is especially true because Amtrak and transit have far more severe maintenance backlogs than highways, yet the bill included no similar provisions for those modes.

Click image to download a 4.0-MB PDF of this bill.

I’ve read through the 2,702-page Senate infrastructure bill and the good news is that it doesn’t include the same fix-it-first provision for highways as the House bill. However, it does have several mobility poisons of its own. Continue reading →

Democrats looking to the 2022 election must worry that some of their number are working so hard to alienate the vast majority of American voters. As noted in Politico, members of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, led by the Antiplanner’s own congressman, Peter DeFazio, are openly hostile to American’s favorite form of travel.

“You can’t pave over the whole country,” says DeFazio, whose INVEST Act, which recently passed the House, contains provisions that would severely restrict the ability of state to spend federal highway dollars on new highways. Yet highways occupy a vanishingly small share of the nation’s land area, and the idea that there is any danger to them paving over the whole country is just fear mongering.

Americans use highways for 87 percent of their personal travel while Amtrak and transit, which DeFazio and friends favor, provide just 1 percent of passenger-miles. There are good reasons for this: motor vehicles and highways are cheap, convenient, and fast relative to the Democrats’ alternatives. So it’s not surprising that 92 percent of American households own at least one car, 96 percent of American workers live in a household with at least one car, and at least a third of the 4 percent of American workers who live in households without cars nonetheless get to work by automobile. Continue reading →

“More highway spending won’t rev up the economy,” argues a recent article in the Wall Street Journal. However, the article’s writer, David Harrison, seems a little confused about how highway spending might help the economy.

“The U.S. already has an extensive system of roads, so building more wouldn’t add much to productivity, economists say,” writes Harrison. But this depends entirely on where roads are built. Continue reading →