The vice chairman of a congressionally mandated transportation policy panel and a Department of Transportation official sparred at an industry conference Sunday over the best way to fund the nation’s growing mobility needs.
“I think one of the biggest problems is that today there is a lack of clear vision as to what the government … is trying to achieve in transportation,” Jack Schenendorf, vice chairman of the National Surface Transportation Policy and Revenue Study Commission, told those attending a panel discussion at the Transportation Research Board’s annual meeting.
Schenendorf said that in the years leading up to the construction of the Interstate highway system, the nation had a vision and that vision allowed President Dwight Eisenhower and Congress to quadruple the gas tax to build the visionary network. Articulating a new national vision that centers on reducing traffic congestion could provide the political capital to increasing the gas tax again, he said. The gas tax was last raised in 1993.
Schenendorf made the comments just before the release of a commission report today that will propose raising the current gas tax of 18.4 cents per gallon by between five and eight cents per year for five years and indexing the tax for inflation after that.
The report is also expected to call on Congress to establish specific congestion relief goals which state and local governments would be able to meet through a range of options — a departure from the current transportation program, which only permits gas tax dollars to be spent on highway and some transit projects.
But Tyler Duvall, the DOT assistant secretary for transportation policy who also spoke at the conference, warned that boosting the gas tax will only perpetuate problems of the existing transportation system, which has failed to alleviate congestion.
“So the question we always ask is, how do new ideas — new pricing concepts, new utilization of private capital — compare to existing models that, in our view, do not really respond well to the needs of consumers or allocate resources efficiently?” Duvall said.
One reason that the gas tax has not been an ineffective financing tool to fight congestion is that Congress is increasingly earmarking federal gas tax receipts for transportation programs in their districts instead of dedicating them to projects that would provide the best results to reduce gridlock, Duvall said.
The failure of the existing gas-tax-funded system has led Transportation Secretary Mary Peters and two other panel members to dissent from the commission’s recommendations.
The commission will also propose easing of restrictions on the tolling the Interstate system, in a nod to the notion that tolling will need to play a greater role in transportation finance in the future, according to Washington, D.C.-based consultant C. Kenneth Orski, who has seen the report.
For example, the report will say tolling should only be used to fund new capacity on the Interstate. The report is also expected to recommend that only metropolitan areas with more than one million people be allowed to use variable price tolling to mitigate congestion.
As for pubic-private partnerships, the report will suggest that Congress prohibit so-called non-compete clauses in P3 deals where states or localities lease a road to a private party for a number of years. Non-compete clauses prevent the government from building or improving roads that would compete with the leased road.
Congress should also limit increases in tolls to inflation, require that private entities share revenue beyond a certain level with the public entities, and a limit on the length of concession agreements, the report will say.
Orski, an advocate of increased private-sector investment in transportation infrastructure, believes that “some of the proposed conditions [are] onerous.”
Other recommendations include a federal ticket tax on transit trips and intercity rail passenger trips to augment federal gas tax funding and a fee on freight shipments for freight infrastructure investment. The report also proposes that the nation switch to a pricing system based on vehicle miles traveled, instead of the gas tax, after 2025.
