June 2, 2014

Boston Globe: Tax the Roads, Not Fuel

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By Jeff Jacoby, June 2, 2014

For decades, gasoline taxes have been the largest source of funds for building and fixing America’s highways. What happens if those funds dry up?

Gasoline sales have been trending downward in recent years, thanks in part to more fuel-efficient cars, which travel farther and farther between fill-ups. That trend is sure to continue. Federal fuel-economy standards require automakers to achieve an average of 54.5 miles per gallon for new vehicles by 2025. And the first all-electric cars — such as the BMW i3, which can run for 80 miles on battery power alone — are now showing up in dealers’ showrooms.

Actually, more money has to come from somewhere. Steel and concrete aren’t getting cheaper; neither are the expenses involved in hiring engineers and construction crews. According to Carl Davis, a policy analyst at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, highway construction and repair costs have climbed 55 percent over the past 20 years, while the federal gas tax has remained unchanged at 18.4 cents per gallon. “That means drivers today are chipping in the same $3 in federal taxes per tank of gas that they paid in 1993,” Davis says, “even as the construction projects being funded with that $3 have become much more expensive.”

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