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The Roads Crisis

Here and across the country, we don’t have enough money to support our highway, byway and bridge habit. Raising the money will mean taking a path so far untravelled.

Illustration by Keith Negley

Retiree Leroy Youngblood’s daily circuit didn’t take him much beyond his rental properties, the grocery store and the health club, but that didn’t dampen his enthusiasm for turning his Subaru hatchback into a transportation funding laboratory. In 2006, he was among 299 Oregon drivers who volunteered to participate in a pilot program to test a new tax based on vehicle miles travelled.

His car was outfitted with a transponder, which measured how many miles Youngblood had driven in between fill-ups. When Youngblood pulled into the gas station, the transponder delivered the information to the pump. Instead of paying tax on the gas he purchased, he was charged a substitute tax based on how far he’d gone since the last fill up—roughly one cent for every mile.

Youngblood, sixty-five, estimates he paid slightly more than he would have under the gas tax, but he didn’t mind. “It was really insignificant,” he says. “I thought the study was important for someone to do—and I think it could work.”

Walter Daggett, another volunteer, was far more skeptical of its future prospects. “I thought it was a very brave adventure,” he says. “But the execution—I considered that dead on arrival.” 

The idea is far from dead and many more entities, from Rhode Island to the federal government, are considering its execution. That’s because nearly every transportation system in the U.S. is in search of new dollars to patch crumbled roads and bridges. The Oregon legislature began talking about shifting to a vehicle-miles-travelled tax eight years ago, and although a switch is hardly imminent, the pilot has started a very important conversation about a problem that must be solved.  

“Changing a system scares people,” says James Whitty, of the Oregon Department of Transportation. “There’s a suspicion of change because people don’t know what it’s going to mean.”

What scares transportation planners and legislators more is letting things continue as they are. Last year, a national commission estimated that the federal Highway Transportation Fund, which collects federal gas and vehicle taxes and then funnels the money back to the states for road projects, will—at the current spending rate—go broke this year. The transit account would collapse in 2012. In Rhode Island, the gap between our needs and our funds is about $284 million a year.

“You can look at every state and see the same fundamental crisis,” says Jack Basso, president of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials. “It’s time to make some serious changes, but politically it’s very difficult.”

In late December, a panel convened by Governor Carcieri to study funding the state’s transportation projects issued its report. It is the third such study in thirteen years.

“These reports don’t look very different from one to the other,” says Deborah Ro-sen, of URI’s Transportation Center. “My biggest fear is that this report will suffer the fate of previous panels. If we had put some recommendations in place, we’d be in better shape. I’m not saying we’d be solvent, but we’d be in a better position.”

The report enumerates Rhode Island’s position today, which is, in a word, bad. The state has accumulated a staggering list of urgently needed improvements. One hundred and sixty-four of the state’s bridges are structurally deficient; sixty-one have posted weight limits; nearly 60 percent of the road pavement is fair, poor or outright failed; the Rhode Island Public Transit Authority is in perpetual deficit.

Under the current revenue scheme, the state’s chances of crossing off even half the items on its to-do list are dim. Like the federal government, the state relies heavily on the gas tax. Like the federal government, Rhode Island hasn’t raised it in years. As more consumers opt for hybrids or more fuel-efficient vehicles, there are fewer opportunities to collect taxes on gasoline. As inflation drives up construction costs, the shrinking revenues raised by the gas tax pay for less and less.

Rhode Island’s transportation funding formula is shakier still due to its heavy reliance on federal funding. While most states get a third of their transportation revenues from federal highway funds, Rhode Island depends on two-thirds federal funding. Those dollars require a state match, and since the state doesn’t raise enough from gas taxes, every two years, the voters have approved bonds to provide it. The gas tax raises about $96 million—$94 million goes to the Rhode Island Department of Transportation. And that $94 million equals the amount of money the state pays on debt service for transportation projects each year.

In a series of public meetings last year, RIDOT Director Michael P. Lewis was blunt: “They didn’t really know how transportation was funded, and they had no understanding of how the bond issues fed into the system,” he said. “But we need to wean ourselves off bond issues and change to a pay-as-you-go model.”

The commission offered nine different ways to raise funds, from a vehicle-miles-travelled tax to interstate tolls to a bump in the gas tax or auto registration fees. The latter two options are the easiest to implement, since the state already collects them. But these strategies would be just drops in the bucket. Under two scenarios—one that would raise $150 million and one that would raise double that amount—sturdier steps would have to be taken.  

“The funding shortfall has to be met somehow, someway,” says Lloyd Albert of AAA Southern New England. “Politicians have to have the political will to do so.”

A federal stimulus might reduce the shortfall and delay that shift, but commission member John C. Simmons, executive director of the Rhode Island Public Expenditure Council, cautions, “We have to continue to push on the structural fix and not to lose sight of the big picture.”

Tax cuts being far more politically popular than tax increases (remember all those ill-advised campaign calls for a gas tax holiday?), the idea of tolls on the interstate doesn’t exactly rally the people. In fact, that proposal—a key element of both scenarios—has already caused a minor stir. But there’s no denying that we have delayed the inevitable nearly to the breaking point. In June, the rusting steel beams under the Sakonnet River Bridge compelled RIDOT to lower the weight limit to protect the bridge’s structural supports from deteriorating further. The posting banned vehicles with more than two axles from using it and forced RIPTA to cut routes. And as anyone who’s taken the thirty-mile detour to the Mount Hope Bridge knows, it’s a long way from Point A to Point B.