Streetsblog Capitol Hill

Transportation reformers around the country have long been disappointed at politicians’ unwillingness to raise the gas tax to pay for infrastructure. It seems, to many, an obvious and necessary solution for the chronic underfunding of our transportation system. Meanwhile, to the politicians, it is just as obvious that raising consumer taxes during a recession is a bad idea.

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has teamed up with a multi-partisan group to reform the way our transportation system collects revenues.

The Leadership Initiative on Transportation Solvency, a project of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, has come up with a solution.

The three principals of the Initiative – former senator (and presidential candidate and basketball star) Bill Bradley (a Democrat), former governor and DHS secretary Tom Ridge (a Republican), and former comptroller general David Walker (an Independent) – aren’t transportation experts, which Carnegie Endowment President Jessica Matthews says is an asset, since they have “no constituencies to serve.” Indeed, their interest is in creating a paradigm for “the type of fundamental review and reexamination that must be undertaken with every major government program and policy,” according to Walker. All three spoke at an event yesterday to launch the 125-page report, “Road to Recovery: Transforming America’s Transportation.”

A New Way to Raise Transportation Revenues

In addition to other reforms, the three are advocating a formula for increasing transportation revenues in a way that might be more politically and economically palatable.

First, they say, tax gas when the price is on the way down. That’s the way to make it less controversial. They’d like to see a variable gas tax of anywhere between zero and 43 cents per gallon. It would go up or down counter-cyclically based on oil prices, rising when oil prices diminish.

The problem, of course, is that oil prices aren’t expected to diminish. Sure, they were on their way down over the last few months (and then spiked again last week), but over the long term, as scarcity increases, so will prices. The Bradley/Ridge/Walker strategy, then, would leave us with a lower gas tax – and less ability to pay for infrastructure. Right?

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With the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee set to introduce its reauthorization bill the first week of July and the Senate EPW Committee already behind on its own timeline to introduce its own, think tanks and policy groups have a limited amount of time left to influence the process. The Bipartisan Policy Center got into the act yesterday with its report, “Performance Driven: Achieving Wiser Investment in Transportation.”

The Bipartisan Policy Center gets down to brass tacks on how the federal government can overhaul transportation funding for better outcomes. Photo: Metropolitan Planning Council

It’s a sequel to a 2009 study laying out “A New Vision for Transportation Policy,” which sought to divide all federal funding into two mode-neutral categories: system preservation (which would get 75 percent of all federal transportation dollars) and capacity expansion (which would take 25 percent).

The new report goes further to fully re-design the framework for how the BPC thinks the federal government should change the way it allocates transportation money. The authors take no position on how big the “pie” of federal transportation funding should be – they say their recommendations should guide how the pie is divided, no matter how big it is.

“This report takes as given the current revenue levels,” BPC Transportation Advocacy Director JayEtta Hecker told an audience yesterday at the report launch. “We’re not advocating for something there’s no receptivity for.”

“Given the bills that are being considered in Congress now, we wanted to be relevant to them,” said former Senator Slade Gorton, a co-chair of the BPC’s transportation project. Another co-chair, former New York Congressman Sherry Boehlert, said he would like to see a shift to a VMT fee and a significant hike in the gas tax in the meantime – but his view hasn’t prevailed, and so they’re stuck working with a small pie.

Many in Washington have turned to performance measures as an essential element of any transportation bill that includes lower levels of funding, in order to guarantee that those scarce resources are well-utilized. The BPC framework sets out specifically how the new system would work.

To start, the BPC recommends setting clear goals for the federal surface transportation program. BPC says performance should be measured against these five goals:

• Economic Growth
• National Connectivity (connecting people and goods across the nation)
• Metropolitan Accessibility (providing efficient access to jobs and other services)
• Energy Security and Environmental Protection
• Safety

Starting from there, BPC recommends consolidating the 108 current federal transportation programs into 10 mode-neutral new programs:
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