Do Roads Pay for Themselves?
Do Roads Pay for Themselves?

Author:

Publisher:

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 40

ISBN-13:

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Highway advocates often claim that roads 'pay for themselves, ' with gasoline taxes and other charges to motorists covering, or nearly covering, the full cost of highway construction and maintenance. They are wrong. Highways do not, and, except for brief periods in our nation's history, never have, paid for themselves through the taxes that highway advocates label 'user fees.' Yet highway advocates continue to suggest they do in an attempt to secure preferential access to scarce public resources and to shape how those resources are spent. To have a meaningful national debate over transportation policy, particularly at a time of tight public budgets, it is important to get past the myths and address the real, difficult choices America must make for the 21st century.

Rethinking America's Highways
Rethinking America's Highways

Author: Robert W. Poole

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2018-08-03

Total Pages: 376

ISBN-13: 022655760X

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A transportation expert makes a provocative case for changing the nation’s approach to highways, offering “bold, innovative thinking on infrastructure” (Rick Geddes, Cornell University). Americans spend hours every day sitting in traffic. And the roads they idle on are often rough and potholed, with exits, tunnels, guardrails, and bridges in terrible disrepair. According to transportation expert Robert Poole, this congestion and deterioration are outcomes of the way America manages its highways. Our twentieth-century model overly politicizes highway investment decisions, short-changing maintenance and often investing in projects whose costs exceed their benefits. In Rethinking America’s Highways, Poole examines how our current model of state-owned highways came about and why it is failing to satisfy its customers. He argues for a new model that treats highways themselves as public utilities—like electricity, telephones, and water supply. If highways were provided commercially, Poole argues, people would pay for highways based on how much they used, and the companies would issue revenue bonds to invest in facilities people were willing to pay for. Arguing for highway investments to be motivated by economic rather than political factors, this book makes a carefully-reasoned and well-documented case for a new approach to highways.

Highway Finance
Highway Finance

Author: N. Kent Bramlett

Publisher:

Published: 1983

Total Pages: 104

ISBN-13:

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This publication contains two reports on highway finance. The first report, "The Evolution of the Highway-User Charge Principle," examines the financing concept that, for the most part, pays for building our highways, their maintenance and other related highway costs. It examines the history of road and highway financing in the U.S. and the development of the "user-pays" concept. The user-nonuser debate is described, including who benefits from highways. The second report, "State Highway Finance Trends," examines the means of fiscal revival in State highway programs. It identifies and analyzes representative fiscal mechanisms of the several States which are responsible for the fiscal recovery. It also discusses implications such as the broadening of the scope of State transportation programs, including multimodal financing, highway-user subsidization of public transportation, and the nonuser revenue support of highway and transportation programs.