We’re not alone with road woes

By Peter Bacqué, Media General News Service
Published: June 21, 2008

Eagerly watched by national transportation officials, Oregon wrapped up a high-tech test project last year to record the miles a group of volunteers drove.
“The principal idea was a per-mile charge ... as a replacement for the gas tax,” said Jim Whitty, the Oregon Department of Transportation’s manager of innovative partnerships and alternative funding.
Using a gee-whiz system of computers and global positioning satellites, he said, “it worked really easily.” But the groundbreaking and user-friendly test involving 260 Portland-area motorists didn’t find a new, painless pot of money for urgent transportation needs.
Virginia’s struggle to find politically viable ways to pay for solutions to its costly highway and transit problem is echoed across the country. And transportation officials say there is no silver bullet for transportation funding woes here or in other states.
Monday, Gov. Timothy M. Kaine convenes a special session of the General Assembly, hoping to generate $1 billion annually for state highway maintenance and to relieve congestion in Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads. State officials estimate Virginia has at least $19 billion in unmet transportation needs.
“There is no magic,” said Mark L. Foster, chief financial officer with North Carolina’s Department of Transportation. “You’re not going to solve it based on sound bites and knee-jerk reactions.”
Oregon has “well over $10 billion in unmet needs,” Whitty said. “We have a $4 billion bridge we want to build between Portland and Washington [state] on Interstate 5, and that’s just one project.
“Most of the public doesn’t quite understand the fix that transportation’s in,” the Oregon official said. “This isn’t just our problem. This is the whole nation’s problem.”
To make America’s roads, rails and public transit a globally competitive system to move people and goods, America needs to invest $225 billion to $338 billion a year for the next 50 years, the congressionally established National Surface Transportation Policy and Revenue Study Commission says.
But, the commission said, “we are spending less than 40 percent of this amount today.”
Financial innovations being looked at across the nation include tolls, congestion pricing, high-occupancy toll-lane projects and a range of public-private partnership ideas.
Virginia “has actually been in the upper end of creativity on some of these,” said Peter “Jack” Basso of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials. Basso is a former assistant U.S. secretary of transportation for budget and programs and the U.S. DOT’s chief financial officer.
Directly charging for vehicle-miles traveled, along the lines of the Oregon test project, is another idea on the horizon of public debate, but it won’t be possible for 12 to 15 years, officials said, when cars and trucks, roads, gas stations and governments can be fitted with the technology.
For almost a century, federal and state governments, including Virginia’s, have used motor-fuel taxes — the gas tax — and vehicle taxes as their main sources for highway funding.
Those revenues built the world’s most extensive highway network, but the price tag to maintain and improve this aging system will soon exceed expected highway revenue. Without congressional action, federal highway funds are expected to dry up next year, according to the Transportation Transformation Group, a transportation advocacy group based in Washington and Austin, Texas.
West Virginia, like Virginia, has given its Department of Transportation responsibility for state and local roads — 34,610 miles in all. The West Virginia state highway system is supported only by user fees, such as fuel taxes, tolls and license fees.
But the Mountaineer State is working with a mining company to help build the 90-mile-long King Coal Highway across southwestern West Virginia. A Virginia-based coal company is digging coal while constructing the highway’s foundation, saving the public about half the cost of the work.
Virginia is using the same sort of public-private risk-sharing on the Coalfields Expressway in Southwest Virginia. The Virginia Department of Transportation hopes to save as much as half of the $2.8 billion cost of the approximately 51-mile Coalfields Expressway by having two coal companies mine the road’s alignment for coal, thus doing for VDOT the rough grading for the road through the mountainous terrain.
Virginia’s Coalfields Expressway will run from Pound in Wise County to the West Virginia Coalfields Expressway.
Florida, another fast-growing Southern state, has about 11,500 miles of state-owned highways. The Sunshine State has indexed its gas tax to inflation, adjusting the tax annually, said Marsha Johnson, the Florida Department of Transportation’s financial development director. Virginia’s legislature has turned down indexing the state’s gas tax.
“We would just be sunk without it,” Johnson said, because fuel consumption itself is down as the economy sours and oil prices soar. “I don’t know whether it’s better than other states. It’s just what works for Florida.”
For transportation work, sooner or later “somebody’s paying,” Basso said. “I don’t care what you do, at the end of the day you need cash. . . . There is no such thing as free lunch. Somebody’s got to pay.”
More money for roads and transit projects, however, is not necessarily the solution to America’s mobility problems, critics of the national transportation system say.
“We’ve spent the last 60 years designing almost exclusively for the automobile,” said Anne P. Canby, president of the Washington-based Surface Transportation Policy Project. “Now that gas is almost $4 a gallon and going up, that’s not the best place to be in.”
Canby is the former head of two states’ departments of transportation, New Jersey’s and Delaware’s.
It’s time to rethink America’s patterns of land use to encourage development that reduces the need for people to drive, she said, such as clustered and mixed-use housing projects.
“It doesn’t cost money to change development patterns,” Canby said, “but it does cost money to pay for developments that are very auto-reliant.”
Peter Bacqué is a staff writer for the Richmond Times-Dispatch.