Why your highway has potholes: The government spends too much on mass transit
In a typical year only about 65 cents of every gas tax dollar is spent on roads and highways. The rest is intercepted by the public transit lobby and Congressional earmarkers. Then there are the union wages that pad the cost of all federal projects. The New York Times reported in 2010 that 8,074 Metropolitan Transportation Authority employees made $100,000 or more in 2009 even as the system loses money.
Transit is the biggest drain. Only in New York, San Francisco and Washington, D.C. does public transit account for more than 5% of commuter trips. Even with a recent 2.3% gain in bus and rail use due to high gas prices, public transit still accounts for a mere 2% of all inner-city trips and closer to 1% outside of New York.
Since 1982 government mass-transit subsidies have totaled $750 billion (in today’s dollars), yet the share of travelers using transit has fallen by nearly one-third, according to Heritage Foundation transportation expert Wendell Cox. Federal data indicate that in 2010 in most major cities more people walked to work or telecommuted than used public transit…
The best solution would be to return all the gas tax money to the states, roughly in proportion to the money each pays in.
Blowback
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Sounds to me like the gas tax can be lowered to 65% of what it is now and that new taxes need to be imposed on the USERS of these boondoggles to make up the difference.
Gasoline taxes on CARS should ONLY go back into the roads we drive on.
wildcat72 on April 16, 2012 at 11:50 AM
Leftist hogwash wastes money? Shocking.
forest on April 16, 2012 at 11:51 AM
Oh I don’t see THIS happening. As of right now, we pay (as a nation) about 1.89 federal taxes per gallon of gasoline. This does not include state or city or county taxes.
upinak on April 16, 2012 at 11:51 AM
Yes! Then the states can do as they will with it, but hopefully much of the infrastructure will be privatized.
petefrt on April 16, 2012 at 11:55 AM
What I’d like to see is a state start defying federal mandates, ie: the kind where the feds say, “you must have a primary seatbelt law” for example, “or you lose all your highway funding”. In that event, simply require all gasoline stations send the federal portion of the gasoline tax to the STATE government so they can allocate their ACTUAL fair share of highway funds themselves.
wildcat72 on April 16, 2012 at 11:56 AM
Another take on this from Car & Driver.
Actually, I think the gas tax should be abolished and all freeways should be privately operated toll roads.
Don’t worry, I wore my asbestos pajamas today.
fiatboomer on April 16, 2012 at 11:57 AM
Yeah, this is why I have to roll my eyes at politicians who say they don’t have enough money to maintain the roads. If they’d stop stealing 35% of it for pet projects and causes, the money would be there.
Doomberg on April 16, 2012 at 11:57 AM
Sweetie, I know you want this; heck what person wouldn’t? But the feds are making bank on us and our driving habits. Do you really see them doing this?
Nope. Come back to reality.
upinak on April 16, 2012 at 11:57 AM
Roads cost about $1million/mile to lay down, rail about $10million/mile… about 15 years ago, beats me what it is today.
Roads need more maintenance over time, but are lower cost to start with.
Meanwhile the government must pick up the tab for vehicles on the rails, maintenance, staffing of the vehicles, electricity/fuel costs… all done at a government pace with government overhead and generally costing out the wazoo to run.
The vehicles on roads are owned privately, maintained privately, paid for privately and, generally, individuals and companies seek the best value for their buck to cut down on overhead costs.
Rail is great for freight, not so good for humans unless they are treated like freight. If companies could make money doing *that* then government wouldn’t need to ‘invest’ in rail, and spend all those bucks every year to run it. Sadly people expect to be treated like people, not freight, which costs too much and government runs to expand government, not get to the best value per dollar spent.
This is why Progressives love government run rail: it expands government at the highest cost with the least payback.
Roads allow independence: Rail forces dependence.
And that is why your roads suck and no one uses rapid transit enough to make it break even.
ajacksonian on April 16, 2012 at 12:00 PM
Heck, that would be the Awesome! But, if you knew you could get away with taxing the crap out of people who either don’t know or care… would you?
Everyone gripes about oil companies making profit (even though it is gross and world wide and only on crude, not refined), I would like to see what the feds make per year on taxing us. If Oil companies are making .08 pg and the feds are making 1.89 pg, it makes you go hmmmmmmmm.
upinak on April 16, 2012 at 12:00 PM
That would work if it weren’t for the contracts that the DOT’s write with those private entities. Here in Texas we have been screwed in previously unimaginable ways, like paying new tolls on existing public roads, and having lowered speed limits on existing roads to attempt to force traffic onto the new, tolled roads. The interchanges and routing are all designed by Machiavelli’s own engineers to make working around the toll roads on existing parallel paths longer and more difficult than it was before the private toll went through.
TexasDan on April 16, 2012 at 12:01 PM
Biden needs low ticket prices so that he can afford to ride Amtrak.
But I thought he was willing to pay more.
When asked today about Joe Biden and his love for Amtrak, Jay Carney will respond that he knows at least three Joe Bidens.
BuckeyeSam on April 16, 2012 at 12:03 PM
I’ve been screaming about people having to license their Bicycles here in Portland for a long time now. They don’t own cars, have bicycles, and demand we use our gas tax to build bike lanes, bicycle only over passes, and making car lanes into bike only lanes.
portlandon on April 16, 2012 at 12:03 PM
it would also help if the roads were made… thicker. How a lot of Europe (I know, I know) gets around pot holes, is they make the roads 6 inches thick in places. They also use a different asphalt base, as the US uses a cheaper version that disintegrates faster.
Heck, Germany puts in 1 ft of concrete and 6 inches to 1 ft of asphalt on the major roads, and only replaces them every 15 to 20 yrs.
upinak on April 16, 2012 at 12:04 PM
There’s nothing wrong with our driving habits. The federal transportation dollar should cater to us, not the other way around. It’s time to weed out the idea that Americans drive “too much” or have “too much” or otherwise need to be herded, confined, or trimmed like a hedge by people whose only valid point is that they don’t like all the cars and driving.
There is not a scintilla of “science,” and certainly no superior moral virtue, behind hatred of the automobile culture. There is nothing but personal preference. Go ahead, have your personal preference. But those who dislike the automobile have no prior right to control government policy.
Meanwhile, let’s talk my personal preferences. Women: out of the jeggings! No one over the age of 8 can wear those without looking idiotic. Men: lose the baggy, below the knee shorts! Seriously, you look like you escaped from an asylum.
Thank you very much.
J.E. Dyer on April 16, 2012 at 12:07 PM
I don’t like this meme. The other major transport mode in the US, air travel, is the most restrictive, tightly controlled, TSA-infested mode of transportation in modern history.
Yes, many lefties are abusing rail transport advocacy to force people out of their cars and enrich PEUs. But rail transport can integrate well with freeways and airports to provide a modern transportation network with a wealth of options. If Amtrak was finally privatized, you’d see the demise of many pork-barrel passenger routes but a dramatic improvement in the areas where rail transport is in demand (SD-LA and the Northeast Corridor).
Lefties are ruining the future of rail transportation in this country by drowning it in subsidies and destroying competition.
fiatboomer on April 16, 2012 at 12:08 PM
Why take the long road to get here? Just cancel the tax altogether.
“Returning” the money sounds a like a “your current representative” is bringing home the bacon ad ….so re-elect him.
BobMbx on April 16, 2012 at 12:11 PM
I don’t have any studies that support this, but I would bet that the negatives of busing outweigh the positives. That is, when you take into account the noise, pollution, and traffic conditions created by buses, they actually make people worse off.
I suspect that buses are, primarily (like just about everything else in our society) just another taxpayer-funded subsidy.
ramesees on April 16, 2012 at 12:13 PM
I’ve been an advocate of having states thumb their noses at the feds for years. The federal government only takes the power and liberties the individual states are willing to give up….for money.
Don’t like the US Dept. of Education? Get a ballot initiative to wean your state off the federal teat.
BobMbx on April 16, 2012 at 12:15 PM
The gigantic difference between the two is this: The government incurs no cost or liability in its taking of oil taxes. From the governments perspective, it is free money, as are all taxes.
BobMbx on April 16, 2012 at 12:20 PM
Is it only me who sees this and wonders why are we sending it to the national government in the first place if we’re just going to return it to the states?
Lost in Jersey on April 16, 2012 at 12:27 PM
Right on. If oil is “big”, how big does that make government?
I actually think that taxes on gasoline and diesel could work well as a “use” tax, but of course they obviously don’t.
TexasDan on April 16, 2012 at 12:39 PM
This is how the Federal government controls the states. If the state spends its own money then government on the Federal level has no control. But when the states send the money to the Federal government, it can dictate how that money is spent when it is returned to the states.
shuzilla on April 16, 2012 at 12:47 PM
I sent a link to the article this morning to a friend of mine who is a civil engineer with a city. The response I got:
4 cents on an $18 million dollar invoice and the state kicks it back. That is the sort of insanity that drives costs up. This is a civil engineer making in excess of $100K/year having to waste hours of time quibbling over 4 cents. Back home we called that “stepping over a dollar to pick up a dime”.
So that 4 cents has cost the state agency the time to review and and reject the invoice, the initiating engineer needs to find the “discrepancy” and send the invoice back where it needs to be reviewed again. Easily several hundred dollars spent on looking for the missing 4 cents. It is like Captain Queeg’s cherries. This state will waste billion (literally) on projects nobody wants yet quibble over 4 cents on a road people DO want.
crosspatch on April 16, 2012 at 12:49 PM
Uh uh. No way. If anything, the government doesn’t spend enough on mass transit.
Those of you commenting against mass transit here – how many of you are from areas with congested traffic? I mean real congestion – the kind where you are sitting still in bumper-to-bumper traffic every day, almost without fail. That’s what the Beltway looks like in Washington DC. That’s what the Tunnel into Manhattan looks like off the Turnpike. That’s what I-405 looks like going from LA to the Valley. That’s what the Golden Gate Bridge looks like….
Simple fact of the matter is that buses cram more people into a square foot on pre-existing highway than any other transportation solution except bicycles and pedestrian traffic and thus can do more to alleviate congestion (read: more efficient use of scarce resources). And you’re crying about potholes?
Infrastructure spending is not even close to being properly funded in most super-urban cities and yes, it DOES threaten recovery when your customers don’t want to come to you not because your product or service sucks, but because they don’t want to drive for an hour through godawful traffic again.
If you want to make the argument that your rural or otherwise sparsely populated community doesn’t need to spend millions on light rail, fine. I can buy that. But let’s make a record of all other completely Constitutional spending that rural areas disproportionately benefit from – it’s no secret the Post Office loses money because, unlike UPS or FedEx or any other competitor, the Post Office has to charge the same socialized cost no matter if you live in Manhattan or on the North Slope of Alaska. That money comes out of the Federal budget. Or maybe we shouldn’t try to build a fence along our border with Mexico? Oh yeah, they’re definitely not feeling the drug war pain in the Washington DC suburbs or on Long Island. We’ll dismantle military bases built in “random” places like Fort Benning and build them outside places like Las Vegas so our troops can have some “real” entertainment on their free time instead of creating bubble economies in the middle of nowhere entirely dependent on Federal spending. It’s not a bad thing that urban environments that desperately need this money are disproportionately benefiting from mass-transit spending – it’s just a part of federal governance.
solatic on April 16, 2012 at 12:50 PM
most of the “real people” choose not to live in congested areas.
upinak on April 16, 2012 at 12:53 PM
The government is spending money on the wrong areas of mass transit. AMTRAK has thousands of rail cars in maintenance yards sitting idle for lack of spare parts while sold-out trains are rolling long distances that could be using those cars.
Adding more cars to a passenger train reduces the per-passenger cost of that trip. AMTRAK complains on one hand that they don’t make enough to support the service to repair the cars but at the same time, if they repaired the cars and put them in service, the per passenger costs would go down. In other words, the incremental cost of pulling one additional car load of passengers is less than the revenue generated by a car full of paying passengers. It doesn’t cost much more in fuel to pull another car of people.
We have an underutilized resource in our rail system today. The mistake we make is in building new rail. We don’t need to do that. We need to make better use of the rights of way that we already have.
crosspatch on April 16, 2012 at 1:04 PM
This was my first thought.
cptacek on April 16, 2012 at 1:09 PM
Your statistics show how desperate people are to stay off of mass transit.
The most insightful piece ever written about mass transit is
http://www.theonion.com/articles/report-98-percent-of-us-commuters-favor-public-tra,1434/
pedestrian on April 16, 2012 at 1:19 PM
this is one of those silly statements people make that really infuriate me. Americans are full and equal citizens no matter where they live and the fact of the matter is that rural and under populated areas suck up vastly more then they have ever contributed to the national budget. So if you want to bite the hand the fed you, paid for telephone lines, electrical lines, highways, byways, asphalt, sewage, schools, and the internet go ahead. But realize just how foolish you are with such flippant statements.
Zekecorlain on April 16, 2012 at 1:52 PM
The establishment and maintenance of post offices is a function of the federal government specifically provided for in the Constitution. The establishment of immigration laws and the defense of our borders is a function of the federal government specifically provided for in the Constitution. The military is a function of the federal government specifically provided for in the Constitution.
Cite for me the part of the Constitution that authorizes the federal government to spend money on mass transit, or for that matter highways in general, and then we can talk.
Shump on April 16, 2012 at 2:58 PM