The fiscal underpinnings of Virgnia’s road construction and maintenance program continue to deteriorate, John R. Layman, the state Department of Taxation’s chief economist, told the Commonwealth Transportation Board yesterday. “There’s no ‘up’ in this presentation right now,” he said, as reported by Peter Bacque with the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
The state’s highway maintenance fund will see about $125 million less in each of the next two years, said Layman, and maintenance revenues are projected to fall by $739.9 million over the next six years. With reductions in other state tax revenues, Virginia will have about $300 million less annually for transportation. And that’s the best case, said Pierce R. Homer, secretary of transportation.
Adjusted for inflation, the state’s motor fuels tax collections are the lowest they’ve been in 20 years, Layman said. The underlying cause is one that Bacon’s Rebellion has been warning about for years. When gas prices soar, people (a) drive less and consume less gasoline, and (b) shift to more fuel-efficient vehicles. Virginia’s transportation funding system, based primarily on the gasoline tax, is living on borrowed time.
“Every time you see a [hybrid electric] Prius on the road, that’s somebody consuming less gas, but driving anyway,” Layman told the board.
However, there could have been an “up” to the situation, if Layman had chosen to present it: People are driving less. When people drive less, there’s less traffic congestion — the very reason we need more construction dollars in the first place.
Sales of new vehicles in the current 2009 fiscal year are expected to fall to levels not seen since the mid-1990s, Layman said. It would be interesting to see what’s happening to total Vehicle Miles Driven. If people are driving less, reducing the number of cars on the road at any point in time, then we may need to re-think road-building plans that are predicated on the outmoded assumption that traffic will continue to increase as it has for the past 25 years.
