Everybody knows that Virginia needs to invest more money in its transportation infrastructure. The central questions that have concerned lawmakers is how much money, and who pays? (I’ll leave aside for now the nettlesome issue, which has received insufficient attention, of coordinating transportation improvements with human settlement patterns.)
As the collapse of the HB 3202 funding formula shows, Virginia’s transportation funding policy is in total disarray. In this week’s column, I argue that the only approach to raising more money for transportation that can be sold politically to the public is one built around the principle of user pays. In the normal course of politics, constituencies lobby for road and transit improvements that benefit them — but do their utmost to shift the cost to someone else. That just won’t work anymore. People don’t trust the system to treat them fairly. The only politically palatable way to raise funds is to ensure that those who use, or benefit from, transportation improvements pay for those improvements themselves.
No more taxing the public and cycling billions of dollars to Richmond where politicians, bureaucrats and rent-seeking lobbyists can divert funds to their own special uses. From now on, transportation revenues must go directly back to those who pay for them. And if the money can’t be found to build a pet project, then maybe, just maybe, it doesn’t deserve to be built.
But never fear. There are many, many sources of funds that we can tap to expand our transportation system. In “User Pays,” I outline many of them and show how they can be sold politically to a skeptical public.
Most of these ideas are familiar to faithful readers of Bacon’s Rebellion. But for the benefit of those who don’t haunt this blog every day and read all the comments, here is an outline of the main points:
- Dedicate the gas tax to maintenance. Raise or lower the tax as maintenance costs rise or fall.
- Prepare for the day when the gas tax doesn’t work anymore by investigating a Vehicle Miles Traveled tax.
- Use privately financed tolls to build major new bridge and limited-access highway projects.
- Charge impact fees on commercial and residential development
- Use CDAs and TIFs to finance local projects when impact fees do not suffice
- Use congestion tolls to allocate scarce highway capacity. Create congestion “corridors” and “districts” where the tolls apply, and plow back revenues into improvements that increase mobility and access within those corridors and districts.
- Tap the General Fund only for projects that can be justified on the basis of public safety or economic development.
- Pass a constitutional amendment to protect dedicated transportation revenues from legislative raids.
