Could Fuel Costs Hurt the Country’s Roads?
The fact that the cost of fuel has skyrocketed has been a tremendous problem for consumers, making everything – especially travel – more expensive. It has become too expensive for many, and as a result, less people have been traveling this summer. In fact, in June, alone, travel dropped nearly 5% from last years amount of miles traveled, in what is usually a busy travel month with kids out of school.
We continue to hear about new and amazing effects of the fuel crisis, and the latest effect is the potentially negative effect on the roads themselves. How could less travel have a negative effect on the roads? In a not so obvious way.
The tax on fuel contributes to the nation’s highway fund. As consumers buy less fuel, there is less money from taxes to contribute to the Highway Trust Fund. Taxes on all types of fuel are contributed to this fund.
A major source of funding for infrastructure, repairs and other necessities on the roads and for the roads, is that very fund, and the less consumption of fuel actually will create more issues that could plague our nation’s roadways.
There have been calls for making repair and maintenance of the roads less dependent on fuel taxes. This is not necessarily a simple idea. There are many ideas swirling around including creating a Metropolitan Investment Fund to reward cities that improve traffic and deal with other issues related to congestion.
Other ideas include a National Infrastructure Bank that would work like the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and fund civic building projects for everything from bridges to sewers and more. The funding would come from bonds, and the agency would be nonpartisan.
This is a complicated issue that needs to be addressed. It is good that lawmakers are making a concerted effort to deal with the effects that the fuel crisis has created – even the ones that are not that obvious.