Comparison Features

The State of the Union's Roads: An Investigative Report

What's happening to our playground? The American highway is broken. And broke.



Price Starting at

Not Available


Since 2005, the trust fund has been spent according to the latest reauthorization, SAFETEA-LU (an acronym for the Safe,  Accountable, Flexible, Efficient Transportation Equity Act: A Legacy for Users), which allocated a total that Congress could spend over the bill’s life span, doling out roughly one-sixth each year. The long time frame is necessary so state transportation departments have enough lead time to plan and build a project, secure in the knowledge of how much money they’ll get and the limits of what they can spend it on. SAFETEA-LU, for example, authorized about $193 billion between 2005 and 2009 for the trust fund, an average of about $32 billion per year to the states.

Once in the HTF, interstate money is divided according to complex formulas that take into account things such as lane-miles of road, the number of  licensed drivers, ­priority programs for things like bridge replacements, and equity provisions to ensure that every state gets a minimum (currently guaranteed at 92 percent) of their contribution back. State transportation departments, which plan, build, and maintain the interstates, decide what they want to do and then pay for it; the federal share for interstate projects is 90 percent, 80 percent if no high-occupancy lanes are built.

Now, the HTF is running out of money. The first reason is that the gas tax does not keep up with inflation. As inflation rises, each dollar buys fewer and fewer goods and services. Sales tax, for example, is a tax on the dollar—for every dollar you spend, the government gets a certain amount, so the more something costs, the more goes into the feds’ coffers. The gas tax, however, is a tax on a unit of measure, and since your 1995 Honda Accord requires the same amount of gas per fill-up as when it was new, the federal government still gets the same amount of money regardless of the total cost. To match the rate of inflation and have the same value that the 18.4-cent tax did in 1993, the gas tax  would have to be increased to 28 cents per gallon.

Second, the relatively rapid proliferation of fuel-efficient and alternative-fuel vehicles means people are buying less gas per mile driven. The use of cars keeps increasing—car travel is up 39 percent since 1990 and heavy-truck travel, 64 percent—so the increase in traffic outpaces the amount of gasoline purchased. Extremely fuel-efficient cars are becoming more popular, and the owner of an all-electric car isn’t funding highways at all.

Third, construction is getting more expensive. Worldwide demand for building supplies is rising, and prices are escalating. The global recession has hit the construction industry particularly hard, as credit for giant projects is more difficult to find. But rest assured, it will rebound. China, in particular, is in the midst of an unprecedented infrastructure building boom; in recent years, it alone has bought about 40 percent of the world’s steel and produced half of the world’s cement.

Tappan Zee Bridge in New York

Not rebuilding will cost you, too. According to the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, the average annual cost of vehicle maintenance due to rough roads is $335, up substantially from previous years. Not surprisingly, the costs are concentrated in urban areas, where 80 percent of Americans live, work, and drive. It is unlikely to get better. The Texas Transportation Institute’s Urban Mobility Report, the most authoritative paper on the topic, found that in 2009, commuters wasted 3.9 billion gallons of fuel in traffic jams and, on average, 34 hours per person. In 1993, the year of the last gas-tax increase, the figures were 2.1 billion gallons and 30 hours per person. (Note, however, that the maximum for both figures was in 2006, before the recession hit.)

The recent stimulus package contained some money for interstate building and maintenance, but the impact was relatively minimal. However, one small portion was given to the federal DOT for a new grant program, known as TIGER (Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery), which handed out money in a new way: Localities and states made cases for individual projects, and the federal DOT awarded grants based on its own criteria, an approach assuring that national goals would be held above state goals.

Over the past few years, legislators injected money into the HTF from the general fund, $47 billion in total, giving it a reprieve; the money is now expected to run out in about 2014, so the federal government has until then to either raise more money or contribute less to highways. But the 2010 midterm elections brought to power a new wave of fiscally conservative legislators who vow to impose radical spending cuts. Interstate spending has traditionally been inviolable because it ran through everyone’s district and mostly funded itself, but that’s no longer the case.

L.A. Interstate 405

States decide what interstate projects they want to build according to their own criteria, which is often just whatever state politicians can hash out, leaving the money susceptible to political whim. Transportation is a favorite pork product: It’s tangible, it’s helpful, highway projects take a long time to build and last through the next election cycle. It is a visible manifestation of  how your government can directly benefit your neighborhood. But maybe your neighborhood doesn’t need that extra lane or repaving. So if the state won’t provide the cash for a pet project, the recent rise of earmarks means you can bypass the state altogether and ask your local Congressman to slip your favorite project into the next bill.

“President Reagan vetoed the transport bill in the 1980s because it had 100 earmarks in it, and now it has 6000-plus,” says Robert Puentes, a transportation scholar at the Brookings Institution. “It’s become kind of a manifestation of what’s wrong with the federal program today, in that the congressmen have to ask for these special projects because there’s a feeling that the program is not delivering these things otherwise.” While earmarks can include badly needed transportation projects that have gone unfunded by the state, they are rife with abuse. By far, the most famous earmark to date is $223 million for a bridge to Gravina Island, Alaska, population 50. It is commonly known as the “Bridge to Nowhere” and has become an enduring symbol of profligate waste in Washington.

“The consequences are absolutely staggering. Everybody thinks that every highway dollar goes to things like that,” says Leif Wathne, P.E., of the American Concrete Pavement Association. “In the public’s eye, every dollar is dedicated to some bridge to nowhere, and it’s a gross misunderstanding. That [earmark] was a catastrophe.” The earmark was withdrawn with the compromise that the state of  Alaska would get the money but not build the bridge. It should be noted that under current transportation bill ­SAFETEA-LU’s formula, Alaska has received nearly $5 for every $1 it contributes.


Related Content