Who Should Pay for Transportation?

The cost of constructing and maintaining America’s surface transportation network has long, in theory, been borne by the people who use it most. This is the idea behind the gas tax: The more you drive on our shared roads, the more fuel you have to buy, the more you chip in through taxes to pay for said roads. As it was originally conceived, the gas tax was a kind of user fee, linking what people pay into the system directly to how much they rely on it.

For a variety of well-documented reasons, this compact has been crumbling. Federal and state gas-tax rates haven’t kept pace with inflation. And when gas taxes were first conceived early in the last century, most cars had roughly the same fuel efficiency; now a 50 mile-per-gallon Prius shares the road with an 8 mile-per-gallon rusting pickup truck. That imbalance spoils some of the fairness first baked into the concept.