News Journal: Are we on the crumbling road to nowhere?

One of the many battles going on in Congress right now involves raising the federal gasoline tax or finding some other way to fend off the insolvency that threatens the Federal Highway Trust Fund as early as April. If that happens, construction on all federally financed roadwork will stop, hundreds of thousands of jobs will be lost, and the crisis our highway infrastructure has faced for years will get far worse.
Congress will probably find some way to put a temporary patch on the problem, but it will be just that – an inadequate patch that will do nothing to resolve the long-term viability of our decaying infrastructure. Raising the gas tax is the first, most obvious, and really the only feasible way to provide the funds necessary to begin to rebuild our crumbling roads and bridges. But it isn’t going to happen because too many in Congress argue that the federal government should never have gotten involved in funding our highway system in the first place, that building and maintaining roads should be left up to the states.
I spent a few hours considering – well, actually fuming about – that argument a couple of weeks ago when my wife and I drove down to Florida, where we are lucky enough to spend some time every winter. I was stuck in a traffic jam in South Carolina, the only state between Maine and Florida where Interstate 95 goes from six or eight lanes to an inadequate four. It wasn’t the first time I’ve been stuck in South Carolina (and don’t get me wrong, I love South Carolina for a lot of other reasons), nor will it be the last. If you drive I-95 very often, you have probably had a similar experience.
So I fumed, but my frustration went way beyond being stuck in a preventable traffic jam. What, I asked myself, is happening to us as a nation?
An overreaction? Let me explain. Interstate 95 is the busiest single highway in the 47,000-mile Interstate Highway System that came into being in 1956, when President Eisenhower was the driving force that led Congress to create it. That system of interstate highways, which now accounts for one quarter of all vehicle miles driven in the United States, is still one of the crowning achievements of our national government. I grew up thinking we would at least pass it on to our children in the same condition we received it from our parents.
The Federal Highway Trust Fund pays 90 percent of the cost of projects mutually agreed on by the federal and state governments. It is funded by the federal tax on gasoline, which is presently 18.4 cents a gallon and hasn’t been raised since 1993. That tax is simply a service tax – paid only by those who use the roads. Given inflation and the better mileage cars now get on a gallon of gas, the fund has been unable to keep pace with even urgently needed roadwork for years, and has depended on short-term infusions from general revenue funds since 2008.
Back to my South Carolina traffic jam. Even when the federal government had the money to pay 90 percent of the costs of adding lanes to I-95, the state of South Carolina said no thanks. Why? I can only guess that I-95 isn’t that important to the state’s voters. There are probably more out-of-state than in-state license plates driving on it, and the people in those cars and trucks don’t have a South Carolina vote.
What’s terribly wrong about this is that I-95 is part of the Interstate Highway System. If South Carolinians choose not to maintain the other roads in their state, that’s up to them. But the interstate system is supposed to allow all Americans to travel swiftly and safely from one place to another, across state lines. It should not be held hostage in a fight about states’ rights.
Maybe my traffic jam was a peculiar place to think about the fundamental balance between state and federal governments. But I believe the interstate system created by President Eisenhower is a good example of why we have a nation, not a loose confederation of sovereign states. I don’t believe South Carolina or any other state has the right to deny other Americans the right to use that system as the national asset it was intended to be.
As for the gas tax, we shouldn’t be arguing about whether it should be raised. The argument should be about how much, whether it should be indexed to inflation, and if there are other ways to raise funds that would help the Federal Highway Trust Fund return to the days when it expanded and maintained a highway infrastructure we could be proud to pass on to the next generation.
Ted Kaufman is a former U.S. Senator from Delaware.