As my brother heads back across the PA Turnpike, he faces one of the busiest travel days of the year. He had choices. Drive, fly, take a bus or Amtrak. These are available because of infrastructure choices we have made as a society. So are the costs of each.
By Turnpike he will spend $46.30 each way, without an Ezpass or $22.80 each way with one. Add another $60 bucks for gas. By plane he’d pay $260 round trip. It’s $53 each way by bus. By train it’s between $50 to $100 each way. Unless he drives, he’s got transportation costs once he gets here. But none of these are the real costs. Each is subsidized by our tax dollars in some way or another.
The amount of those subsidies determines which mode is “cheapest” for us, and therefore, which mode we use most. Today, because my brother wanted to drive around while he visited, car was the least expensive option, TO HIM! That doesn’t mean it was the cheapest option overall. But those other costs are either hidden, or absorbed by someone else.
Our federal taxes paid some $96 billion last year for highway maintenance and construction. Pennsylvania added $6.9 billion in various gas taxes, vehicle fees and general revenue funds. Local roads add more to the kitty, mostly from property taxes. The new federal infrastructure bill will pump $110 billion into roads and bridges over the next ten years. When you add all this up and divide it by trips, my brother’s holiday visit by car, gets a whole lot more expensive for us all. In fact, if all the costs of travel were paid directly by the traveler, we would find the costs change along with our decisions on how we move around.
But its not only car travel. We subsidize our railroads (at a mere fraction of other nations), our airports, our bus system and many public transit transfer stations. The distribution of those subsidies determines what mode of transit we choose and the overall costs of our mobility. Yet we never have a real public debate about all of this spending or our choices. We want maximum transport mobility, which right now means cars, highways, bridges and gas. America shuns public transportation (less than 5% use it) as much as possible and our penchant for quick delivery of products leans us away from rail to trucking.
Yet underneath the surface of this cost sleight-of-hand, loom both financial and environmental pitfalls. The cost of highway construction has gone up 140% over the past 30 years. Places to put highways have diminished as the number of vehicles using our roads has grown exponentially, primarily driven by population growth. Even if we can afford to keep building out our roads, we’re running out of places to put them. There may be some hope in technology. We are experimenting with “hyperloops”, that shoot cars through tunnels in a hybrid car/train system. So are Magnetic Levitation systems that transport cars intracity. Climate mediation efforts are focused on auto emissions and forcing a shift to electric vehicles. The nation’s rail freight system has been decimated by railroad deregulation and the shift to more trucking, but could be modernized and rebuilt. Since we’re going to have to change our modes of transportation in some way, it is an opportune moment to have a debate about what form we will subsidize, and therefore incentivize people to use.
As always, we have a vested interest in the transportation system we now have. We’re also not really good at planning for or transitioning into the future. Our political divisions have all but stopped rational debate or fact-based policy decisions. Ultimately the question might not be what mode of transportation my brother uses to visit over the holidays. It might be that he can’t get back and forth at all.
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