Sometime in 2010 or 2011, Congress expects
to decide how to spend the $250 billion or more of
federal gas taxes and other highway user fees that
will be collected over the next six years. The
process of doing so is called surface transportation
reauthorization. A major point of contention in this
law is how much of our transportation system
should be centrally planned and how much
should be built and operated in response to the
needs of actual transportation users.
Advocates of top-down planning want to
reduce per capita driving by providing disincentives
to automobiles, such as increased congestion
and driving costs, and funding expensive
alternatives such as high-speed rail and rail transit.
Even if you believe in the goal of reducing per
capita driving, the evidence indicates that these
tools have minimal effect on driving and may
even be environmentally counterproductive.
Advocates of customer-driven transportation
want to fund transportation out of user fees,
not taxes, and make transportation providers—
whether public agencies or private parties—
responsive to the needs and desires of those
users. Decades of experience have proven that
the best way of reducing the environmental
costs of transportation is to use new technologies
to reduce the impacts per mile of mobility,
not to reduce mobility itself. This citizens’ guide
presents the basic facts behind these two views.
Sometime in 2010 or 2011, Congress expects
to decide how to spend the $250 billion or more of
federal gas taxes and other highway user fees that
will be collected over the next six years. The
process of doing so is called surface transportation
reauthorization. A major point of contention in this
law is how much of our transportation system
should be centrally planned and how much
should be built and operated in response to the
needs of actual transportation users.
Advocates of top-down planning want to
reduce per capita driving by providing disincentives
to automobiles, such as increased congestion
and driving costs, and funding expensive
alternatives such as high-speed rail and rail transit.
Even if you believe in the goal of reducing per
capita driving, the evidence indicates that these
tools have minimal effect on driving and may
even be environmentally counterproductive.
Advocates of customer-driven transportation
want to fund transportation out of user fees,
not taxes, and make transportation providers—
whether public agencies or private parties—
responsive to the needs and desires of those
users. Decades of experience have proven that
the best way of reducing the environmental
costs of transportation is to use new technologies
to reduce the impacts per mile of mobility,
not to reduce mobility itself. This citizens’ guide
presents the basic facts behind these two views.
Randal O’Toole is a senior fellow with the Cato Institute and author of the forthcoming book, Gridlock: Why We’re Stuck in Traffic and What to Do About It.
