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The farebox recovery ratio for roadways is similarly terrible, gas tax is piss in the wind when it comes to building and maintaining road infrastructure. Up fr
by StudentStuff 9y ago
The farebox recovery ratio for roadways is similarly terrible, gas tax is piss in the wind when it comes to building and maintaining road infrastructure.
Up front though, our federal government will happily eat 90+% of the cost for new roadway projects, resulting in said projects seeing ample funding, and older localities ending up with massive infrastructure they can't afford to maintain, let alone replace at the end of its design life (eg: when its starting to approach failure).
- twoodfin 9y ago[G]as tax is piss in the wind when it comes to building and maintaining road infrastructure That’s an exaggeration. Federal and state gas taxes and user fees cover a large fraction (something like 50%) of maintenance and capital costs of highways and local roads, even though 1/6 of the Federal gas tax is redirected to mass transit. If it were politically viable, a 100% user tax/fee scheme could fund 100% of the system with gas prices not too much higher than they were a few years ago. The system would not collapse; EVs and hybrids would just become more popular. Air travel is similar. That is not true of passenger rail of any form in the US today, outside of perhaps the Boston-DC corridor.