Use the gas tax for more than roads

Many of the well-known problems our country faces today — dependence on foreign oil (and the attendant threat this poses to national security), traffic congestion, air pollution and inordinate amounts of land devoted to roads and parking — can be traced to a major flaw in our public policy on transportation.

That flaw is the administration of the gas tax. It is, after all, nothing more than a sales tax on transportation fuel.

Yet its proceeds are funneled almost exclusively to only one transportation mode — roads — rather than to the modes that use far less oil, namely railroads and transit.

Aside from the fact that most road travel, and thus most of the revenue generated by the gas tax, does not even occur on federal highways — it occurs on city and county roads paid for by local taxes — a far bigger flaw is that the policy is upside-down in terms of energy efficiency.

The billions in funds generated by the gas tax should be used to solve our problems, not exacerbate them.

Yet, those funds are fed right back to road projects that induce even more oil consumption. This is ill-advised.

Today’s public policy can be traced to the decision made a century ago to treat highways as belonging in the public domain financed by taxes, while viewing travel on rails as strictly a matter of private enterprise.

A series of actions over the years, culminating in the building of the interstate highway system under President Eisenhower, led to the bankruptcy of many of our railroads, such as the once all-powerful Pennsylvania Railroad, forcing almost all freight onto roads instead of rails.

This happened because the profit base of the railroads was gradually undercut by allowing the competition — the trucking industry — to use federally funded highways (they do pay user fees, but these by no means cover the costs).

Meanwhile the railroads, then as now, had to generate every bit of their maintenance costs and pay property taxes on all their land and structures to boot.

The same scenario applies to our formerly extensive national passenger rail network.

Now, with the exception of its highly successful northeast corridor component, we have only the skeletal Amtrak limping along (slowly compared with automobile speeds on the parallel interstates) carrying a tiny fraction of the country’s travelers.

Today, few people question the appropriateness of building and maintaining highways with tax monies, yet at the same time they assert that tax support of railroads and transit is an inappropriate subsidy of systems “awash in red ink.”

There is no valid reason why a vehicle rolling on a rubber tire should receive tax support, while a vehicle rolling on steel wheels should be left to sink or swim on its own.

One could just as well argue that railroads should all be built and maintained at taxpayer expense and that all highways should be toll roads.

What is needed? A new public policy that puts all transportation modes under one umbrella, with gas tax monies used to promote modes that use less oil.

Eventually we will need to build a new energy-efficient (and expensive) high-speed passenger rail system to reduce the number of vehicles on the highways.

As a first and relatively inexpensive step, however, we could shift a great deal of freight from roads to rails by increasing the speed and capacity of existing railroads (e.g. double-tracking single-track main lines and increasing tunnel clearances).

Here in Georgia, we continue with the illogical restriction on the use of state gas tax revenues, which really should be supporting rail and transit projects, not just more roads.

John Pooler, a retired Emory University professor, lives in Doraville.