The recently passed Georgia transportation bill provides $900 million in new transportation revenue for Georgia. While the General Assembly should be congratulated for finally enacting transportation reform, the end product could have been better.
For the most part, the bill wisely sticks to the users-pay/users-benefit concept that should guide transportation funding — people who use the infrastructure should pay for it. Georgia’s biggest problem has been prioritizing and directing funding to the transportation projects that will deliver the most mobility. Lawmakers and planners can now stop complaining that they don’t have enough money and start prioritizing needed projects. The transportation bill indexes the gas tax to inflation and fuel efficiency standards, which will result in a tax increase for drivers. It also replaced the complicated combined gasoline and sales tax with a 26 cents-a-gallon gas tax, which will be easier to collect and understand.
The portion of the gas tax that was being misdirected to the general fund will now rightly go to transportation uses. But the bill still allows local county governments to continue charging a local sales tax on gasoline — meaning counties can siphon off gas tax money that should be spent on roads.
The bill enacts a $200 fee on electric vehicles. Electric vehicles have positive environmental benefits, but since they do not use gasoline their owners don’t pay gas taxes, which are the primary funding source for building and maintaining roads. Since getting rid of the fees for all cars wasn’t going to happen, the electric car fee means electric car owners will start to pay their share to maintain Georgia’s roads.
The legislation also imposes a truck-weight fee. The gas tax paid by truckers is three times higher than the tax for cars, but trucks wear out roads 10 times faster than cars. Like the electric car fee, the new truck fee based on weight is aimed at getting the vehicles putting the most wear and tear on the roads to help pay the costs they impose on others.
One of the worst things in the bill is the $5 a night hotel room fee, which will be charged to hotel visitors and used to fund local roads. Hotel users should pay to use roads when they drive on them, not when they sleep in a hotel bed.
The final transportation bill did well to eliminate several tax breaks, including the $5,000 tax credit subsidizing the purchase of electric vehicles and the tax break airlines were getting for buying jet fuel at Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport.
The only major change to mass transit was eliminating the requirement that MARTA spend half of its money on capital needs and half on operations. Going forward, transit advocates should look to get funding from the state’s general fund to help supplement local money for bus and paratransit services.
Georgia would’ve been better off shifting to mileage-based user fees — charging all drivers for the number of miles they drive — instead of raising gas taxes and fees. But now, with the influx of money from this bill, the state will need to prioritize the projects that will reduce congestion, reduce travel time and deliver the most value for taxpayers, who will be paying more and won’t want to hear that the state doesn’t have enough transportation money.
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