Missouri Bicycle News

A question often asked about bicyclists riding on streets and highways is, "How can we allow bicyclists to use our public roads when they don't pay their own way? Don't motorists pay their way through gas taxes and other 'user fees'?"

It turns out that bicyclists do in fact pay their fair share of taxes to support our transportation system, but what about the other side of the question--do motorists really pay the all the costs of road and highway construction and maintenance through their user fees?

In Do Motor Vehicle Users in the US Pay Their Way? (PDF), a forthcoming article for the journal Transportation Research A, Delucchi writes:

To pay for [road] infrastructure and services, governments collect revenue from a variety of [motor-vehicle user] taxes and fees. The basic objective of this paper is to compare these government expenditures with the corresponding user tax and fee payments in the U.S.

The analysis indicates that in the U.S. current tax and fee payments to the government by motor-vehicle users fall short of government expenditures related to motor-vehicle use by approximately 20-70 cents per gallon of all motor fuel. (Note that in this accounting we include only government expenditures; we do not include any "external" costs of motor-vehicle use.)

That implied subsidy of 20 to 70 cents a gallon -- which excludes social and environmental costs such as climate damage and uncompensated crash costs, which Delucchi has tallied elsewhere -- equates to 7 to 25 percent of the current price of gasoline. On a dollar basis, U.S. drivers are underpaying local, state and national governments by $40 to $105 billion a year.

Delucchi's conclusion, "motor-vehicle users in the U.S. -- unlike users in most European countries -- do not 'pay their way'," will come as no surprise to many of us.

Read more on StreetsBlog.

Related:

News: MoBikeFed Editorial: Amendment 3 will affect Missouri's transportation future

News: Federal Complete Streets Amendment offered--your support needed

permanent link to article: "Do motorists pay the full costs of roads and highways?"
posted by Brent Hugh at 10/02/2007 10:54:00 AM |comment on this article