Uncertainty about shoring up the bankrupt U.S. Highway Trust Fund to address the nation’s crumbling transportation infrastructure has led some states to find new revenue sources, including tolls that target trucks.
“Our predictions are coming true,” says Darrin Roth, vice president of highway policy for the American Trucking Associations. “Even though about half of states have increased their own fuel taxes or registration fees, all they’ve done is made up somewhat for lost time. Many of them haven’t increased those fees for decades, so they’re just catching up.”
Since 2008, the Highway Trust Fund has needed more than $140 billion in IOUs from the U.S. Treasury to stave off insolvency. The fund’s revenue source – per-gallon taxes on gasoline and diesel, which haven’t been increased since 1993 – has since been crippled by inflation and improvements in fuel-efficiency.
Congress has let the issue flounder despite urgent cries from the business community and the public at large. It’s also despite lawmakers and Presidents Trump and Obama crowing annually about the dire status of America’s infrastructure and their intentions to address it.
At least four states in the past 12 months have enacted or considered truck-specific toll plans. These proposals follow years of warnings from highway funding advocacy groups and trucking groups about highway funding “devolution” — that is, highway funding rolling downhill to states and the likely expansion of tolled highway lanes that would come with it.
Until recently, says Roth, truck tolling proposals popped up every two to three years. “Now we’re seeing something up every two to three months,” he says. “I expect that trend to continue and to accelerate.”
Likewise, the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association points to federal inaction as a key cause of the recent truck tolling plans. President Todd Spencer says there’s been “a clear and distinct turn away from traditional methods for funding highways, and that move was to the idea of basically selling off our roads to be converted to toll roads.”
