Shortchanging Motorists
In a Heritage Foundation study published yesterday (Backgrounder #2283), Wendell Cox and Ronald Utt point out
“In 2007, motorists and truckers paid $39.3 billion in fuel tax revenues and excise taxes into the trust fund but received only about 60 percent of those revenues in the form of federal spending on general-purpose roads.
“In contrast to motorists and commercial airlines, transit users pay no federal taxes or fees and instead benefit by receiving a share of the taxes paid by motorists and funding from general federal tax revenues.”
What’s going on? And how is that fair? Cox and Utt explain:
“In December 2004, the Bureau of Transportation Statistics at the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) published its first and last report on the cost of the federal subsidies provided to each mode of transportation per passenger per 1,000 miles: cars, buses, airplanes, transit, and passenger railroad. The survey covered the years 1990 to 2002 and demonstrated that motorists received the lowest federal subsidy per 1,000 passenger-miles and that transit and Amtrak received by far the largest federal subsidies.
<snip>
“In this paper, The Heritage Foundation has updated and replicated the original 2004 USDOT study by adding new data for 2003 through 2006.”
The two charts below provide federal transportation 2002 subsidies by mode the original U.S. Department of Transportation study and the authors update for 2003 through 2006.
No wonder "transit and train advocates in Congress" were embarrassed, and "discouraged" the bureaucrats in the U.S. DoT "from further exercises in transparency" and "the 2004 report was the first and last of its kind." Consequently, the Heritage Foundation is to be congratulated for updating the original study.