Special Features

Image Libraries

Blog
Your typical highway: 16% cost recovery

From cyclelicious:

Transit haters talk of how much [money] public transportation loses and the public subsidy [transit receives], but they almost universally ignore the money lost on roads and highways… An analysis of road building and maintenance costs from the Texas Department of Transportation revealed that…
no road pays for itself in gas taxes and fees. For example, in Houston, the 15 miles of SH 99 from I-10 to US 290 will cost $1 billion to build and maintain over its lifetime, while only generating $162 million in gas taxes. That gives a tax gap ratio of .16, which means that the real gas tax rate people would need to pay on this segment of road to completely pay for it would be $2.22 per gallon.

This is just one example, but there is not one road in Texas that pays for itself based on the tax system of today. Some roads pay for about half their true cost, but most roads we have analyzed pay for considerably less.

So that’s a 16% cost recovery ratio for your basic non-toll highway. For constrast, Metrorail recovers about 81% of its costs (operating only; not construction).

May 13th, 2009 | Permalink
Tags: transportation



Media

   
   



Site
About BeyondDC
Archive 2003-06
Contact

Search:

GoogleBeyondDC
Category Tags:

Partners
 
  Greater Greater Washington
 
  Washington Post All Opinions Are Local Blog
 
  Denver Urbanism
 
  Streetsblog Network



BeyondDC v. 2013d | Email | Archive of posts from 2003-2006