Do people who bike and walk pay their share of transportation costs?
I don’t know how many times people who drive everywhere accuse me of not paying my fair share of transportation costs because I ride a bike and thus don’t pay gas taxes. Those gas taxes obviously pay for all our roads, sidewalks, and bike lanes, right? They make it clear that they shouldn’t have to pay for my bike lanes!
OK. I just took a big breath and got over the thought that we are a community and we don’t function as individuals when we fund community infrastructure–roads, water, sewer, fire, police, and… even sidewalks and bike lanes. So does this accusation that people who bike and walk, rather than drive, don’t pay their fair share have any merit? Am I a freeloader?
This idea is wrong on several levels. I’ll start at the shallow end and get deeper.
We all use the roads
Most adults who walk and bike also drive cars. And everyone who drives also walks part of every trip. So almost all of us are paying the gas tax and we all use the non-motorized part of the roadway. We’ll ignore the need to charge a weight/mileage tax to the increasing numbers of electric vehicles on the road for their contributions to our potholes.
The gas tax doesn’t do as much as we think it does
The gas tax is failing to fund our transportation needs at the national, state, and local levels. Every gallon of gas sold contributes 18.4 cents to the nation’s Highway Trust Fund. That amount hasn’t changed since 1993! More efficient cars and inflation have degraded the value of that 18.4 cents over that 32 years. But we also continue to build roads at almost the same rate as when we were building the interstate highway system. So with the capacity of the Highway Trust Fund shrinking every year, we keep building roads, or at least adding lane miles. That means we need to maintain an ever growing number of lane miles. How is the magic Highway Trust Fund keeping up? Well, it isn’t. Congress has been bailing out the trust fund since 2008 with general fund taxes, paid not by drivers, but by all of us. These bailouts since 2008 total about $275 billion or about $16 billion/year. That compares to about $44 billion of projected 2028 gas tax revenues and $64 billion federal spending on highways. In 2028 Congress will have to supplement the highway trust fund with $20 billion for highways and streets. That will be paid for by all of us, not just those who buy gas.
At the state level, the story is similar. Oregon gets a share of the federal Highway Trust Fund every year. Those funds plus state gas taxes of 40 cents per gallon and the mileage charge levied on freight trucks and vehicle license fees go into the State Highway Fund. Those funds pay for construction and maintenance of highways, roads and streets. The state spends 50% on state highways, the counties get about 30% and cities the remaining 20%. The state gas tax has risen from 25 cents per gallon in 2020 so it is keeping up with inflation better than the federal gas tax but still only pays for about 75% of its roadway spending with gas tax and other road user fees. And that amount isn’t keeping up with what the state says it needs in the future. This will lead to large cuts in transportation staff and services in the next few years or increased taxes.
Locally, most of our new streets are paid for with System Development Charges paid for by developers as new homes and buildings are built. But the city’s share of the State Highway Fund isn’t keeping up with repairing existing streets and maintaining all our streets. When the local gas tax proposal failed in 2016, the city responded by passing a bond levy of $190 million to fund major transportation projects. These projects will be paid for with property taxes over the next 25 years and although they include some high profile bike and pedestrian projects, the bulk of the funding will be for streets for automobiles. On top of that, all households and businesses are paying a Transportation Utility Fee that will fund maintenance of streets, safety projects, and transportation planning.
All this is a long way of saying that although drivers are paying for a large share of building and maintaining our highways and streets, that cost is increasingly being paid for with other tax sources–paid by all of us no matter how much or how little we drive. That is true at the national, state, and local levels.
We all, and none of us, pay the largest costs of vehicle use
Finally, the societal costs of walking, biking, and driving are starkly different. “What’s the cost of choosing to drive a car instead of riding a bike?” by Rodrigo Davies summarizes a European study published in Science Direct that estimates that every mile driven costs society about 18 cents. Walking returns 69 cents for every mile walked to society and biking returns 32 cents per mile. These costs include the costs of infrastructure. They also include the cost of pollution and medical costs of poor health due to obesity, diabetes and other chronic diseases made worse by driving and countered by exercise from walking and biking. Costs of crashes, whether medical costs or loss of productivity due to death and injury are also high. These costs never get accounted for in our tax structure because they are paid generally by all of us, whether we drive or not.
So the next time someone accuses you of not paying for the sidewalks or bike lanes you’re using because you’re not driving, you can tell them that we’re all paying for all the miles driven, and we’re paying much more than we think we are.