(crossposted from Buffalo Ridge Blog.)
My County Board had a trying meeting last night... They were considering the highway budget. Sounds like the County Engineer was about ready to pull his hair out, his staff is already stressed from this years blizzards, floods, and tornados, and they're still short staffed because they haven't replaced the retirees. They've got a laundry list of over 20 deficient bridges that need to be replaced, and they hoped do two this year. Sounds like they won't be able to do any, instead they lay awake at night worrying about the truck that will break through the bridge or the fatal accident that may happen when a combine and car can't fit between it's too narrow width at the same time. They talked about and seemed to like a proposed bike trail too, but they have no money to build it. In cities, counties, and states across the country it's the same story- roads falling apart faster than they can be fixed, clogged railway "networks", and pedestrian and bike trails that end before they get anywhere.
It's time to revive the "Good Roads" movement of a century ago, with rails and trails to boot. Here in Minnesota, we have a state highway system because the "Good Roads" movement demanded it and the citizens demanded and approved a constitutional amendment to establish it. Today that investment is falling apart- I drove down Minnesota Highway 7 the other day and it's devolved into a patched and frost heave mess, and that's the good spots between the potholes. Roads like MN7 used to be the pride of Minnesota, and now thanks to the republicans's "no new taxes" policy they're being reduced to rubble.
Of course, Good Roads, Rails, and Trails are going to cost money. Potholed highways cost even more money, but we pay for them in blown out tires, alignments, and higher insurance rates. So we need a funding mechanism, and for some "people" it's going to cost more money. The "people" I speak of are big corporations that run 40 ton trucks a couple hundred thousand miles a year on our highways, yet pay only a $2000 or so license fee and maybe $14,000 in fuel taxes a year. That sounds like a lot, but the real cost of highway construction is maintainence is around a nickel a mile for each ton of weight. So that 40 ton truck running 200,000 miles a year should be paying it's real road costs, about $160,000... Which is about ten times what it's now paying! For real people like us, it'd pretty much be a wash- a two ton car covering 10,000 miles a year would pay around $1000 a year, which is close to what we're already paying in license fees and fuel taxes.
Now a few years ago this kind of fair and adequate road tax would have been impossible to implement. Times have changed- every car sold in the U.S. since the mid 1990s has an On Board Diagnostics connector that allows easy readout of miles travelled. Virtually every big truck on the road now has even more sophisticated computer capability, allowing easy downloading of mileage and load data to calculate fair taxes due. And GPSs are cheap and oftentimes included in new vehicles. Older vehicles could be retrofitted with mileage tracking devices, users could log mileage, mileage readings could be taken from tamper proofed odometers, or they could simply be charged a modest annual fee.
So what's it gonna take to accomplish this reform? Us! Our Republican legislators only propose truly stupid constitutional amendments, good legislation comes from the people, like our Heritage Fund Amendment that uses a meager chunk of the sales tax to fund environmental and cultural programs in Minnesota. So folks, it's time for us to revive the Good Roads, Rails, & Trails! movement.