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In the USA, highway building and maintenance is paid out of the highway trust fund, which is filled from the federal fuel tax. That fund doesn’t receive enough money to maintain highway quality.

This being the USA, the average citizen doesn’t accept the fact that “we would like to have better roads” may mean “we need to raise the fuel tax”, so, instead, they pay, on average, $515 per year in extra car repairs, so that they can keep their payments on fuel taxes at a low $97 (according to https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/06/25/why-d...)

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Alternatively, take a tiny fraction of what we spend on 'defense' and send it to the highway trust fund. The federal government has a problem with prioritization, not with lack of funds.

There's also many roads (that are reasonably considered highways) that are maintained using state and local funds.

(for example, in Michigan, counties, townships and incorporated municipalities all fund work on roads)

I don't mean that as an argument against your point about spending money in the wrong spot, just pointing out that the trust fund isn't the only spending.

Pennsylvania is the same - there is a $0.58 tax on a gallon of gas ($0.75 on diesel) that is used to fund the majority of the costs related to road maintenance. Wikipedia tells me that is the highest fuel tax rate in the country - the roads must be incredibly expensive to maintain in this state because they are generally in significantly worse shape than the roads in neighboring states.

In Germany, total taxation on gasoline is around 0.85 € per liter (3.2 € per "gallon"); less for diesel.

Yeah, every state is spending on roads. I was talking about the additional ~1500 entities in Michigan that also have road budgets. It's only really the 83 counties that are building larger roads though.

Pennsylvania does have a large number of miles of road.

However Pennsylvania has a large amount of corruption in the state government also...

I believe, at least in California, raising gas tax is frowned upon by voters because the so called highway fund (filled with gas tax money) has been raided to pay for non-road related projects.

No one likes bait and switch.

The federal gas tax was and still is 18.4 cents/gallon. It would need to be raised to 77.7 cents/gallon. https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2014/7/24/some-perspecti... Worse, that was in 2014.

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