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Comment by awalton | Hacker News Reader

Hm, using your own link, I see "Federal aid to highways" totaled at $43,421,077,419, and I see "Total excise taxes" at $42,329,411,402. I do a subtraction and I see a $1,091,666,017 deficit. Seems to suggest that, in fact, the Highway System does not pay for itself, but rather we pay for it, no? (It get worse if I just use gasoline taxes and ignore the rest.)

I do see their balances coming up positive though, thanks to a very massive balance transfer from the General Fund per the FAST act (https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/22), straight from US taxpayers' wallets.

I also see no mention to climate impact anywhere. $36 billion dollars of gas taxes at 18.3 cents per gallon suggests sales of nearly 200 billion gallons of gasoline were burned. That's a hell of a lot of climate damage that everyone's being forced to pay for.

So, you were saying about us not subsidizing the IHS?

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The budget for the highway system is managed by the Highway Trust Fund. The trust fund had been solvent until 2008, but has since needed additional funding to meet outlays. Prior to that the system had been working as outlined in the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956. So yes the taxpayer has been subsidizing the highways for the last 12 years.

So the system is broken, but it has a simple fix, just raise the gas tax. We haven't done that since 1993 and it isn't indexed to inflation. This is something that should have been fixed years ago, but alas I don't control congress.

If you want to go even further and discuss the environmental impact, again the solution is more taxes.

> So the system is broken, but it has a simple fix, just raise the gas tax.

Given the latency on legislatively fixing things in the USA these days, any work at fixing stuff now should probably include the likelihood of a major shift to non-gas vehicles in the next couple decades.

Your simple fix would change the calculus when comparing road & rail travel, which I think is the point of the person you were disagreeing with.

Which is a fair argument, but using the current math it's about half the cost of rail. So even if you need to increase the gas tax in order to "make it pay for itself," you're absolutely not going to do that so much so that you double the cost.

It's hard to make an argument that rail is cheaper than driving without getting into a lot of mental gymnastics, and I really like taking the train when able.

I don't think "cars cost more than just the price of gas" is mental gymnastics, but an exact $ figure we can all agree on will be tough.

Once they become a thing, the price of an autonomous taxi between the cities should approach the real amortized cost of road travel.

Inflation-indexing might help for a bit but there are longer term issues on the horizon.

Namely, as fuel efficiency increases and some drivers switch to alternative fuels, people will need less gas for the same amount of driving.

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