Trucking industry figures speak favorably of an increase in the Federal Fuel Tax

Excerpt from Transport Topics article:

It isn’t often that industry supports raising taxes. That seems to be the case with American roads and bridges, however, with both industry officials and the Trump administration signaling that they might be amenable to raising the federal fuel tax to pay for road improvements.

During a committee hearing May 17, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao said that the administration’s infrastructure plans would rely primarily on private funding, but said that a fuel tax was not off of the table as a funding source. Representatives of the railroad and trucking industries appear to support the suggestion, seeing it as a user-based funding source.

America’s roads need work, particularly as the country and our economy continue to grow.

“Roads are the country’s circulatory system. If this were our body’s circulatory system, I think we would all be looking to get some stents or surgery,” said David Manning, vice-chairman of American Trucking Associations, showing a map of projected freight traffic growth which predicted congestion along major freight corridors.

Currently, the federal fuel tax rate is 18.4 cents per gallon for gasoline and 24.4 cents per gallon for diesel fuel. The tax is not indexed for inflation and has not been raised since 1993.

Despite the millions of tons of goods moved on America’s roads, freight transportation did not have its own budget line prior to the 2015 FAST Act, which provided dedicated funding for bridges and refocused existing funding for a national freight highway system.

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