AASHTO Journal, 5 February 2016
President Obama in his 2017 budget request will propose phasing in a $10 per barrel tax on oil, and use the revenue to cover long-term revenue needs of the Highway Trust Fund and to increase spending on “clean transportation” systems including mass transit, higher-speed passenger rail and self-driving cars.
The White House issued a lengthy fact sheet detailing the plan. It said the president will also continue to seek corporate tax reform that could generate funds for a “temporary near-term surge in investment,” while the oil fee would pay for long-term transportation improvements.
His ideas quickly hit roadblocks among Republicans who control Congress. House Speaker Paul Ryan criticized the oil fee as something that would raise energy costs and land hardest on poor consumers. Ryan dismissed the proposal as “little more than an election-year distraction,” and said it is “dead on arrival in Congress.”
Obama’s multifaceted proposal would also expand the TIGER infrastructure grant program at the U.S. Department of Transportation, and the Diesel Emissions Reduction Act Grant Program at the Environmental Protection Agency. TIGER grants have been awarded to a wide range of highway, passenger and freight rail, port, transit and alternative transportation projects, while DERA grants help pay for new vehicles or retrofits in trucking, bus, rail and marine operations.
But the plan’s core focus is on what it calls clean transportation systems, and says it would increase investment in them by 50 percent. It said: “A new approach to our transportation system can help to speed goods to market, expand transportation options, and integrate new technologies like autonomous – or self-driving – vehicles while at the same time reducing our reliance on fossil fuels, cutting carbon pollution, and strengthening our resilience to the impacts of climate change.”
The president would spend nearly $20 billion a year above current levels “to reduce traffic and provide new ways for families to get to work and to school. The plan would expand transit systems in cities, suburbs and rural areas; make high-speed rail a viable alternative to flying in major regional corridors and invest in new rail technologies like maglev; modernize our freight system” and expand TIGER “to support high-impact, innovative local projects.”
It would change current federal formulas used to allocate surface transportation funds to states, and provide “bonus funding to states that use existing formula funding to cut carbon pollution in the transportation sector. It would create three new competitive grant programs for regional-scale transportation and land-use strategies, expanding transportation choices, and to bolster resilience to climate effects.
And it would put $2 billion a year into research and pilot projects to produce “smart, clean vehicles and aircraft.”