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After some secret meetings last year, Gov. Roy Romer has gone public with the notion that we will need tolls or increased taxes for better highways. He says we will need $24 billion for construction in the next 20 years, while our current revenue stream will produce only $4 billion.
But the governor also observed that We need to have
on the table different ways of doing business here.
So as a public-minded citizen, I'll offer a few different ways to do highway business:
1) Quit taxing fuel. As it is, we pay 22 cents per gallon toward the construction and maintenance of Colorado highways. The more efficient your car, the less you pay -- yet your new 45-mpg Cheapitzu coupe needs just as much road as my 15-mpg 1965 Dodge Dart.
Americans drive more miles than ever, but thanks to improved fuel efficiency, that doesn't translate into more money for roads. The gasoline tax is also regressive. People who drive old inefficient cars, that is, the poor, pay proportionately more than those who can afford new cars.
So instead of taxing by the gallon, why not tax by the mile? Every year, at state income tax time, you'd subtract last year's odometer reading from this year's, and remit so much per mile.
How much? In 1990, Coloradans drove 27.2 billion miles and spent $714 million on highways, for about 2.6 cents per mile.
Some complications come to mind, but they're not insurmountable. The State Patrol could perform random roadside checks to guard against cheating. Tourists might file an itinerary upon crossing the border and pay an estimated mileage tax.
2) Ban California immigrants. It's not that they're evil, but they grow up with some dangerous attitudes because they're accustomed to horrors like commuting from Riverside to Long Beach, which can mean five or six hours in the car.
After they decamp in Colorado, they think nothing of commuting from Estes Park to the Denver Tech Center, Vail to Aurora, or Larkspur to Northglenn.
From their vantage, any of these daily drives is a major improvement on the smog and congestion they fled in the Golden State, let alone the gunplay on the freeways. To the invading California culture, any commute less than 75 miles is close-in and easy, especially if you don't need an armored car.
But from our vantage, they're a demanding burden because their increased numbers on our country lanes requires expensive highway improvements.
3) Rather than tax the driving public at large to build those highway improvements, hit the real-estate developers, since they're the real beneficiaries.
U.S. 285 serves as a perfect example. It's the shortest route from Salida to civilization, and I keep wishing I gained some benefit from the millions of dollars I've seen spent along the stretch between Webster and Wadsworth in the past 17 years: four-lane extended deeper into the mountains, straightening and widening elsewhere, occasional parallel access roads, even a stop light at Conifer.
But as U.S. 285 improves, more land gets chopped up into subdivisions because parcels that were once so inaccessible as to be fit only for hunting cabins become salable as amenity-laden income-segregated year-round homesites.
While this is a good deal for the developer who performs the valuable public service of converting $200-an-acre scrub pasture into $30,000 five-acre ranchettes free of minorities, this also means that shortly after U.S. 285 is improved so that it can handle its old traffic safely and efficiently, traffic increases so that safety and efficiency soon drop to their old levels.
For my purposes -- occasional trips to the city -- the old narrow and winding U.S. 285 was quite adequate. Why should I have to pay more in gasoline taxes, or perhaps even tolls, to support an expensive highway that I wouldn't need if the developers hadn't run amok in Jefferson and Park counties?
Further, these improvements extend the sprawl. The metropolis used to end somewhere east of the mouth of Turkey Creek Canyon. Over the years it oozes ever westward with the highway improvements: Conifer, then Bailey. Grant and Webster begin to display symptoms. Extend the four-lane over Kenosha Pass, and the pastures around Jefferson will be sprinkled with trophy homes.
As this process continues, the do-gooders will want to
preserve something called open space,
and so they,
too, will be after your money. Our marvelous system of
private enterprise would provide these greenbelts and open
space, at no cost to the taxpayer, if we just quit
improving highways.
Highway construction represents a public subsidy to everything we that most of us said we didn't want -- growth, smog, subdivision, congestion -- when we went to the governor's regional smart growth summits last spring.
But maybe the governor has been so busy meeting with the engineers, developers and contractors -- a/k/a the Coalition for Mobility and Air Quality -- that he just hasn't found time to listen to the public.
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