Over at Prime Buzz, Brad Cooper laments the lack of funding for MODOT:
Like Kansas, Missouri is significantly short of meeting all it’s transportation needs. Both states combined have about $60 billion in needs over the next 20 years.
At a recent transportation summit in Mexico, Mo., where MoDOT released a booklet (warning: PDF) detailing the challenges facing Missouri’s transportation system. Included was a list of projects that MoDOT deemed essential.
After detailing some of these projects for the KC Metro area, Cooper remarked:
Just how we fund any of these project no one knows for sure. But expect voters to be asked sometime in the next couple years for some kind of tax increase to fund roads.
Over here at the Show-Me Institute, we always have a few suggestions. David Stokes presented a policy study at the Mexico transportation summit detailing many of them. One is tolling. If the infrastructure improvements are really all that necessary, then people would be willing to pay fees for them when they actually use them, rather than only up front in the form of taxes.
In conjunction with this, public-private partnerships can help as well. Governments aren’t good at much more than actual governing, so instead of having the government take on the financial risk building a new toll bridge, for example, let the private sector do it. If the bridge is likely to be profitable in the long term, firms would be willing to pay for the right to build and operate government-owned infrastructure. This provides another source of revenue that can be used for projects that aren’t as easy to contract out to the private sector.
The best thing is, no new taxes are needed to fund projects this way. With tolling, the only people who have to pay for the projects are the people who use them. I can’t imagine anything that would be more fair.
