For those of you who don’t follow her blog as faithfully as we do, some of you might be interested to learn that Department of Transportation Secretary Mary E. Peters has her own blog called “Welcome To The Fast Lane.” Recently, Sec. Peters weighed in on the gas tax holiday that has become, according to ABC and NBC news, the “defining issue” of the Indiana and North Carolina primaries.
According to Sec. Peters, the Bush Administration remains neutral on the issue, but she’s willing to wade in:
As the primary federal funding mechanism for our national highway system, the gas tax is increasingly outdated, inefficient, and unpopular. When President Eisenhower envisioned our interstate system, he favored a user-pay method of financing its construction and maintenance. Unfortunately, he was limited by the technologies of his day. Now, however, we have exciting new financing mechanisms that are supplementing the gas tax while simultaneously reducing congestion. Through the broad deployment of high-speed, open road tolling technologies coupled with hundreds of billions of dollars of private sector capital, we can begin eliminating our dependence on a failed gas tax-based transportation model.
Sec. Peters is clearly in favor of eliminating the gas tax. Since Sec. Peters hasn’t been asked to resign, we can only assume that the Administration favors this approach as well.
Bottom Line: Sec. Peters must really lover her job because we don’t know anyone else who would refer to open road tolling technologies as an “exciting new financing mechanism.” We can only assume that the hundreds of billions of dollars in private sector capital is coded language for privatizing the interstate system.
