Friday, May 4, 2012

Crumbling Infrastructure Porn: Drivers Pay "Secret" Road Tax In $15 Billion For Car Repair


The days of Happy Motoring, as Jim Kunstler is fond of calling it, may be drawing to a close. Here is Bloomberg with the details:
Gil Giro doesn’t need a license plate to tell where a car is from -- he just looks underneath the chassis.

“Every time we see a car that comes in from the district, you can see that its suspension is torn up,” said Giro, the owner of Gili’s Automotive in Rockville, Maryland, outside Washington. “It’s almost like the vehicle has been driven off- road.”

The nation’s capital isn’t alone in offering motorists teeth-rattling rides as U.S. lawmakers tussle over how to pay the bill for mending battered roads. Mechanics such as Giro say they see the hidden tax car owners pay every day in torn tires, misaligned front ends and bent axles.

Drivers won’t get relief anytime soon.

The U.S. Highway Trust Fund, which helps pay for road and transit projects in Washington and all 50 states, has been bailed out by Congress three times since 2008 for a total of $34.5 billion. The gasoline tax that supports the fund hasn’t been raised in 19 years, and with the cost of materials such as steel and asphalt on the rise, the fund is expected to have a deficit of about $10 billion this year.

Car owners already are shelling out far more than that to repair damage done to their vehicles by America’s ruined streets and highways, industry and academic researchers say.

Motorists pay $67 billion annually for increased fuel consumption, body dents, worn tires and premature wear wrought by pitted roads, according to The Road Information Program, a Washington-based research group. The group’s board includes representatives from construction-equipment makers Caterpillar Inc. (CAT) and Deere & Co. (DE), as well as Vulcan Materials Co. (VMC), a Birmingham, Alabama-based asphalt and concrete producer.

That works out to $324 per licensed driver, says Frank Moretti, TRIP’s director of policy and research. The figure is an average of all vehicles and can vary widely between cars and large commercial trucks, which are prone to costlier damage, he says.

Karim Chatti, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Michigan State University in East Lansing, estimates that damage linked to poor roads probably runs between $15 to $25 billion annually for car owners, not including tire damage and fuel-efficiency costs.
As a denizen of the DC-area, I can attest to how crappy the roads are around here. And this is happening in a part of the country where local tax revenues are still fairly robust because of federal government spending. I can't imagine what it must be like in some of the less well off locales. It's now a race to see what will destroy our automobile-centric economy first, high oil and gasoline prices, or our crumbling highways.


Bonus: Some Drivin'n'Cryin' seemed appropriate here

4 comments:

  1. But....but.... the Newsweek cover story sez American is "Winning" (not sure what) and that we are not in a decline but a .... "Regeneration."

    LAUGHING OUT LOUD!!!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Here in Chicago we got a lot of Barry-O money this past 2 yrs. So, we've got some nice new zippy smoov roads. Just enough to get ppl. zipping along above the speed limit. Then, POW! back onto a section of normal rutted post-industrial decay roadbed. All the new crappy cars ppl. bought over the last 5-10yrs are really starting to look like shit. I just have to laugh. A few yrs ago, I started driving really slowly and never over the spd limit (typically 30mph on main surface streets) I'm always amazed at how ppl. tailgate and then go speeding past when there's a red light 1 block ahead and nothing but rutted road. Fuckin' awesome. If the road gets too choppy, I slow way the fuck down and that really pisses ppl. off. They go flying past, and I can hear their car getting torn up. Hilarious. I am such a dick.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Getting a larger car is becoming self defense - from the roads.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Last two years we got a bunch o stimulus money to make road repairs along 101(pacific coast highway) and for a while it was really nice, but we get rain here. A lot of rain. And now the road has had a bunch of slide outs and we no longer have the money to make very nice repairs, so a lot of sections are pretty awful to drive now.

    ReplyDelete