Why Nobody Wants to Pay for Fixing the U.S. Transportation System

Another short-term extension of funding for transportation infrastructure improvements? This story is getting old. The Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation has come up with a six-year transportation bill, the Comprehensive Transportation and Consumer Protection Act of 2015. That's not to be confused with the DRIVE (Developing a Reliable and Innovative Vision for the Economy) Act, which came out of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. Ideally, these measures would be successfully combined into a comprehensive, multi-year bill that nails down funding for transportation projects once and for all. But don't get your hopes up. Meanwhile, Congress has passed yet another extension of the Highway Trust Fund, but only until the end of the year. Have we made any progress at all, since enactment of the last big transportation bill in 2012 (which, by the way, didn't include a long-term funding solution)? On this episode, Joshua Schank, president and chief executive officer of the Eno Center for Transportation, returns to the podcast with an update on a perennially contentious issue. It's time to come up with a new way of paying for transportation projects, he says. But what will that look like? Nobody can seem to agree.