Do Roads Pay for Themselves?

You sometimes hear it said that road construction pays for itself, or some similar claim, usually followed by a hand wave in the direction of the fact that gasoline tax revenues go into a federal trust fund that finances transportation projects.

The thing about the trust fund is true, but the rest is wrong as Chris Bradford spells out in detail. The idea that roads are self-financing via gas taxes mostly involves acting as if there’s no cost associated with operating and maintaining highways. That, however, obviously isn’t the case. It’d be easy to pay for mass transit out of the farebox, too, if you didn’t cost operating cost and repairs.