Impact of Highway and Interstate Funding Policy Decisions on Truck Safety and Truck-Involved Crashes: Future Research Needs

The Highway Trust Fund (HTF) was created in 1956 as a source of financing for the United States Interstate system through several taxes and fees. Money from this fund now supports many diverse transportation and transportation-related projects. The majority of these funds are raised through the excise tax on fuels. Though billions are collected, there remains a deficiency in funding for necessary highway maintenance and additional infrastructure. The funding burden falls to entities outside the HTF, and state governments must provide more revenue toward the total needed for road maintenance and new infrastructure each year. To ease this financial burden, states have indicated an interest in tolling existing Interstates and highways, creating new tolled infrastructure, and increasing current toll rates for both trucks and automobiles. The safety issue discussed here is avoidance of toll roads, which are designed for truck use, by trucks and their use instead of less direct and more congested routes or parallel secondary roads, which were not designed for heavy-truck traffic. Research therefore should be conducted regarding the future allocation of HTF revenues, addressing the following issues: a comparative analysis of HTF resource allocation for highway and nonhighway uses, and a cost-benefit analysis of HTF funding categories and the relative impact on safety and efficiency.