Top Highway Problems: Finance and Maintenance

The nation’s highway departments say their number one problem is inadequate funds. Congress and the Federal Highway Administration are worried that, due to inadequate highway budgets, the interstate and other highway systems will deteriorate unacceptably. This article describes (1) Causes of shrinking highway budgets; (2) maintenance status of the highways; (3) how a few states have succeeded (while many failed) in boosting their gasoline taxes; (4) the new “pavement management systems” that states are beginning to introduce, so that rehabilitation of older pavements is done before deterioration becomes so bad that the road must be ripped out and rebuilt, and (5) the Interstate Maintenance Guidelines that Congress mandated FHWA publish by this fall.