As with many aspects of life, the coronavirus is bringing a few opportunities for highway construction amid a host of difficulties.
With travel plummeting while large numbers of people work from home, state and local transportation officials have been able to take advantage of the light traffic by advancing some projects. Parts of the reconstruction of Interstate 94 between Milwaukee and the Illinois border have been accelerated ahead of the original schedule.
The pandemic has not been easy, however, on the state’s transportation coffers. The drop-off in travel has meant a corresponding decline in gas taxes. Reluctance to buy vehicles amid so much economic uncertainty has also led to a decrease in collections of registration and titling fees. Wisconsin Department of Transportation officials believe the resulting hole in the budget will amount to $80 million this spring. That number could easily stretch into the hundreds of millions if travel doesn’t start picking up.
In a recent interview with the news service WisconsinEye, WisDOT Secretary-designee Craig Thompson said he thinks it unlikely the worst-case scenario will happen. At the height of the state’s shutdown in response to the pandemic—from March 15 to the end of April—vehicle miles traveled by passenger cars on Wisconsin roads were down by as much as 48%. But signs of improvement have already appeared. Vehicle miles traveled are now down only 19%.
Painful Decisions Avoided
Thompson said WisDOT has not had to go as far as some other states and delay projects. Painful decisions have been avoided in large part by reducing internal costs and adopting other efficiency measures. Still, the situation is serious enough that the federal government is being turned to for help. WisDOT and other members of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials have appealed to federal lawmakers for $50 billion in emergency aid. If something of the sort is not forthcoming, Wisconsin could soon find itself having to cut long-planned projects.
“We haven’t reached out with any specific warnings on any specific projects,” Thompson said. “We are doing a lot of scenario planning for our next construction season. But if there is no intervening action, there will be impacts.”
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Even should vehicle miles traveled continue to stagnate, cuts are unlikely to fall on the big projects like the reconstruction of Interstate 39/90 south of Madison, Thompson said. Small projects and rehabilitation work are much more likely to be on the chopping block. Thompson noted that the decline in driving has not reduced the need for maintenance and rehabilitation. Even though miles traveled for passenger vehicles has fallen precipitously this spring, heavy trucks have continued their operations largely unabated. Because of emergency laws passed to protect deliveries of medical supplies and other necessities, vehicle miles traveled for trucks—the source of most road damage—fell by only about 10% at the peak of the shutdown.
“We have over a decade-plus of neglect to our roads,” Thompson said. “I’d hate to see us take a step backward on that.”
Unexpected Benefits
But just as working from home has brought some unexpected benefits to many – not having to commute to an office, more time for hobbies or long-neglected household chores – so the pandemic has not been an unmitigated disaster for transportation officials. Thompson said WisDOT was able to advance its I-94 North-South project by allowing it to have more lanes simultaneously closed and have crews work more day hours than would have been possible if traffic had continued at its normal rate.
Such benefits have not fallen solely on the state. Andrea Weddle-Henning, Milwaukee County director of transportation engineering, said the drop-off in driving also allowed crews to close down the Oakland Avenue bridge near North Avenue completely for a renovation project. Work that would have taken months under normal conditions, with accommodations to keep the bridge partially in use, ended up needing about four weeks.
“So this really helped,” Weddle-Henning says. “Low traffic makes it not only easier to stage, but it’s also safer. It’s safer for the public and for the motorists and also the construction crews, especially in urban areas.”
Like roads in the rest of the state, those in Milwaukee County are becoming busy again. The local traffic count bottomed out in the week of April 3, when roughly 7 million vehicle miles traveled were logged. By May 8, the figure was up to 11,251,429.
All this is likely to draw attention once again to the inadequacy of Wisconsin’s current system of paying for roads. Even before the coronavirus outbreak, the ever-increasing fuel efficiency of cars and trucks had led to constantly diminishing returns from the state’s gas tax. Now the pandemic has shown just how vulnerable a system dependent almost entirely on gas and vehicles sales is to disruptions.
Pay as You Go?
Robert Poole, director of transportation policy at the libertarian group Reason Foundation, has long been an advocate of weaning states off gas taxes. Even if lawmakers could muster the political will to raise the tax every few years—Wisconsin’s hasn’t been increased since 2006—they would still struggle to keep pace with the revenue falloff brought about by fuel efficiency.
At the same time, however, Poole thinks it’s important to keep the pay-as-you-go principle for drivers. It’s only fair that those who use the roads most should bear the greatest burden of paying for them. Among alternatives to the gas tax, Poole has long favored tolling technology like the I-Pass system used in Illinois. Although such systems can be vulnerable to downturns in driving and might still require federal intervention during pandemics or economic slumps, they at least are not tied to the amount or type of fuel that cars and trucks use.
“It’s a sound principle to make it independent of what makes the vehicle move,” Poole said. “It could be gas, or batteries or hydrogen cell. It doesn’t matter if you are charging per mile.”
Debby Jackson, executive director of the Wisconsin Transportation Development Association, agreed that the coronavirus pandemic is likely to make the gas tax a topic of debate again. At the same time, she recognizes there are needs that should probably take precedence at the moment.
“In the hierarchy of pain, there are people out there who haven’t received their unemployment checks, people who are laid off and their pay has been cut,” she said.
In other words, WisDOT and local officials probably won’t be able to count on new sources of revenue for their salvation – at least in the short term. Even if the temporary balm of a federal bailout is forthcoming, their best hope still lies in the prospect that drivers will hit the road again.
