By Jeff Davis
“Congress should carefully consider whether and how to replace the fossil fuel-based highway user taxes that currently support highway and mass transit spending with some other revenue source,” he said.
“Philip Plotch, principal researcher with the Eno Center for Transportation, said NJ Transit trains on the Northeast Corridor run reliably only 86% of the time. While aging tunnels cause problems, decrepit signal and electrical wiring also trigger shutdowns. It’s a vulnerable network that’s not ready for a long, hot summer, Plotch warned.”
“’Kathy Hochul didn’t just kill congestion pricing in New York, she killed it across the country for a long time,” said Philip Plotch, the lead researcher for the Eno Center for Transportation, a think tank in Washington, and a manager for policy and planning at the M.T.A. from 1992 to 2005.'”
“Philip Mark Plotch, a principal researcher at the Eno Center for Transportation in Washington, notes that Hochul was not without options. ‘She could have said, ‘We’re going to phase this in and we’re going to start with trucks because we just want to test the technology,’” says Plotch. “Or she could have just said we’re just going to start it from 7 a.m. to 9 a.m. and just at the very peak periods and see how it works there.'”“It’s not a ‘if you build it, they will come’ type of scenario,” Puentes said. “It would actually be fitting a need.”
“Election years are tough for controversial policies like congestion pricing, says Philip Plotch, a researcher at the Eno Center for Transportation. For a policy like that to move forward, all the stars have to align: a strong economy, political tailwinds, and a diverse coalition of supporters among business, labor, and environmental groups.”
“‘If you Googled it, it would just tell you to take the train,’ Plotch said. Not helpful. Instead, Plotch’s wife rode the subway north to the 96th Street station in Manhattan, where Plotch, a transportation expert who lives in Fair Lawn, picked her up by car.
‘That is somewhat inexcusable,’ Plotch, principal researcher at the Eno Center for Transportation, said in an interview. ‘Transportation agencies should provide state-of-the-art information,’Plotch said. ‘That’s not the kind of information that was available for my wife.'”
By Jeff Davis
While the climate benefits from booming electric vehicle sales, the nation’s transportation system faces an unfortunate predicament: less gasoline and diesel purchased means dwindling fuel tax revenue. Fuel tax revenue provides a core funding source for operating, maintaining, and improving transportation systems, so policymakers must find a replacement as soon as possible.
This event explores such options as mileage fees, higher annual vehicle fees, or abandoning the user-pay principle and relying on general fund revenue.
“‘There’s this big change that has happened when it comes to this ‘user pay’ concept, which basically needs to be thrown out the window,’ said Robert Puentes of the Eno Center for Transportation, a century-old nonprofit think tank based in Washington, D.C.”
“Agencies are going to be having to do things differently,” said Robert Puentes, president and CEO of the Eno Center for Transportation. “This is a real time for innovation and for new ideas and new opportunities.”
By Jeff Davis
As Jeff Davis explains in an article for the Eno Center for Transportation, the FHWA has lost buying power, getting less “bang for the buck” on projects. “This was the 11th straight quarter of cost increases. The July-September 2023 NHCCI of 3.456 is a 69 percent increase in highway construction costs since the October-December 2020 quarter.”
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