Roads: Taxes, Tolls, Other?

I check The Infrastructurist feed daily.  It’s a pretty good blog about this nation’s infrastructure, with significant bias on transportation infrastructure.  However, I was a little disappointed by today’s article with embedded video, ”Finding Alternatives to the Gas Tax: The Pundits Discuss,” because they didn’t really discuss alternatives to the gas tax.

Instead, I heard the repeated complaint that the gas tax is no longer able to fund the repair of streets and highways and that tolling is the only other idea.  Tolling is the typical alternative, but is an expensive solution due to installation and maintenance costs of the tolling equipment.  In the concluding seconds of the video, Infrastructurist editor, Melissa Lafsky, states that raising the gas tax is long overdue.

I believe that raising the gas tax needs to be part of the solution.  But I also believe there are cost-cutting measures to discuss.  Here are six of my own ideas for affording our streets and highways.  Not all of these ideas are good, but they might be worth discussing if only to show that we’ve considered everything:

1. Design lightweight vehicles and roads so the roadway’s engineering and materials costs are less and the wear-and-tear by the vehicles is less.
2. Categorize roadways by mass so that heavy vehicles are restricted to certain roads in order to prevent wear-and-tear on roads not meant to handle heavy traffic.  This is already done to some extent for extremely heavy vehicles, but a finer-grained system with more weight categories might offer better results.
3. Put the nation on a road diet.  One way to do this is to quit building out roads to support sprawl.  Instead, have a municipality draw a border outside of which it will not support street construction and repair.  Anybody living beyond the border must join their neighborhood infrastructure district which will have to pay for their roads (and maybe other utilities).
4. Perform only road repairs that can be afforded without diverting funds from other sources.  A city should then prioritize its road repairs; perhaps focusing on roads that carry the city’s buses.  When citizens realize that their roads are in horrible condition because they aren’t paying enough taxes, raising the gas tax becomes more palatable.
5. Design a different kind of road using modern materials.  Often, roadways are built with the most affordable material.  Are there other materials (recycled and recyclable, preferably) that are less-expensive because they last proportionately longer?
6. Design a simpler kind of road.  Instead of a solid flat surface everywhere, can we make the long, non-intersecting segments of roads from two paved strips where the wheels go, but the middle strip is not paved?  Something like this “trail road,” (but better engineered) might reduce the frequency of lane changes which makes traffic more orderly. In this design, we fully pave intersections and special segments designated for lane-changes.

These are just some ideas that I came up with after watching a disappointing video on this topic.  Do you think any of these ideas are worthwhile?  Do you have any ideas yourself?  Please share.