Dive Brief:

• Alabama DOT chief John Cooper told a meeting of Southeast contractors that agencies like his are stuck with fuel taxes that are largely unchanged in two decades.
• Costs for building highway's have gone up, by some estimates, 250% in the past 30 years.
• Changing travel patterns, more mass transit use, fuel-efficient gasoline-powered cars, and hybrids and electrics that use little or no taxed fuel have reduced income even with the same fuel taxes.

Dive Insight:

How to keep up existing roads and build new ones has one solution that sounds simple: pay for it. The sticky part is in the "who" of paying for it, since higher taxes are far from a popular notion in the country. The fuel tax, however, is 90% of the federal revenue for highway work, and federal funding is critical to state programs.