Pennsylvania motorists will feel the cost of the state’s new transportation-funding plan at the gas pump and the driver’s license center.
And if motorists run a stop sign or let their insurance lapse, they will pay more.
A typical driver can expect to pay $22 more a year in 2014 and $132 more by 2018, according to calculations made by Gov. Corbett’s Transportation Funding Advisory Commission in 2011. The commission’s recommendations formed the basis for the funding plan approved by the House and Senate this week.
That would amount to a 42-cents-a-week increase next year, and $2.54 a week by 2018.
(The commission assumed that the typical driver owns one vehicle, drives it 12,000 miles a year, and gets 24 miles per gallon.)
The new transportation measure will provide about $2.3 billion more a year by 2018 for better roads, safer bridges, and viable public transit. Next year, the amount will be considerably less, about $351 million, but it will increase each year.
The measure will create 50,000 jobs and preserve 12,000 existing jobs, the Corbett administration said.
Most of the additional money – about 82 percent – will come from higher gas taxes. Gas taxes in Pennsylvania were last increased in 1997.
The plan calls for the state to gradually remove the limit on the wholesale tax on gasoline (now capped at $1.25 per gallon, while the actual wholesale price is about $2.70 a gallon) and eliminate the current 12-cents-a-gallon retail gas tax.
Within five years, if wholesalers pass on the full increase to consumers, that could increase the gas tax by about 28 cents a gallon. That would boost the state gas tax from the current 31.2 cents a gallon to 59.2 cents by 2018.
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