The Life and Death of the Highway Trust Fund

Summary

The current federal program for funding surface transportation infrastructure in the United States is broken. This situation has created a state of perpetual uncertainty surrounding federal transportation funding. Lewis’s presentation details the circumstances that have led the U.S. transportation program to its current funding situation and explores how other nations have created sustainable mechanisms for ensuring adequate national-level investment in surface transportation systems. The Life and Death of the Highway Trust Fund is the result of an 18-month effort to evaluate the current political, economic, and legal forces behind the U.S. Highway Trust Fund (HTF), including an examination of peer countries and their lessons on providing long-term sustainable funding for transportation investment.

PAUL LEWIS is the Director of Policy and Finance at the Eno Center for Transportation where he is responsible for overseeing policy research and forum products. He has been a co-author on several Eno papers, including The Life and Death of the Highway Trust Fund and Getting to the Route of It: the Role of Governance in Regional Transit. He has worked at Eno since August 2011 applying his background to help tackle policy issues in transportation at the federal, state, and local levels. Prior to joining Eno, Lewis worked as a contract researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Through work at Eno and MIT, Lewis worked directly on projects and research papers that involve highways, railroads, transit, and aviation, covering movement of both passengers and freight. Lewis’s bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from Ohio Northern University and master’s in Transportation from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.