Maine is facing a major transportation funding problem. By 2027, the Maine Highway Fund is projected to be $280 million short of what is needed to cover transportation expenses. This comes at a time when Americans are experiencing soaring transportation costs and congestion, and when funding for affordable solutions to meet everyday travel needs is drying up.
New research shows that Maine can close a significant part of its transportation funding gap just by shifting the types of projects it invests in. Here’s how.
What Contributes to Maine’s Transportation Funding Problem
Bangor City Bus (Courtesy City of Bangor)
We can break Maine’s transportation funding problem down into two buckets: how Maine gets money for transportation and how the state spends that money. On the revenue side, Maine’s Highway Fund has been suffocated for more than a decade by a law in 2011 that divorced the gas tax from the rate of inflation, keeping gas tax revenues flat as expenses continued to grow—$580 million in transportation funding has been lost since that time.
The second part of the equation, spending, is equally important. If the state continues to spend money on expanding a vast network of roads that we already can’t afford to maintain, Maine will continue to incur long-term maintenance obligations that will keep revenue lagging behind need. This means it’ll be harder and more expensive to take care of our roads.
Building Smarter: New Analysis Shows Multimodal Solutions Save Money
To solve this problem, Maine could look to other states that are taking bold actions to more efficiently spend their transportation dollars while delivering relief to their residents right away. Last year, Illinois lawmakers brought transit service in the state back from the brink of collapse by shifting investment of transport revenues away from excess roadway construction and instead into turbocharging the region’s trains and buses.
New analysis from the nonprofit, nonpartisan Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP) shows that, if the rest of the country followed Illinois’s example and repurposed larger shares of their transportation expenditures into “multimodal” solutions, like bus, rail, and biking, governments could collectively save $1 trillion in public expenditures by 2050 while also better serving travel demand.
Electric bus and bicycle in Portland (JCaldwell/NRCM)
ITDP looked at two scenarios: Business as Usual (BAU) vs. the Multimodal Investment Pathway (MIP). Under the BAU scenario, national transportation investments continue to focus on highway expansion, which increases traffic and dependence on cars as the only viable transportation option. This result reflects the fact that despite significant investments in widening freeways, drivers are losing an all-time high of 63 hours a year — more than a typical work week — sitting in gridlock. More than just wasting drivers’ time, these trends also encourage development patterns that spread housing and services farther apart, thus requiring more tax dollars to construct and maintain more pavement, and impact more natural landscapes and farmland.
However, state governments have the technology today to slash congestion and move more people per dollar by leveraging 21st-century public transit and active transportation solutions. The Multimodal Investment Pathway assumes that metro regions, to the maximum extent feasible, invest in projects that give commuters more affordable choices — bus, rail, and biking infrastructure. In this scenario, we find that state budgets would save on average 10 percent of their annual transportation expenditures largely due to lower spending on highway expansion and reduced wear and tear on roads.
How Much Maine Could Save by Investing in Cleaner, Healthier Transportation Options
Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) partnered with ITDP to localize their study results and better understand how each state in the nation could best leverage their resources to achieve maximum cost savings while reducing traffic congestion between now and 2050.
Their analysis found that if by 2050 Maine built 79 miles of new Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) and 460 miles of new protected bike lanes, the state would see net savings of $86 million per year, equal to approximately 5% of state public transport expenditures in 2022.
While those numbers may seem lofty, they are very achievable by 2050. Seventy-nine miles is the distance between Portland and Waterville, or Bangor to Millinocket. And 460 miles of new protected bike lanes would mean adding protected bike lanes to just 2% of Maine’s 22,787 road miles. These lanes would also unlock the true potential of emerging low-cost clean transportation technologies like electric bikes.
Bike on the Eastern Trail, Scarborough, by Colin Durrant
We don’t have to look far to see evidence of these benefits: a 2022 study found that the Eastern Trail (a safe, separated walking and biking trail in Southern Maine) generates $44 million annually in economic activity for the state.
To solve our transportation funding challenges, there is no question that part of the solution lies in finding new sustainable and equitable revenue sources that will keep our statewide transportation system moving for the long haul.
At the same time, Maine can learn from other states and act now to reorient transportation planning and investments away from endless road building and ever-increasing maintenance costs, and toward the multimodal options that will save money, reduce pollution, and keep Mainers out of traffic.
Based on the RMI article: Building Smarter How Investing in More Transportation Choices Cuts Infrastructure Costs
—by Miguel Moravec, Rocky Mountain Institute
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