The U.S. Interstate Highway System is facing threats from the growing backlog of structural and operational deficiencies and by challenges such as climate change, automated vehicles, and electric vehicles, according to a report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
If the challenges and deficiencies are not addressed, the nation’s interstates will become increasingly unreliable and congested, less safe, incompatible with new technology and vulnerable to extreme weather, the report said.
“The interstates have long been the backbone of our country’s transportation system, but most of them have exceeded their design lives and in many places are worn and overused,” Norman Augustine, chairman of the report committee, said. “We recommend a course of action that is aggressive and ambitious but by no means novel. Essentially, we need a reinvigoration of the federal and state partnership that produced the Interstate Highway System in the first place.”
The highway system was authorized in 1956 and comprises 1 percent of public road mileage, 25 percent of vehicle miles traveled, and 50 percent of heavy truck miles.
Solutions proposed in the report include increasing the federal fuel tax, allowing tolls per-mile-charges on more interstate routes and extending the system’s length and scope.