U.S. Sens. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) and Mark Kelly (D-AZ) praised Tuesday’s vote by the U.S. Senate to include their highway study bill as an amendment to the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.
The Senate voted 95-3 to include Lummis and Kelly’s Highway Cost Allocation Study Act of 2021 into the Infrastructure bill, which would require the Secretary of the Department of Transportation to conduct a study of vehicular highway use to understand how Americans’ highway use has changed since the last study.
The new study would provide Congress and the Department of Transportation with updated information about highway use. The last study was conducted in 1997, nearly 25 years ago, the Senators said. The information gained from the study would inform decisions to address the Highway Trust Fund’s revenue shortfalls during the next reauthorization cycle.
“This amendment is the first step we must undertake to determine how we pay for our infrastructure moving forward,” Lummis said. “Since 2008, we have repeatedly bailed out the Highway Trust Fund. That makes it a trust fund that we cannot actually trust. A highway cost allocation study provides the data that we need in order to make long-term, sustainable, and fiscally sound decisions about how best to invest in our nation’s aging infrastructure.”
Kelly said adding the study to the infrastructure bill would ensure Congress and subsequent administrations had the most up-to-date data to make decisions about highway infrastructure.