PA highly taxes gas for roads, yet many factors still make them lousy

In 2025, Pennsylvania had the fourth-highest state gasoline tax in America. The commonwealth held the No. 3 spot the prior year but dipped below Washington State. That might feel, for a nanosecond, like incremental progress, but the drop owes only to Evergreen Staters’ gas tax rising 6.22 cents per gallon (cpg) to 59.04.

At 57.6 cpg (58.7 counting the underground storage tank fee and 78.5 counting the federal gas tax), Pennsylvania’s liquid fuels tax also stands only below Illinois’s (66.4 cpg) and California’s (70.92). Indiana rounds out the top five states at 54.5. Pennsylvania’s levy will rake an estimated $3.5 billion into the treasury in Fiscal Year 2025-26. What does the Keystone State have to show for taking so much at the pump? 

Equally concerning marks on road and bridge quality. 

U.S. News & World Report puts Pennsylvania at Nos. 42 and 45 respectively in its road and bridge rankings, judging the state about as unflatteringly in related categories: 47th on overall transportation and 43rd on overall infrastructure.

The free-market Reason Foundation judges the commonwealth almost as severely, placing it at 37th on general highway performance and cost-effectiveness and far worse in certain regards: 42nd in mitigating urbanized area congestion and 45th in addressing structurally deficient bridges.

“Pennsylvania has a very high gas tax, its overall per capita transportation spending is high, and yet the pavement quality particularly is poor, as are the bridges,” senior Reason Foundation managing director of transportation policy Baruch Feigenbaum told The Independence. 

Why must Pennsylvania’s drivers abide such substandard infrastructure? Gas taxes largely flow directly to it: 47.9 cpg go toward construction and maintenance of roads, highways, and bridges while 4.1 fund highway-related State Police patrol and law enforcement; the rest gets spent on Turnpike operations, other transportation functions, and debt service. The Pennsylvania Constitution guarantees the state’s liquid fuel revenues be “used solely for construction, reconstruction, maintenance, and repair of and safety on public highways and bridges.” Despite the dedicated funding stream, problems linger. 

Some of their causes can’t be avoided. Robert Latham, executive vice president of Associated Pennsylvania Constructors, a highway-building trade group, pointed out that Pennsylvania has one of the nation’s largest state highway systems in the country. The commonwealth encompasses over 40,000 miles of state-run roadway in addition to 25,000 bridges. The Pennsylvania Department of Transportation must maintain more roads than New York, New Jersey, and New England combined. And potholes often riddle the roadways due to the frequency of regional freeze-thaw cycles that lower the water temperature below freezing and then raise it back above its melting point. 

“We have a very large system and we’re right on a freeze-thaw line, so we get a lot more of that than most states,” Latham said. “That of course plays havoc with concrete, asphalt, and steel.”

Elizabeth Stelle, policy vice president at the Harrisburg-based Commonwealth Foundation, agreed Pennsylvania can’t blame all its roadway travails on policymakers.

“We have a lot of infrastructure and we have all four seasons, and so we’re certainly at a disadvantage in terms of [the] resources it takes to keep our infrastructure maintained,” she said. Still, she noted, Pennsylvania usually finds itself in the top ten biggest spenders of funds on roads yearly per mile, suggesting a cost-efficiency problem. “Before we even have a question about how much more money that we need to spend on these resources, we need to ask the question: How are we spending what we’ve already allocated?”

Many experts also fret over the state’s requirement that contractors working on public projects pay the prevailing wage, which the U.S. Department of Labor defines as “the average wage paid to similarly employed workers in a specific occupation in the area of intended employment.” (U.S. law imposes this wage-floor system on highway projects using federal funds in all states.) A cement mason working on reconstructing or repaving roads in Morrisville last year, for instance, earned $81.16 hourly including benefits; a similarly classified tradesman working in Mount Joy made $57.30. 

Feigenbaum’s research has determined that states with prevailing wage laws have highway-work costs of about 20 percent higher on average, though that can vary state to state depending on the laws’ strength.

“That’s 20 percent less of a roadway section or a bridge or whatever else you’re trying to do for the same amount of money,” he said. 

A 2013 bill signed by then-Governor Tom Corbett (R) raised the expense threshold for applying prevailing wage to highway work projects from $25,000 to $100,000, but such jobs rarely have five-figure costs anymore.

“Outside of context, those numbers look like a big increase,” Stelle explained, “but when you understand how much these projects cost and you factor in the inflation of the past four years, it really doesn’t move the needle in terms of helping especially your more regional governments take care of the infrastructure they need to address.”

Latham disputed that prevailing wage heightens the cost to build and maintain highways.

“In our space, prevailing wage is essentially lower than what we have to pay to have workers,” he said. “So, it really has no impact on the cost of road construction in the PennDOT space.”

Feigenbaum said there are instances when the prevailing wage could roughly match the rate that would be paid to road workers in some instances. Comparisons between differing states’ project costs show it’s doubtful those are the majority of cases, he argued. And whenever prevailing wage fails to raise worker pay, he added, it proves useless to anyone involved.

“If it was [the rate that would come about anyway], why would you need to have it in the first place?” he said. “It’s kind of a circular logic to me.”

The Pennsylvania Motor Truck Association, a statewide organization advocating for truckers’ interests, deems the wage policy a persistent problem. 

“Prevailing wage is definitely a concern for cost inflation of road and bridge projects, most especially at the local level, where small businesses are unable to effectively compete,” PMTA President Rebecca Oyler said.

In addition to repealing prevailing wage, Stelle and Feigenbaum believe the commonwealth should procure more public-private partnerships (P3s) to improve core infrastructure. Feigenbaum recollects Pennsylvania having had worse bridges than any other state about fifteen years ago. The use of a P3, he said, transferred risks and revealed more innovative bridge designs, moving Pennsylvania’s bridges up five spots in his foundation’s Annual Highway Report.

P3s task the private sector with a range of operational, financial, design, and other responsibilities in the public-works sphere. PennDOT’s press office called them “a valuable tool for the right project.”

Stelle said such arrangements worked well for the Rapid Bridge Replacement Project, which facilitated the replacement of 558 bridges within three years, concluding in 2017. The state is now using a P3 in repairing numerous interstate bridges, though advocates of the practice see room to spread it. Feigenbaum hopes that will be done to create express toll lanes with free access for carpools and buses on the often maddeningly congested Schuylkill Expressway.

Latham doesn’t share their enthusiasm for P3s, calling them “just an expensive way of borrowing money” that involves “all kinds of middlemen.” 

Stelle said that isn’t necessarily the case, underscoring the need for strict contract terms.

“They’re a tool that can be used well and they’re a tool that can be used not well,” she said. “It really depends on accountability and making sure that there’re clear elements of accountability in the contracts and [that] they’re paying for performance. And that’s oftentimes where this idea gets a bad rap, [when] the contracts are not clear on what needs delivered and there’re no ramifications when the contractor fails to deliver.”  

The gas tax isn’t the only source of roadway funding; driver’s license and registration fees also provide for it, as often does federal money. And that touches upon another issue Stelle raised. She opined that bridge and road funding shouldn’t get diverted, as when Governor Josh Shapiro (D) shifted $153 million in federal highway money to the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority.

Latham said the state’s highway fund still suffers somewhat due to losing $250 million annually to the general fund for the Pennsylvania State Police, though that figure has fallen dramatically in recent years. The Shapiro administration considers the PSP’s reduced reliance on gas taxes a major win.

“Thanks to bipartisan action in Governor Shapiro’s budgets,” PennDOT’s press office told The Independence in an email, “an additional $391.7 million for roads and bridges has been made available by reducing the PA State Police’s reliance on gas tax revenue from the Motor License Fund by explicitly increasing PSP’s funding.”

The commonwealth, Latham suggested, could achieve more progress for its driving infrastructure by enacting a short-term bond program, via pending State Senate legislation, to fix lower-volume roads throughout Pennsylvania. Finally, he hopes the state will do a thorough study of the backlog of transportation funding needs and possible new funding sources including, perhaps, expanded highway tolling.

Feigenbaum also recommended stronger administrative examination of Pennsylvania’s road and bridge problems, suggesting Pennsylvania could adopt a task force like the one formed in Georgia to scrutinize the state’s road repair and construction practices.

Some solutions will need to materialize. Pennsylvania’s reputation as a high-tax, bad-road state doesn’t just hurt drivers at the pump or on the highway; it impacts the state’s relative economic position. All neighboring states boast substantially lower gas taxes, Maryland’s being 46.19 cpg, New Jerseys’ 44.95, Ohio’s 38.5, West Virginia’s 35.7, New York’s 24.87, and Delaware’s 23. Meanwhile, only West Virginia places worse than Pennsylvania in U.S. News’s transportation rankings, at 49th. 

Worries over Pennsylvania’s roads and bridges aren’t getting easier to assuage. Keystone State motorists buy between four and five billion gallons of gasoline each year, yet electric vehicles and rising fuel efficiency are increasingly putting downward pressure on that consumption. All the while, borrowing costs will swell painfully if lawmakers don’t arrest the growth of the commonwealth’s budget deficit, which the Independent Fiscal Office forecasts will balloon to $7.5 billion by FY 2029-30. And lawmakers have spent the last of Covid-era federal aid. 

Under such circumstances, Feigenbaum said, policymakers should cool rationalization of the state’s poor roadways — even given legitimate causes like weather conditions and infrastructural volume — and zero in on fixes.

“While nobody’s expecting that Pennsylvania’s going to have the best roads in the country or the lowest costing roads, I think there’s room for improvement in both quality and cost,” he said. “The focus should be on how we can make things better, knowing that it’s not necessarily going to be No. 1, but also knowing that we shouldn’t be using excuses that might be out of our control but [instead] making improvements.”

Bradley Vasoli is the senior editor of The Independence.