Let's go through a brief exercise here . . .
According to the Federal Highway Administration's Bureau of Transportation Statistics and the American Petroleum Institute, Arizona has the following:
1. A total of 65,000 miles of roadway (combined local, state, and FHWA-funded);
2. 49.8 billion vehicle-miles traveled (VMT) in 2000. Based on the growth of this figure before 2000, I'd estimate this to be about 55 billion today. Let's call it 60 million to be conservative.
3. Total state gasoline taxes of 19.1 cents per gallon. This, coupled with the Federal gas tax rate of 18.3 cents per gallon, yields a combined tax of 37.4 cents per gallon (somewhat lower than the U.S. average of 42 cents per gallon).
4. A total of 3.8 million registered vehicles in 2001. Let's call it 4.5 million just to be on the high side.
5. Average auto registration fee of $8.00 -- we'll raise that to $20 just to be safe.
6. About 3.5 million registered drivers. Let's call this 4.5 million just to be on the high side.
7. About $5 per year fee for license renewals (I may have this wrong -- I'm not sure if the license fee is assessed for each renewal, or just up front).
. . .
OK. Now, with all of this information in hand, let's look at Arizona's revenue from all of these different sources:
License Fees: 4.5 million drivers X $5 per driver = $22.5 million
Registration: 4.5 million vehicles X $20 per vehicle = $90 million
Fuel Taxes: (55 million VMT / estimated average fuel efficiency of 20 miles per gallon) X 37.4 cents per gallon = $1,029 million
This yields a total annual revenue stream of $1.142 billion in Arizona.
As far as expenditures are concerned, let's just look at operating and maintenance costs:
65,000 roadway miles X 2 lanes = 130,000 lane-miles (this is a very low estimate, since it is based on the assumption that every road in the state is a two-lane road)
Unit costs for annual operating/maintenance expenses in the U.S. generally range from $12,000 per lane-mile to as high as $17,000 in urban areas where the labor costs are higher. Even if we use the lower figure, we come up with total annual estimated operating/maintenance expenses of $1.56 billion for Arizona.
Not only don't the motorists of Arizona pay 100% of their own costs -- my very conservative estimate indicates that they only pay about 73% of the recurring maintenance costs of the state's roadway system!
And I haven't even mentioned the cost of building the roads in the first place. If we were to use estimated capital costs of $2 million per lane-mile (very low), an annual interest rate of 5%, and a 50-year amortization schedule, the capital cost estimate for Arizona's roads (based on the very conservative estimates I've presented here) would be $14.2 billion per year, which really dwarfs the operating/maintenance costs.