1. Fuel taxes are less reliable over time because they have been declining due to improved fuel efficiency even as funding needs have increased. This is exacerbated when you have more and more vehicles that don't use traditional motor fuels.
2. Check your state's laws closely to see what types of expenditures can even be paid for out of the fuel tax revenue. In some states, any transportation funding from the fuel tax can only go into new projects, not ordinary repairs.
3. At 17.5 cents per gallon, it seems like Virginia has one of the lower fuel tax rates in the U.S. (for whatever that's worth).
4. While there's an understandable inclination to make every attempt to have users pay directly for the use of public assets (hence the appeal of toll facilities in recent decades), it is very difficult to figure out who the "user" is for transportation infrastructure when you consider how much commerce takes place on our highways that benefits the public at large and not just the users of a given road or bridge.
5. Here in the NYC area we have a series of interesting situations unfolding involving major bridge rehabilitation and replacement projects. Two of them in particular -- the Goethals Bridge and the Tappan Zee Bridge -- involve bridges that have passed the end of their useful lives and need to be replaced. In both cases the agency that owns the bridges has looked at public-private arrangements for having the bridge built by a private consortium that would then collect tolls for a period of several decades to finance the cost. In both cases, the financial analysis shows that the tolls that would be required to pay the cost of the bridge would be so high that revenues would suffer simply because fewer motorists would use the bridge with such a high toll in place. The implications of this are really fascinating.
Anyway ... flame away if you feel like it, folks!
I agree with your statements and will add my own thought.
I have no issue paying for things that I use and paying the actual cost. If it REALLY costs $212 to register my truck every year then so be it. But in most cases Political hacks see fit to skim that money. So 212 bucks become $250 with the extra going into the general fund or earmarked for some pet project.
If tax funds on a national level were segregated into specific funds and kept that way we would be way ahead.