The Financing Commission's recommendations are based on a set of principles that together can help to achieve a national surface transportation system that is safe, effective, efficient, fair, and sustainable.
As a first order of business, the Commission agreed on broad goals for the surface transportation system: it must be safe, effective, efficient, fair, and sustainable. To achieve these fundamental goals, the Commission developed six overarching principles to guide its consideration of funding and finance approaches. Athough these guiding principles are generally applicable to all levels of government, the Commission focused primarily on applying them to the federal level. After an extensive review of relevant literature and discussion with stakeholder groups, the Commission selected a reasonable and logical group of revenue raising and finance mechanisms for detailed analysis and applied the principles and related evaluation criteria to this set of options.
Although the Commission's core objective was to arrive at a package of funding approaches that together incorporate these principles in a meaningful way, clearly not every recommended mechanism will fully adhere to all the principles. There can be different priorities, or weighting, across the principles, reflecting legitimate differences of opinion as to the relative importance of each. And there are inherent and unavoidable conflicts among some of the principles, so that achieving some principles through certain mechanisms impinges on the ability to fully achieve other principles. The guiding principles should be applied to the surface transportation system as a whole and, to the extent possible, to individual system components, balancing across the various individual funding principles and policy objectives.
The following guiding principles are not listed in priority order but rather should be considered collectively.
• The funding and finance framework must support the overall goal of enhancing mobility of all users of the transportation system.
• The funding and finance framework must generate sufficient funding to meet national investment needs on a sustainable basis, with the aim of closing the significant funding gap. The framework must enable the federal government to raise sufficient funding and also support the ability of other levels of government to raise sufficient funds and make appropriate investments.
• The funding and finance framework should cause users and direct beneficiaries to bear the full cost of using the transportation system to the greatest extent possible (including for impacts such as congestion, air pollution, pavement damage, and other direct and indi- rect impacts) in order to promote more efficient use of the system. This will not be possible in all instances, and when it is not, any cross-subsidization must be intentional, fully trans- parent, and designed to meet network goals, equity goals, or other compelling purposes.
• The funding and finance framework should encourage efficient investment in the trans- portation system—recognizing the inherent differences between and within individual states—such that investments go toward projects with the greatest benefits relative to costs.
• The funding and finance framework should incorporate equity considerations—for ex- ample, generational equity, equity across income groups, and geographic equity.
• The funding and finance framework should support the broad public policy objectives of energy independence and environmental protection.
Each principle is described in greater detail in this section.