Celebrating Infrastructure Week

At WSP, every week is Infrastructure Week.

From roads, bridges, rail, seaports and airports, to the buildings, factories and cities they connect, and to the water and energy systems that make our communities more vibrant, productive and livable places, we collaborate every day with our clients to improve the built environment and our communities.

The hurdle to delivering life-changing infrastructure improvements rarely is a lack of creative, innovative ideas. Bright minds across our industry pioneer Future Ready® solutions that meet society’s most pressing needs, mitigate climate risks and deliver equitable outcomes.

Funding, now that can be another story.

Fortunately, thanks to the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL), we have a historic opportunity to make transformational change.

Since its passage in 2021, $400 billion has been awarded to more than 40,000 projects nationwide across more than 4,500 communities.

I’m proud to say that WSP, through its strategic grants team, has helped clients secure nearly $19.1 billion of BIL funding since the bill’s enactment.

Those and other newly funded projects are already breaking ground and taking shape.

With new projects underway and with the BIL’s reauthorization to be taken up soon, there is enormous pressure on owners to demonstrate real progress and deliver on time and on budget.

Technology advances such as digital twins and digital as-builts enable streamlined project delivery and lower the costs of design, construction and maintenance of our infrastructure assets.

One of the nation's primary infrastructure funding sources, however, isn’t benefitting from the wave of innovation.

Yet.

The gas tax is the primary source of funding for the nation’s roads and bridges. The increasing efficiency of internal combustion engines and the rise of electric and hybrid vehicles have eroded gas tax funding for years and the trends point to a further, accelerating decline.

Ultimately, the country needs a new funding mechanism to replace the unsustainable gas tax, which has less purchasing power than it did when it was last raised in 1993, as well as factoring in the advent of electric vehicles which decrease gas tax revenues. Road usage charging, or RUC, is gaining traction at the state and federal levels as a possible replacement.

The concept behind RUC is to treat the usage of our roadways just like other public utilities. Drivers are charged for the amount they use the roadways. Just like electricity, the more one uses, the more one will pay, regardless of what “fuel” propels the vehicle.

While there are many questions about a nationwide RUC implementation, the BIL funds its study, pilot programs are underway and more discussion is expected soon.

We look forward to the release of RUC grants in the near future, which will further demonstrate the viability of mileage-based fees and enable states and local governments to continue addressing important areas of research. Additionally, the near-term deployment of a national RUC pilot program, as required in BIL, will be an important moment to take lessons learned from state-based pilots and build a broad-based nationwide program. Frankly, now’s the time to take RUC to the next level.

Recently, I sat down to discuss RUC with my expert colleagues, WSP’s Paula Hammond, former secretary of the Washington State Department of Transportation; Davey Kim, former secretary of the California State Transportation Agency; and Shawn Wilson, former secretary of the Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development.

They are acutely aware of the importance of sustainable, predictable road funding, and our discussion illuminates both the practicality and probability of RUC in the coming years. Check it out here.

Innovative thinking and frank discussions like this underscore the purpose of Infrastructure Week, focusing the industry’s attention, talent and leadership on what it takes to deliver safe, resilient and reliable infrastructure that best meets the needs of the communities it serves.

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