Every time you fill your gas tank, you are not only contributing to highway improvements by paying federal and state gas taxes, but you are also saving lives. According to a recent report, Federal Highway Program and Highway Safety: An Economic Analysis, every dollar invested in highway improvements over the past 40 years has helped save American society two dollars in health care, insurance, lost wages and productivity costs.

The report, authored by Dr. William R. Buechner, American Road and Transportation Builders Association vice president of economics and research, retrospectively analyzed public highway investment and traffic fatality and injury rates.

According to Dr. Buechner, every $1 billion invested by the public in government-financed road improvements since 1950 has helped prevent 1,400 premature deaths and nearly 50,000 injuries. In the early 1950s, there were seven fatal crashes for every 100 million vehicle miles traveled (VMT) in the U.S. By 1997, the U.S Department of Transportation reports that this rate had dropped to fewer than 1.6 fatal crashes per 100 million VMT. The number of crashes resulting in non-fatal injuries also declined 53 percent during that time period. It is no coincidence that these reduced fatality and injury rates directly coincided with the post-war development of the Interstate Highway System – one of, if not the, safest road systems in the world.

The investment in multi-laned highways over the past 50 years has also increased our mobility and quality of life. For example, in 1956 when Congress passed legislation to create the Interstate System, approximately 1.5 million tourists visited Yellowstone National Park. By 1996, with construction of the interstates nearly complete, that had doubled to more than three million people per year.

We owe our collective summer vacation memory of being in the backseat of a station wagon and asking "Are we there yet?" to the creation of interstate highways and the freedom to explore America from coast-to-coast.

Investment in highway improvements also helps drive the American economy. More than $4.4 trillion worth of products—72 percent of the total value of commodities shipped annually in the U.S.— are transported via highways. Research also shows that 35,000 jobs are created for every $1 billion invested in the construction of our infrastructure.

The total value of our transportation infrastructure is $1.75 trillion. That’s 12 percent of the value of all tangible productive assets in the American economy! It’s also 10 times the current total value of all computers being used by American businesses and eight times the value of the nation’s entire telephone and telecommunications network!

Over the past 50 years, your tax dollars have made our roads and bridges safer, helped reduce the number of deaths and injuries that occur on our highways, strengthened the American economy, and provided a quality of life that is unmatched anywhere in the world. Continued investments in transportation will make America even stronger as we head into the 21^st century.

Just keep this in mind the next time you pull into your local gas station and fill'er up!