MY TURN: What do Alaskans pay for the road?

Published 10:30 am Wednesday, September 23, 2026

Fill a pickup in Anchorage and eight cents of every gallon goes to Alaska’s roads. On a 20-gallon fill, that is $1.60.

A dollar sixty, toward every mile of pavement in the state.

The rate is eight cents because the Legislature set it at eight cents in May 1970 and has not touched it since. It is the lowest in the nation. A gallon averaged about 34 cents in 1970. In Alaska this week it is more than $5. The tax is still eight cents.

Now put a family on the ferry. Passengers are charged one by one. The vehicle is charged separately. A cabin is charged on top of that. Every fare is one way.

On the Seward Highway nobody counts heads.

One of those two arrangements gets called heavily subsidized. It is not the one paying a dollar sixty.

Ferry fares cover roughly a third of what the system costs, which is a third more than any road in Alaska collects at the point of use.

The boat is the Alaska Marine Highway. Thirty-five hundred miles, Bellingham to Dutch Harbor, on the National Highway System. Sen. Dan Sullivan counts 230 Alaska communities with no road to them.

Only the fare box disagrees.

In August, Washington awarded Alaska $410 million for the ferries, and $161 million of it pays for operations rather than steel. The law authorizing it expires Sept. 30. Congress may pass a short extension. What comes after that, nobody knows.

On Jan. 23, 1963, the Malaspina came up Tongass Narrows into Ketchikan and stopped traffic while people got out to look. A resident named Betty Marksheffel watched from a window. The feeling of isolation went away, she wrote.

Juneau is still the only state capital in America with no road to it.

Alaska has exactly one toll on land, at the Whittier tunnel.

The money maintains and operates the tunnel. Notice where we chose to charge. It is the one piece of road which behaves like a ferry. You come early. You wait in a staging lane. You go when they let you.

Scotland ran into this in 2008 and asked a plain question. What would this crossing cost if it were a road? Then they charged it. Road Equivalent Tariff. A fixed amount covering harbors and vessels, plus a rate per mile drawn from what driving costs. By 2015 it covered the whole network. The car fare from Ardrossan to Arran fell 70 percent.

It cost them more, not less. Fares came down and the subsidy went up. Scotland did it to cut the disadvantage of living on an island, and to make the islands better places to live, work and do business.

Alaska wrote the same idea into law and then walked past it. Fuel tax on watercraft goes to water and harbor facilities. Fuel tax on road vehicles goes to highways.

One statute, one system, two surfaces. Marine fuel is taxed at five cents a gallon, last raised in 1977.

The driver has never been handed a bill for the road under his tires and has no way to know what it costs. Neither did I, until I went looking.

We built one highway system. We named the wet half a highway.

We put it on the federal map as a highway. Then we priced the two halves by rules with nothing to do with each other, and 63 years went by.

Whoever is asking for your vote in November should be able to answer one question. Does Alaska have one highway system or two?

The answer is painted on the side of the boat.

Evan Swensen is an Anchorage publisher and author who writes about Alaska, public policy, and the enduring principles that strengthen free societies.