Brad Plumer, at The Washington Post's WonkBlog, unpacked a new Government Accountability Office report "looking at how much federal highway money each state gets, per dollar of gas-tax revenue they chip in to the Highway Trust Fund".
Tuesday's figures reveal how much individual highway authorities will get.
Highway user fees should be proportional to how much people use highways, not how much fuel they use.
To learn how much land a typical highway will affect, landscape ecologist Richard Forman of Harvard University and ecologist Robert Deblinger of the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife studied a four-lane highway west of Boston.
Congress and the White House are still fighting over just how much to spend on highways, but they have resolved a 182-year-old dispute of more practical significance to most drivers, especially commuters stuck in traffic.
To test how much these looping ocean highways might be buoying young turtles away from their hatching sites, the researchers first designed a computer simulation of ocean conditions near the turtle beach between 2000 and 2008.
Another way to measure the disparity is in terms of how much states pay into the highway construction fund through road and petrol fees, versus how much they take out.
"Using that to determine how much money should go into highway funds versus transit projects is faulty because you're counting on an awful lot of mass transit that might not ever materialize".
Given that the product has only been out of beta since September 2008, that gives you an idea of just how much junk travels the digital highways.
The guidelines limit how much the state can alter the highway.
