What’s 75 years old, in need of repair and struggling with crushing debt? The Pennsylvania Turnpike. And in what has become a time-honored tradition of sorts, starting next year the commission is hitting drivers in the pocketbook yet again.

On Tuesday the commission voted to enact yet another toll hike, this one beginning in 2017.

The commission has its own checkered past filled with scandal and mismanagement, and so gets little sympathy when it talks about the costs of maintaining its infrastructure.

But these toll hikes are also a symptom of Pennsylvania’s broken transportation funding system.

Annual six percent increases to toll fees for the next 30 years — that’s not a joke; the commission is actually projecting this — might seem like less of a scam to drivers if their money was used more prudently.

In 2007 state legislators passed Act 44 as part of a package envisioning tolls on Interstate 80 flowing to the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission and, subsequently, PennDOT for highway and bridge work. The plan to toll I-80 fell through, but the Turnpike’s payments to PennDOT — $450 million each year until 2023, when the decrease to $50 million — magically remained.

In 2013 state lawmakers amended Act 44 into Act 89, to separate the Turnpike payments from money raised through new increases to the state’s gas tax and vehicle registration fees. The Turnpike payments were shifted to pay for nonhighway programs related to transportation. The gas tax and registration fee money was supposed to be used for highways and bridges, but lawmakers decided they’d quietly steal a huge chunk of it — $750 million — to buttress the budget of the Pennsylavnia State Police.

Oh, what a tangled web we weave.

In 2013 Pennsylvania Auditor General Eugene DePasquale issued a dire warning: unless the Act 44 payments were eliminated, it would cost motorists $50 to cross the state by 2021, he said.

Whoops. We’ll actually hit that mark next year. The six percent rate hike the Commission approved on Tuesday means the cost of riding Route 76 from Ohio to New Jersey in 2017 will be $51.85.

The cost of being a motorist in Pennsylvania has become outrageous, and it’s difficult to see the benefit from the billions of taxpayer dollars being pumped into the system.

In February the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities published a report showing state and local spending on infrastructure is at its lowest point in 30 years. In 2014 the state received a C-minus grade on its infrastructure from civil engineers across the state, who noted that the state has the highest percentage of structurally-deficient bridges in the country, and that 44 percent of its roads were rated “fair to poor” by PennDOT in 2012.

Turnpike Commission Chairman Sean Logan says the group will be re-evaluating its projects and departments, because it still may not have enough money. “No one is excluded from feeling the pain,” he said.

It would be nice if, just once, drivers actually were excluded.