HARRISBURG — Jeremy Plant tells his public administration students at Penn State-Harrisburg to always expect to have fewer resources in government than are needed to get a job done.

That's particularly true when it comes to paying for highway and bridge maintenance, said Plant, a professor who specializes in transportation policy.

"We're in this political mode where no one wants to be accused of raising a tax, and there's only so much hocus-pocus," Plant said.

With the collapse of a major highway bridge in Minnesota on Wednesday, the safety of the nation's highway and bridge network is on the minds of many, and could gain stature as a public policy debate.

The subject should be familiar in Pennsylvania, where a sprawling highway network, aging infrastructure and heavily traveled routes have led to crumbling roads and bridges.

In the last few years, policymakers in Pennsylvania and many other states have shied away from increasing taxes to pay for highways and bridges, creating bigger maintenance backlogs.

Plant and others cite various reasons. A big one is that the reach of public funding is being outpaced by the spiraling cost of construction, a primary driver of which is the price of asphalt and other materials.

In the meantime, no one planned for the cost to maintain the nation's interstate highway network, they say.

"When it comes to transportation ... politicians are loath to look the public in the eye and say, 'This is going to cost a lot of money,"' said Robert Latham, the executive director of a Harrisburg-based road-construction industry group.

On July 18, Gov. Ed Rendell signed a bill that would provide a sizable funding leap for highways and bridges in Pennsylvania — an additional $532 million a year over the next decade.

The plan, along with another $400 million-plus a year for mass transit systems, initially relies on borrowing by the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission before the burden shifts to a series of toll increases on the Turnpike and the addition of new tolls on Interstate 80. The Legislature approved it, perhaps because no one ever called the rising tolls a "tax increase," Plant said.

Still, that amount — a roughly 22 percent increase over last year's state highway and bridge funding — does not clear the decks.

A transportation funding panel commissioned by Rendell reported last year that an extra $1 billion annually would eliminate roughness on all major state highways in five years, and cut the percentage of structurally impaired bridges in half — or down to the national average — in 17 years.

Federal help isn't coming, either.

In April, President Bush's top highway official, Mary Peters, appeared in Harrisburg to support Rendell's effort to privatize the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Peters' message was that the states need to get creative regarding transportation problems because there is not enough money in Washington, D.C.

Rendell's idea — it would have been the nation's most ambitious privatization of an existing highway — generated little interest from the Legislature, even though the governor insisted it could mean far more money than the plan that lawmakers eventually approved. It surely would have meant higher tolls, as well.

Pennsylvania's last gas tax increase in 1997 substantially helped resurface the state's major highways. But now Pennsylvania's bridges and smaller highways are in need of similar help, said Craig Shuey, a top aide to state Sen. Roger Madigan, R-Bradford, who chairs the Transportation Committee.

Motorists on the nation's hugely successful interstate highway network may not have lost more money to road-improvement taxes since then. But they probably spend the same amount on wasted time and gas sitting in traffic, not to mention the punishment their vehicles take from poor road conditions, Shuey said.

"We're in a situation now where we have grown into it, we love it, it's an integral part of our life," Shuey said. "But we've ignored it."