WASHINGTON — In his acceptance speech, President-elect Barack Obama cautioned, "The road ahead will be long and steep." He's right. And if it's like many of America's crumbling, potholed roads, it will need repaving and widening.

The nonprofit transportation research group TRIP reports that 33 percent of America's major roads are in poor or mediocre condition, 25 percent of our bridges are structurally deficient or functionally obsolete, and 36 percent of our major urban highways are congested, costing motorists $78 billion a year in wasted time and fuel.

The U.S. Department of Transportation says the backlog of needed highway and bridge repairs and improvements will cost $495 billion. Transit is in trouble too, with 30 agencies at risk of defaulting due to years of under-investment and neglect.

Yet with the current economic meltdown, the overwhelming need for an economic stimulus program is clearly pointing toward a major reinvestment in the backbone of the U.S. economy — our surface transportation system.

History is useful here. In the 1930s, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration put unemployed Americans to work in useful public works programs as an economic stimulus.

In an effort to "get the farmers out of the mud," all-weather roads began to replace muddy rural tracks, and enduring legacies like the Blue Ridge Parkway took shape.

Under President Dwight Eisenhower in 1956, fuel taxes began flowing into the new Federal Highway Trust Fund, primarily to pay for the Interstate Highway System, without which today's economy would simply cease to function. But those federal highway funds are headed from what was a longtime positive balance to a negative $200 million sometime in fiscal year 2009, according to Office of Management and Budget.

Because it is such a political hot potato, the federal tax on gasoline has been raised only four times since World War II, to its current level of 18.4 cents-per-gallon. In fact, the last increase was in the early 1990s.

President-elect Obama told the American Automobile Association recently that he would "work to reform the federal transportation funding process, and also create a new national infrastructure reinvestment bank to invest $60 billion in additional federal funding over 10 years into our transportation infrastructure."

The DOT calculates that each $1 billion of federal spending on highway construction nationwide generates more than 30,000 jobs annually. Jeff Davis, editor of the online wire service Transportation Weekly notes that whatever Congress does in the short term, "it's time to reinvent the highway program."

Obama also told AAA that while China, India and other countries are investing in upgrading their roads, bridges and ports, "Washington, D.C., has not only provided too few resources to maintain our existing infrastructure, but also paid little attention to building new infrastructure to accommodate a growing population and the demands of a 21st-century economy."

While some economists say that timing lags make highway projects too slow to be a timely stimulus, a study this year by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials — the likely driver of a "reinvented" highway program — identified more than 3,000 highway and bridge construction and repair projects that could be under way within 90 days once funding becomes available.

A huge advantage of stimulus programs rebuilding and improving transportation infrastructure is the permanent legacy they leave behind long after the immediate need for job creation has passed.

Unlike writing government checks to bail out Wall Street firms, banks or auto companies, every tax dollar invested in our highway system returns $5.40 in economic benefits. That's the kind of "bang for your buck" stimulus Congress and the new administration should seek in the coming months.

Gerald Bastarache is a former director of communications at both the Highway Users Federation and, more recently, the Intelligent Transportation Society of America. This commentary is distributed by McClatchy-Tribune News Service.