Get ready to pay more or get ready for uglier traffic jams.

“There is no free lunch,” said Jack Schenendorf, vice chairman of a national panel that laid out a plan Tuesday for financing the country’s transportation network.

Created by Congress in 2005, the panel recommended new — sometimes startling — ways to reinvigorate an aging and overcrowded transportation system described as being in a “death spiral.”

Among the ways Americans might pay:

•Higher federal fuel taxes — up to 40 cents a gallon over five years. The level would rise with inflation after five years.

•Fees tacked onto bus fares, train tickets and cargo.

•More toll roads.

•A tax based on how many miles a motorist drives.

The funding issue is important to Kansas and Missouri, which are facing mountainous transportation needs totaling $50 billion combined in the next 20 years.

The Kansas City area alone has a wish list of $5 billion in highway projects intended to keep daily commutes easy and safe.

And that’s not counting Kansas City’s light-rail proposal, which could depend heavily on federal funds.

The group called not only for better and safer highways but also for more mass transit and passenger rail service between cities. It envisioned a high-speed rail network in 13 to 15 major corridors across the United States that are 300 to 500 miles in length.

“Our parents and our grandparents had the wisdom and foresight to give us a world-class transportation system,” said Schenendorf, vice chairman of the National Surface Transportation Policy and Revenue Study Commission.

“Either this generation has the same wisdom and foresight … or we watch the system deteriorate,” he said. “A failure to act would be catastrophic.”

Higher gas tax?

The panel’s report sets out guideposts for Congress when the current highway program — already expected to run a deficit — is renewed next year.

But it was the proposal to raise the 18.4-cent federal fuel tax that drew a quick rebuke from a number of area lawmakers, as well as U.S. Transportation Secretary Mary Peters. She led the commission but didn’t back the gas tax idea.

Republican U.S. Rep. Sam Graves of Missouri, who sits on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, called it a “typical Washington response to a problem.”

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