Those states are taking concrete steps to raise transportation revenues in the face of little congressional appetite for providing anything close to the $3.6 trillion that the American Society of Civil Engineers estimates needs to be plowed into national infrastructure.

It’s a growing trend in the age of austere Washington that has forced states to step up if they want to rebuild bridges, expand public transportation and keep their economies moving.

In Wyoming, Republican Gov. Matt Mead signed a bill in February that will boost his state’s gasoline tax by 10 cents per gallon, seeking to avoid having to dip into general fund spending for roads each year. In Virginia, Republican Gov. Bob McDonnell was able to move bipartisan, complex legislation that raises the sales tax and wholesale gas levies but shaves the gas tax — with the end result of providing more than $3.5 billion for infrastructure.

And in Maryland, Democratic Gov. Martin O’Malley got legislators to pass a bill that, when fully phased in, will increase the gas tax by as much as 20 cents per gallon — or about $70 per year for the average motorist in 2016.

O’Malley said in an interview Tuesday in Annapolis that governors aren’t looking to raise fuel taxes to goose their poll numbers. “There’s probably none more unpopular than the gas tax,” he said.

But he said the state’s residents are already paying for years of inaction and a state transportation program based on the economics of the 1990s.

“We lose a lot of money because of the congestion. We lose a lot of money and a lot of time because we effectively, in essence, capped out transportation estimates back in 1992,” he said. “We can’t kid ourselves and think that we’re somehow clever by capping transportation revenues at 1992 levels.”

Dozens of other governors will eventually face similar revelations, transportation experts say.

Both O’Malley and McDonnell said the key to their legislation is that it seeks to fix the problem in their states by indexing rates or allowing revenues to rise with gas prices. That will keep future leaders from having to take the politically perilous route of seeking regressive tax hikes every few years.

“Every governor in the country is facing this because every governor’s gas taxes are going down. They have more needs and less revenue,” McDonnell told POLITICO shortly after his compromise legislation passed in February.

Both leaders had tried to take on the structural imbalance in transportation spending and revenues in years past, but the possibility of having literally no money for new transportation projects in the near future has become more real each year.

O’Malley at least was able to watch his rival, McDonnell, take the plunge first. Maryland and Virginia are in constant competition for jobs, and O’Malley and McDonnell served in 2012 atop the Democratic Governors Association and Republican Governors Association, respectively.

O’Malley said Virginia Republicans saw the same facts he did.

“Even they saw that bridges don’t grow stronger with age and that the power of that flat gas tax was dropping like a rock,” O’Malley said. “Virginia’s actually persuaded many that this is probably something that we needed to do. Especially if our competitors across the [Potomac] River were willing to leave their ideology: ‘No taxes ever.’”

Maryland’s new law is key to the state’s aspirations on public transportation. The state has long pined after new light rail lines in the Washington suburbs and in Baltimore but has had no funding source for them. The hope is that the $800 million a year in additional revenues will allow the state to finally move on those investments.

But that focus on transit is precisely what led to unanimous Republican opposition in Maryland — a stark contrast to the bipartisan vote totals accrued in Wyoming and Virginia. Some rural Democrats defected in Maryland, as well — with the primary argument that the state’s rural areas, where driving is often the only transportation option, were getting the shaft.

Jim Pettit, a spokesman for a group often critical of O’Malley called Change Maryland, called the gas tax hike “a meat ax of a tax increase” that will further spending not in line with how Marylanders actually get around.

Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.) called it a “war on rural Maryland” and argued that the gas tax should solely fund roads, not public transportation.

“There’s a complete disconnect between rural Maryland and the Baltimore-Washington axis,” Harris said. “A great example is passing the gas tax. In my district, people have to drive everywhere.”

O’Malley said he never expected Republicans to hold hands with Democrats on the fuel tax and transportation revenues. The fact that he moved forward anyway is evidence that governors aren’t getting dragged down by ideological battles on infrastructure, said former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell.

“On transportation, Gov. O’Malley is consistent with what’s going on across the country,” said Rendell, a former chairman of the Democratic National Committee. “It’s pragmatism, and it’s also recognition that spending on infrastructure is an investment.”

Rendell has been a huge booster of infrastructure investment on both the state and federal levels, serving as co-chairman of Building America’s Future Educational Fund along with New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. He’s a constant presence on the issue, arguing that the bipartisan nature of infrastructure investment is on the comeback and cheering conservative governors like Republican Govs. Tom Corbett of Pennsylvania and Rick Snyder of Michigan for making it a top priority.

“Federal funding has been so stagnant and flat,” Rendell said. “The needs are so great.”

In Congress, it was considered a big bipartisan victory last year to come together on a 27-month bill that kept transportation funding flat for highways and transit. O’Malley said that “so far,” Washington has failed states, but he hopes that the new bipartisan nature of state-level transportation investment wafts across Washington’s Maryland and Virginia borders to the House and Senate.

“For taxes, as more and more states act, it will become easier for them to find that collaborative, consensus-building ethic in Congress,” O’Malley said.

One senior House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee member hopes that’s the case, but Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) declined to express even the usual Washington-style “cautious optimism” that the GOP might embrace President Barack Obama’s overtures toward cooperation on infrastructure.

“We cannot stand still and not have our roads repaired and not have proper transportation for people to move from place to place. That’s something that government must do,” Cummings said. But he added: “In the climate that we’re in right now, I don’t have a lot of optimism about Republicans cooperating.”