“It’s not enough, it’s not nearly enough,” Mr. Rendell said. But he added that a gas-tax increase was not currently “a viable political option.”

Since Congress created it in 1932, the gasoline tax has been the chief source of revenue for building American highways. It was designed as a classic user fee — drivers pay for construction and maintenance of the roads they use. Throughout the 20th century, it financed the construction and maintenance of the interstate highway system, and presidents from both parties regularly signed gas-tax increases to keep revenue on pace with inflation and the nation’s growing infrastructure needs. Ronald Reagan raised the gas tax twice.

But the tax, which is not indexed to inflation, has not been raised since 1993, when Bill Clinton increased it by 4.3 cents to its current rate.

Two years later, the conservative lobbyist Grover Norquist asked Republican lawmakers to sign on to a pledge never to raise taxes. Since then, any proposal to increase the tax has been dead on arrival in Washington. But according to the Congressional Budget Office, the highway trust fund is now on the brink of bankruptcy. Absent an injection of new funding, the budget office projects that the fund will run out of money by next year, racking up a $77 billion deficit through 2019 and a $172 billion deficit through 2024.

White House officials said Mr. Obama’s plan would use savings from business tax changes for a one-time, $150 billion infusion of cash into the trust fund to make it solvent. The president also proposed spending $600 million on so-called Tiger grants, which allow states to compete for additional money for regional transportation projects.

On Tuesday, Mr. Obama made the case privately for his transportation funding proposal to the House speaker, John A. Boehner of Ohio, during an hourlong Oval Office meeting, according to officials with knowledge of the conversation. Mr. Boehner, who has said that Republicans are eager to overhaul and simplify the corporate tax system, nonetheless expressed skepticism to Mr. Obama on Tuesday about the proposal to finance transportation spending with business tax changes, the officials said.

Still, some members of both parties have shown some optimism about the possibility of a compromise on a transportation bill, even in an otherwise gridlocked Congress whose members are facing re-election in a matter of months.

House Republicans on Wednesday released their own proposal for a tax overhaul that would cut the top corporate income tax rate to 25 percent from 35 percent and reduce the number of individual income tax brackets to two from seven. A spokesman for the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee said lawmakers would review the president’s proposal.