Comments on the

It is good that monies dedicated to highways are no longer to be held unspent in order to reduce the federal budget deficit. However, the current system of spending money on roads, is more suited to the late Soviet Union than to the United States. It does not reflect road users’ preferences and does little to ensure that funds collected from them are spent efficiently. The time has surely come to put road financing on a commercial basis, as has been proposed for New Zealand, with payments by users designed to cover costs, and investments made on the basis of financial profitability. To reach this situation it is necessary to abolish the federal highway trust fund, and the taxes that feed it, and to leave the bulk of road financing as the responsibility of the states. Progressive states could then set up dedicated road funds that support commercialization and do not discriminate against toll roads and privately-provided roads.

Gabriel Roth, Bethesda MD based transp economist, consultant and author.

Tolls can leverage tax money

It is very tough to build toll projects in the US on a standalone basis. Costs are now so high they need a mix of loan and tax money. So the more tax money there is the better the chance for getting matching funds for toll roads, and for financing needed conncections. Tolls are a way to leverage the tax money and get it to build more highway. It is always bad when the funding cycle is broken. It affects us all in some degree.

Neil Schuster, exec director of IBTTA

(International Bridge Tunnel and Turnpike Assoc) Washington DC

Value pricing is where value is

A large increase in “free federal money” will reduce states’ urgency in turning to tolls and the private sector. However, the $9 billion in pure pork (demonstration projects) will end up consuming much of the increase, since Congress typically funds only about 25% of the cost of these demos. That means their total cost will be closer to $36 billion. Free federal money isn’t so free! More important than the dollars is the fate of two critical Senate provisions: 15 value-pricing projects on Interstates and 15 private toll projects eligible for tax-exempt debt. These provisions could launch a national HOT lanes movement.

Robert Poole, president, Reason Foundation, Los Angeles and transp specialist

A fraud and an embarrassment

This year’s highway spending bill is such a dreadful piece of legislation it makes one long for the days when the Democrats ran Capitol Hill. It makes a mockery of the 1997 budget deal by bulldozing through the spending caps with $30 billion in extra spending but no offsetting savings. This highway bill is a fraud and an embarrassment because its primary motivation is not to improve the nation’s infrastructure. It is to please every special interest lobbyist with even a two-bit office in Washington DC. For example $41 billion of road money is to be turned over to mass transit, an absurdly wasteful allocation to gold-plated rail systems that go nowhere much and carry almost noone. These payoffs come at the expense of our productive infrastructure.

Stephen Moore, Fiscal Policy Studies, Cato Institute, Washington DC

Bad for road users

Increasing federal funding for transport is bad for Congress because political pork corrupts the process. It’s bad for the economy because of the transaction costs of income transfers, and because pork promotes inefficient investment. It’s bad for private investors because they can’t really compete when the feds are giving stuff away for free. It’s bad for the environment, because ISTEA and other TEAs all pander to the new urbanism, which is damaging cities with densification, air pollution and congestion. And it’s bad for road users, because they are deprived the benefits of privatization and rational pricing, which privatization would bring about. Congress should simply shut down the entire federal transp bureaucracy and devolve all programs to the states. Without a trough to feed at, some members of the US Congress would finally have to get a life.

John Charles, transp specialist, Cascade Policy Institute, Portland Oregon

Deaths will drop

America’s highway death toll should start coming down when highway investments (authorized in the Shuster bill) take effect. The Congress has decided to save lives, reduce congestion and regain the trust of the American public. This overwhelming bipartisan victory would never have happened without the leadership of the House chairman Bud Shuster (R-PA) and leading Democrat Jim Oberstar. Government reports cite underinvestment as the principal cause of deteriorating US roads and bridges. Safety experts estimate bad roads are the leading cause of 12,000 highway deaths each year. This legislation will save lives. And it will fight the congestion that is clogging American cities, worsening our air quality and taking us away from our families and our jobs. Equally important Chairman Shuster’s legislation will restore trust in the highway program by ending the practice of parking billions in highway tax revenues in Washington DC to make the federal budget look balanced on paper.

William D Fay, president, American Highway Users Alliance, Washington DC

They want congestion

In Oregon, where New Urbanism has completely captured the state Department of Transp (ODOT), a huge share of the new federal money is going to go into transit, bikeways, and pedestrian walks. ODOT is intent on increasing congestion as a way of getting people out of their cars. ISTEA was similarly a planners and environmentalists New Urbanism act designed to promote transit at highway’s expense. The new ISTEA, if anything, will stimulate the demand for private road investments and congestion pricing, especially in places like Oregon. Portland is one of several cities doing a congestion pricing study with federal funding. If the politicians keep their hands off of it (unlikely), the staff is likely to come up with a decent proposal.

Randal O’Toole, Thoreau Institute, Oak Grove Oregon

Idolatry not adultery the

problem in Washington DC

There’s been a lot of talk out of Washington recently about adultery, but the real problem is idolatry. Rail idolatry is leading to vast waste of money by all levels of government in the US as they scramble to build light rail, heavy rail, any rail, none of which will have any bearing at all on traffic congestion or on air pollution which are supposedly the problems being addressed. Transit has already got most of the market for which it is suited — work trips suburbs to downtown — but this is a small and diminishing market. Transit, especially rail has become largely irrelevant to the transport needs of most Americans. The forces driving urban development are far too strong for any transit strategy to influence land use, a ridiculous effort to use the tail to wag the dog. Some of the highways money will be wasted, sure, but road needs are so great it is difficult not to build roads without serving real customers and real demand, whereas transit money goes mostly to labor unions, equipment suppliers and other special interests. The whole object of transit is to spend money for special interests, not to serve customers. My biggest concern about the new law is that it lays the groundwork for the next S&L crisis by sponsoring a range of federal loan guarantees for transp projects, a high proportion of which will soon require federal bailouts. It is quite shameful that this Congress which was elected on the conservative platform of responsibility and fiscal restraint should so blithely write into law so many invitations to irresponsibility.

Wendell Cox, transp consultant in the O’Fallon IL, the St Louis MO area