EDITORIAL FOR IRF - Roaders of the World Unite, You Have Nothign to Lose but your Deficits

EDITORIAL FOR IRF

Roaders of the World Unite, You Have Nothing to Lose but Your Deficits

The now aging but still fiesty Angela Rooney a leader of the dramatically successful Freeway Fighters movement ofWashington DC in the 1960s has lessons for those of us who believe that better highways can improve the quality of life. Rooney along with Sam Abbott, a labor organizer, were the lead Washington DC activists who began to turn the US political climate against highways in the national capital and diverted $10 billion of motorists taxes into a beautiful but ineffectual and ruinously expensive transit system. The siren song of transit caused planners to abandon corridors for desperately needed area highways.

Rooney highlights the keys to an effective political campaign. First look for a grievance, make a case for inequity, and summarize it in a slogan that can be repeated again and again. She recalls: “Our first rallying cry was: ‘No White Men's Roads Through Black Men's Homes!’ That turned local opinion against the missing link in I-95 planned to run from the end of the expwy tunnel under the Mall near the US Dept of Labor building through northeast DC to the Beltway I-495/I-95 interchange in Maryland. After that success the movement knocked down highway project after highway project. Second, villify the opposition. Rooney and her organizers said the proponents of highways were developers and the oil companies, both unpopular groups. And they said it ahain and again. Third, present an alternative, a better way. Says Rooney: “Our other rallying cry was: ‘Freeways No!, Metro Yes!’ " Fourth the activists don’t compromise, they believe in their cause and Rooney says: let others do the compromising

The highway lobby in Washington DC these days is a bunch of political wimps, or incompetents, who ignore all Angela Rooney’s lessons of political success (see “Tell me it’s not so”). The current road lobby’s idea of political activism is to publish studies showing the cost of congestion, the prospects for worse congestion and the jobs that road-building could generate. All true and admirable but BORING! BORING! My training is economics and I’m all for trying to make economics affect political decisions but it is a hopeless uphill battle especially in an age of soundbite politics. To win in politics you have to be prepared to generate a sense of grievance, paint your constituents as victims of injustice, villify the other guys and suggest a better way, something new, and paint a vision of hope.

The grievance is obviously that the gasoline tax which was instituted as a user fee for funding the roads has been diverted by special interests into a futile, failing mode (rail transit) that serves only a tiny elite while the masses in their cars are denied the benefits of their hard earned labors. It IS an outrage that rich outer area commuters luxuriate on commuter rail trips each day in which they pay less than a third of the costs of providing those trips, and that equally heavily subsidized subway systems are used disproportionately by high-income people - look at the Lexington Av subway between Grand Central and Wall Street or the Red Line in Wash DC. It IS a disagraceful waste that the nation’s public buses roll around increasingly empty because even at heavily subsidized fares they simply don’t serve the people’s needs. All levels of government in the US spend about $100b on roads and about $25b on transit annually. The roads produce about 4 trillion (4,000b) passenger-miles of travel compared to 40b passenger-miles on transit (numbers rounded). The roads serve not only passengers but freight and bus transit too, but they only get 2.5c/pas-ml of government funds compared to 62.5c/pas-ml that transit gets — a 25-to-one disparity! Another way of saying it is: transit users pay a lot less per trip that non-transit users pay for the cost of that transit, since between 2/3 and 3/4 of the cost of each transit trip comes from taxes. Similar snappy numbers could be generated for most other countries. Those are legitimate grievances suffered by our customers, motorists, that need to be summarized in slogans like “Roads Are the People’s Choice,” “Go Road!” and “Get the Transit Lobby Out of the People’s Pockets,” “We Drive Ourselves, Transit Riders have a (tax-payer provided) Driver,” “Transit is for the Elite, Roads are for the Masses” etc.

Finally the vision: new and better kinds of roads have to be offered to the people. No more noisy elevated monstrosities. No more roads that cut swathes through established neighborhoods or parks. They have to be below ground or underground many places, and provide separately for heavy vehicles such as tractor-trailers so the people’s roads are safer and more pleasant to use. And they have to be managed so they provide safe free-flowing travel. Which means they have to be paid for with time-variable tolls. In any case the users, not general taxpayers should be asked to pay for them...We roaders can stand on our own two feet. We don’t need be down there in the political pig trough with the transit parasites feeding off the taxpayer!