Fix-It First for Highways but Not Transit

Last week, Republican Senator Shelly Capito grilled Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg about why he included language from a House bill that had been rejected by the bipartisan group writing the infrastructure bill into a memo to the states about infrastructure funding. The House bill required states to put all of their roads into a state of good repair before they could use any federal funds to built new roads. I called this provision “poison pill” because transportation systems always need some maintenance, but expansions are necessary too.

Buttigieg’s memo wasn’t a mandate, but as Capito noted, it included “language from the House bill basically verbatim.” The Department of Transportation, the memo says, “does not prohibit the construction of new general purpose capacity on highways or bridges, but in most cases Federal-aid highway and Federal Lands funding resources made available through the BIL should be used to repair and maintain existing transportation infrastructure before making new investments in highway expansions.” Continue reading

Pittsburgh Bridge Collapse

Just when the infrastructure issue seemed to be settled for awhile, the failure of the 52-year-old Fern Hollow bridge in Pittsburgh has reawakened it, especially as the collapse took place just a few hours before President Biden was scheduled to speak in Pittsburgh. “I hope it’s a wake-up call to the nation that we need to make these infrastructure investments,” Pennsylvania Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman told local reporters.

Photo from the Pittsburgh Department of Public Safety. Click image for a larger view.

No one yet knows why the bridge collapsed, but numerous media reports say that it was rated to be in poor condition. Inspection reports reveal, however, that the part of the bridge in poor condition was its superstructure while its substructure was considered “satisfactory.” Bad substructure may cause a bridge to collapse, but not, generally, bad superstructure. A 2017 inspection concluded that the bridge “meets minimum tolerable limits to be left in place as is.” As a result, the bridge wasn’t scheduled to be repaired or replaced under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. Continue reading

Joe Biden’s Tired Old Infrastructure Plan

The infrastructure plan recently released by the Biden campaign is a collection of tired ideas that have consistently failed in the past. Too much of the plan is based on last year’s groupthink and not enough of the plan recognizes the new realities that have emerged from the pandemic.

A large part of the plan is based on getting people out of their cars and onto transit and bicycles. American cities have been trying to do this for the last fifty years, spending $1.5 trillion subsidizing transit, and it hasn’t worked anywhere. The plan calls for connecting low-income workers to jobs by building more transit, yet people can reach far more jobs by automobile than by transit while auto ownership, not transit subsidies, are the key to getting people out of poverty.

The plan is based on assumptions about transportation dollar and environmental costs that are fundamentally wrong. Transit, the plan says, saves money while cars impose a burden on low-income people and produce too many greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, when subsidies are included, American transit systems spend five times as much moving a passenger one mile than the average automobile. Ignoring subsidies, average transit fares are still more than the average cost of driving per passenger mile. Transit also uses more energy and emits more greenhouse gases per passenger mile. Continue reading

What’s So Magic about $1 Trillion?

News reports say that the Trump Administration is going to propose a $1 trillion infrastructure plan to “boost the economy.” One writer says it will not only promote recovery but also help the environment.

Since Trump promised a $1 trillion infrastructure plan when he was running for president in 2016, it may seem like it is about time that he kept that campaign promise. But those who thought he was crazy to make that promise in the first place may wonder just where he found enough infrastructure to spend $1 trillion. Part of the answer, it turns out, is a little bit of trickery in the proposal.

Infrastructure, of course, includes airports, highways, pipelines, ports, power plants, railroads, telecommunications, transit lines, water & sewage facilities, and more. A lot of this is private, including pipelines, railroads, and telecommunications. Most of the remainder, including highways, ports, transit, and water & sewage facilities, is owned by state or local governments. Really, aside from roads and other structures on federal lands, the only infrastructure facilities owned by the federal government are some hydroelectric dams. Continue reading

An Abundance of Caution

Illinois contractors and unions are lobbying hard for a gas tax increase, claiming that highway infrastructure is crumbling and killing people. Last week, the Antiplanner told Illinois that its highway infrastructure is actually doing fine, but the infrastructure that was in trouble was rail transit. Increasing gas taxes to repair Chicago transit would unfairly take money from low-income downstate auto commuters to subsidize higher-income Chicago transit commuters.

The day after I returned from Chicago, two local commuters woke up to discover a bridge had shed some concrete that crushed their cars in the night. Does that mean the unions were right about crumbling highway infrastructure?

No, the concrete, it turns out, came from a Chicago Transit Authority Red Line elevated line. CTA didn’t even seem too concerned about it, finding no evidence of “larger deterioration issues.” However, a spokesperson said, “out of an abundance of caution crews are performing a complete inspection of the area.” Continue reading

Is This Infrastructure Really Necessary?

The United States has “at least $232 billion in critical public transportation” needs, claims the American Public Transportation Association (APTA). Among the “critically needed” infrastructure on APTA’s list are a streetcar in downtown Los Angeles, another one in downtown Sacramento (which local voters have rejected), one in Tempe, and streetcar extensions in Tampa and Kansas City.

Get real: even ardent transit advocates admit that streetcars are stupid. The economic development benefits that supposedly come from streetcars are purely imaginary, and even if they weren’t, it would be hard to describe streetcars — whose average speed, APTA admits, is less than 7.5 miles per hour — as “critically needed.”

Much of the nation’s transit infrastructure is falling apart, and the Department of Transportation has identified $100 billion of infrastructure backlog needs. (Page l — that is, Roman numeral 50 — of the report indicates a backlog of $89.9 billion in 2012 dollars. Converting to 2019 dollars brings this up to $100 billion.) Yet APTA’s “critical needs” list includes only $24 billion worth of “state of good repair” projects. Just about all of the other “needs” listed — $142 billion worth — are new projects or extensions of existing projects. Continue reading

Trump Plan Won’t Fix Infrastructure

The White House released President Trump’s infrastructure plan today, which calls for spending $200 billion federal dollars as seed money to stimulate a total of $1.5 trillion on “gleaming new infrastructure.” Almost lost in the dozens of pages of documents issued by the administration is that the reason why the federal government supposedly needs a new infrastructure program is that our infrastructure is crumbling, and the reason it is crumbling is that politicians would rather spend money on gleaming new projects than on maintaining the old ones.

The White House proposes several new funding programs. The administration could have dedicated one or more of these programs to maintenance and repair of worn-out infrastructure. Instead, all $200 billion can be spent on new projects, and knowing politicians, most of it will be. To make matters worse, funds for most of the programs would be distributed in the form of competitive grants, but experience has proven that competitive grants are highly politicized.

“In the past, the Federal Government politically allocated funds for projects, leading to waste, mismanagement, and misplaced priorities,” agrees White House economic advisor Gary Cohn. The administration’s solution, Cohn continues, is to “stimulate State, local, and private investment.” In other words, instead of most decisions being made by Washington politicians, they will be made by local politicians. But if local politicians were any better at maintaining infrastructure, then we wouldn’t have tens of thousands of local bridges classed as “structurally deficient” and the New York, Washington, Boston, and other subway systems wouldn’t be falling apart. Continue reading

State of the Union’s Infrastructure

Remember America’s crumbling infrastructure that supposedly needs trillions of dollars for maintenance and rehabilitation? President Trump doesn’t. Instead, the seven sentences in his state of the union speech that focused on infrastructure talked about building “gleaming new” projects rather than fixing existing systems.

The only real news is that he is upping the ante from $1.0 trillion to “at least $1.5 trillion.” More disturbingly, other than mentioning an “infrastructure deficit” — which could just as easily be interpreted to mean a shortage of new infrastructure as a deficit in maintenance — Trump said nothing about fixing existing infrastructure. Instead, he wants to “build gleaming new roads, bridges, highways, railways, and waterways.”

Why? We have plenty of railways. Though the railroads have trimmed the nation’s rail mileage by 45 percent since 1916, they move more freight than ever and seem to be quite capable of adding capacity where they need it without government help. High-speed trains, meanwhile, are pointless when we have planes that can go twice as fast and don’t require hundreds of billions of dollars of supporting infrastructure. Continue reading

Leaked Trump Infrastructure Plan?

Someone claims to have obtained a leaked document relating to the mythical Trump infrastructure plan. The document is sketchy and contains no hard dollar figures, but it gives an idea of what might be in a final plan.

The document proposes seven different initiatives or programs. The largest, called the Infrastructure Incentives program, would get half of any appropriations to pay for up to 20 percent of the cost of “core infrastructure projects” including transport, water, power, superfund, and flood control projects. The document doesn’t seem to distinguish between new projects and rehabilitation of existing ones, so the politicians who seek the funds would probably be biased in favor of new. Projects would be rated on a variety of criteria the most important of which would be the ability of the state or local government to sustain financing for the project.

Rural infrastructure is the second-largest program, getting 25 percent of funding for transport, water, power, and broadband. The funds would be distributed as block grants rather than matching funds, based on each state’s population and rural road miles. Continue reading

U.S. Infrastructure: Not about to Collapse

A recent report from the RAND Corporation looks at America’s infrastructure and concludes that “not everything is broken.” In face, what is broken, more than the infrastructure itself, is “our approach to funding and financing public works.” This is largely because governments by-pass market signals and rely on “often complicated and multilayered governance arrangements and competing public goals and preferences” to make decisions about where to spend money.

For example, the report shows that government spending on infrastructure as a percentage of gross domestic product declined from a peak of 3 percent of GDP in 1960 to about 2.5 percent in 1980, and has hovered between 2.5 and 2.7 percent since then. But governments also made a clear trade-off in infrastructure spending: spending on roads declined from 1.6 percent of GPD in 1960 to around 1 percent in and since 1980, while government spending on mass transit grew from 0.1 percent in 1970 to 0.4 percent in and since 1980.

This would be fine if spending on mass transit had been as productive as spending on highways had been. But it wasn’t. Until the 2008 financial crisis, per capita driving continued to grow despite the lack of much capital spending on new roads, while per capita transit ridership was stagnant or declining. The report doesn’t have data after 2014, when per capita driving began to increase again while transit ridership began to collapse. Continue reading