The House-approved INVEST Act included a provision requiring states to insure that all existing roads were in a state-of-good-repair before building new roads. I called that a “poison pill” because it poisoned the idea of using federal funds to promote mobility. This is especially true because Amtrak and transit have far more severe maintenance backlogs than highways, yet the bill included no similar provisions for those modes.
Click image to download a 4.0-MB PDF of this bill.
I’ve read through the 2,702-page Senate infrastructure bill and the good news is that it doesn’t include the same fix-it-first provision for highways as the House bill. However, it does have several mobility poisons of its own.
One of the biggest ones is a “carbon reduction program” that directs states and metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) “to reduce traffic congestion by facilitating the use of alternatives to single-occupant vehicle trips, including public transportation facilities, pedestrian facilities, bicycle facilities, and shared or pooled vehicle trips within the State or an area served by the applicable metropolitan planning organization.” Congestion wastes fuel so reducing congestion is a good thing. But we have 50 years of experience proving that promoting carpooling, transit, and bicycle and pedestrian facilities doesn’t reduce congestion. If anything, it increases it because one of the most popular ways of promoting transit is to increase congestion.
States and MPOs are not allowed use carbon-reduction funds to increase road capacities. They can use such funds to reduce congestion through congestion pricing, which is good. However, the bill gives states a choice between true congestion pricing, which reduces congestion, and cordon pricing, which charges anyone who drives past a line drawn around a congested area. Cordon pricing leads to a one-time reduction in traffic but doesn’t reduce congestion in the long run and so it won’t reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
A second poison pill is the so-called highway safety improvement program. It would be more accurately titled the highway congestion increasing program as it provides billions of dollars in funding for projects aimed at slowing traffic and increasing congestion. This includes money for “medians, pedestrian crossing islands, protected bike lanes, and protected intersection features” and other projects “to calm traffic and reduce vehicle speeds” or otherwise “slow or stop a motor vehicle.” It is obviously ironic that one federal program seeks to reduce congestion while another seeks to increase it.
A third poison pill is the “reconnecting communities” program that would allow the use of federal funds for “removing, retrofitting, or mitigating” any road “that creates a barrier to community connectivity.” The good news is that funding for this program has been reduced from Biden’s proposed $20 billion to just $1 billion, but it still sets a dangerous precedent that puts some vague definition of “community” above the clear benefits of mobility. Ironically, most of this money is likely to be spent in poor neighborhoods that are most in need of improved mobility.
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Beyond these problems with the highway program, the bill greatly increases the number of competitive grant programs. Competitive grants sound like a good idea since the funds theoretically should go to where they are most needed. Instead, what happens is that states and cities realize that they can get the most money by selecting the most expensive, rather than the most cost-effective projects, so most of the money tends to go to waste.
A typical example is the BART line that is now under construction to San Jose. It was originally planned as a double-bore tunnel under downtown San Jose, but planners decided instead to go with a larger, single-bore tunnel much deeper under the city. This has contributed to $2.2 billion cost overrun, and local transit agencies are asking the federal government to pay $1.7 billion of that.
This has prompted Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA) to give the project a “Squeal award” for being a boondoggle and led her to introduce a bill prohibiting federal funding for projects that went more than $1 billion over budget. However, the real blame should be placed on Congress, as the Department of Transportation was ready to reject funding for the BART line on cost-ineffectiveness grounds but Congress ordered it to fund it anyway.
The bill also increases the percentage of the Highway Trust Fund that is allocated to mass transit. In the 2015 FAST Act$43.6 billion in 2019, and they’ll be even less in 2020 and 2021, so Congress will have to appropriate funds to keep the trust fund from running out. In effect, all of the money going to transit (whether directly or out of flexible funds) is deficit spending. (Some of the road money is also deficit spending, but it is at least partly offset by the fact that much of it is “poison” spending that reduces mobility rather than increases it.)
There are plenty of other problems with the senate bill, the biggest one being that we can easily live without everything in the bill that won’t be paid for out of user fees. But it doesn’t seem to be enough that Congress is burdening future generations with debts that are unpayable except through inflation; it also has to impede our mobility, which in turn will impede the country’s ability to economically grow enough to repay some of that debt.
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A third poison pill is the “reconnecting communities” program that would allow the use of federal funds for “removing, retrofitting, or mitigating” any road “that creates a barrier to community connectivity.”
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Sounds like something that some places would love. With shifting populations, etc, a lot of cities have some old freeways that just don’t the traffic volume to justify the expense of keeping them up to freeway standards. Instead of state DOTs + cities paying for rebuilding them, they can claim the old freeway divided the community and grab some federal $$$$$ for a project they were already planning to do on their own.
Most of the highways that “divide” communities were built due to demands of the urban politicians.
As originally conceived and planned, interstate highways were to avoid cities and provide lower cost, more mobile transportation. Due to the big city political demands that the highways come though the cities, the cost increased greatly, the difficulty of building the highways was exponentially increased and the result is many of these unsafe and unsightly elevated highways snaking through cities.
But now its “our” fault and we have to spend more money to allow the corrupt successors to the prior corrupt politicians to play around with at our expense.
But it doesn’t seem to be enough that Congress is burdening future generations with debts that are unpayable except through inflation; it also has to impede our mobility, which in turn will impede the country’s ability to economically grow enough to repay some of that debt.
This. And Hillbilly Elegy author J.D. Vance blames this on the Democratic Party which has become a cabal of childless people who don’t particularly care about the long-term because they’ll all be dead when the bills come due.
From the PDF:
What about marijuana-impairment? Oxycontin? Lack of sleep?
Enqiuring mind want to know!
Actually, the “carbon reduction program” will block grant funds to any state that demonstrates a reduction in per capita transportation carbon emissions. That would be every state.
We already have such a program at the federal level. It’s called the Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality (CMAQ) program, and it has been one of the least cost-effective policies to date in terms of reducing vehicle-related emissions in urban areas.
That is because most of the projects and services funded through it don’t actually reduce emissions and because there is no follow-up enforcement or validation mechanism to ensure that the projects funded actually generate the benefits that they claim in their grant applications.
The target of such a bill should focus on the percentage by which the project exceeds its budget, rather than the absolute amount. A project that is proposed to cost $250 million, but ends up costing $500 million is more wasteful than one that is estimated to cost $4 billion but ends up costing $5 billion.
The latter is a 20% cost overrun, while the former is a 100% cost overrun. The point being that if a organization has a fixed budget to allocate to projects, funding more of the lower-cost type of projects from the same amount of money will ultimately lead to more waste relative to initial project cost estimates.
None of this is to suggest that the BART extension is a worthwhile project, and I agree that it sets a horrible precedent for the federal government to keep backfilling the escalating costs of these projects even after it becomes clear that the earlier cost estimates were bogus. This is textbook moral hazard.