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.”
Unfortunately, Capita and other Republicans critical of Buttigieg’s memo overlooked the most important argument they could have made: why was this language applied to highways but not transit or Amtrak? Transit has at least a $100 billion state-of-good-repair backlog and only received $40 billion in the infrastructure bill. Amtrak has at least a $100 billion state-of-good-repair backlog in the Northeast Corridor alone and only received $65 billion in the infrastructure bill. Instead of applying all of the money in the bill to the maintenance backlogs, tens of billions will go for new transit infrastructure and new Amtrak routes. Neither the transit industry nor Amtrak has enough money to maintain and operate these new transit and passenger-train routes, but Buttigieg’s DOT has not made any move to apply a fix-it-first rule to them.
Buttigieg’s response to Capito was technically correct: his memo was not a mandate, and to the extent that funds in the infrastructure bill are distributed using formulas, the states are free to ignore that memo. But much of the funds will be distributed using competitive grants, and the memo signals that the department will be unlikely to use any competitive grant funds for new highway projects. It will still use them for new transit projects, however.
Capito probably did not bring this up because, as one of the senators who agreed to the “bipartisan” bill, she implicitly supported those funds for new transit and Amtrak projects even though the bill didn’t provide enough money to bring those systems to a state of good repair. But this just confirms the idea that politicians, of either party, would rather build new projects than maintain existing ones.
Capito represents West Virginia, whose population has been shrinking since 2012. That means it probably doesn’t really need new roadway capacity, which makes it seem peculiar that Capito is arguing for new roads. It might have been a little more credible if Republicans had encouraged a senator from a fast-growing state like Texas or North Carolina to question Buttigieg.
Sec. of Transportation Petey; had been on “maternity leave” for the past 3 months during the current transportation crisis. If that diversity quota token hire can walk off the job for months while the supply chain ground to a halt, do we really need him working at all?
According to the Federal Highway Administration. In the lower 48 states, there are 72 million lane-miles of road. Between 2000 and 2016, the U.S. built an average of 30,427 lane miles of roadway per year, adding 63.4 square miles per year to the amount of land covered by roads. So The Whole City of Florence, Italy Can Fit in One Atlanta Cloverleaf interchange… https://www.treehugger.com/thmb/TVgD94s84sB3MaR8kfmWbYkmo10=/768×0/filters:no_upscale():max_bytes(150000):strip_icc():format(webp)/__opt__aboutcom__coeus__resources__content_migration__treehugger__images__2014__06__sprawl-429f6a6d38bc4688aaca721f040a7a50.jpg
So we could build entire city on what we’d normally set aside to accommodate our overbuilt burdensome transportation infrastructure…cities give up enormous amounts of land that supports no retail, no residential, pays no taxes, just to move people out of town on highways. https://www.roadtraffic-technology.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/17/2017/10/8-springfield-interchange.jpg
I think the real reason why US has So many traffic accidents, is we have a road system so complicated you have to consult technology or maps to find where you go…Traffic and lack of transportation options came from two things…Street planning and how government views “live-ability”. Post World War II the US adopted the “Dead Worm” neighborhood concept, that relegates neighborhoods to move via only one road. A dead end, begins on a feed road which feeds the highway. With only one way out, you have only one way to get anywhere.
According to the Ohio Dept of Highways, the world’s largest interchange is in Ohio at the junction of I-70 & I-77 @ just over 300 acres in size.
No. The city of Florence is nearly 40 square miles (over 100 square km) in area. There is no interchange on earth that size.
Mayo Pete