The Maricopa Association of Governments (MAG) wasted billions of dollars of taxpayer money because it failed to follow the most basic rules of planning, says a report released today by the Arizona Free Enterprise Club. The standard “rational planning process,” which is described in just about every introductory planning textbook, calls for planners to identify a full range of alternatives, evaluate those alternatives, pick the best one to accomplish their goals, and monitor the implementation of the plan to ensure that their original assumptions were correct.
Click image to download a 8.9-MB PDF of this 38-page report.
Maricopa regional transportation plans, including plans issued in 2006, 2014, and most recently 2021, fail to do any of these steps. By failing to consider a wide range of alternatives, MAG ended up writing a plan that didn’t make sense for the 21th century. By failing to evaluate alternatives, it ignored low-cost solutions that could do more to accomplish the plan’s goals. By failing to monitor previous plans, it repeated the same mistake over and over in long-range plans written about every five years.
One result is that Phoenix was totally unprepared for the effects of the recent pandemic. Even though the most recent plan was issued in December 2021, it failed to recognize the effects of the pandemic or even to acknowledge one took place at all. Instead, the plan is clearly written for the distant past, not the present or future.
For example, over at least the past 30 years, transit has never carried more than 0.8 percent of passenger travel, yet the plan dedicates more than 40 percent of the region’s transportation funds to transit. Planners hope to attract people out of their cars, yet in the decade before 2019, despite spending billions on transit, driving grew while transit was stagnant. The pandemic, of course, cut transit ridership even more: for the past two years, it has hovered around 55 percent of pre-pandemic numbers and show no signed of further recovery.
The real problem, the report showed, is that MAG has too much money to spend on transportation. In 1985, the region’s voters approved a 0.5 percent sales tax to spend on new roads. As a result, the region was able to build new highways to keep up with its rapid population growth and Phoenix had the least congestion for any region of its size in the United States. But then, in 2004, voters extended the sales tax but allowed some of it to be spent on transit, which resulted in the region building an expensive light-rail system. This actually did transit riders more harm than good because once the light rail opened, cuts in bus service led to a significant loss of bus riders.
The problem is that there is no accountability for how the sales tax money is spent. If transportation were funded out of user fees, those fees would provide planners with immediate feedback showing whether their decisions make sense or not.
The plan is also socially inequitable. Sales taxes are regressive and only 3.6 percent of low-income people took transit to work in 2019, declining to 1.9 percent in 2021. The vast majority of low-income people are paying for transit rides they aren’t taking. If transportation were funded out of user fees, it would be more equitable because people would pay only for what they use.
The Arizona State Senate Committee on Transportation and Technology will hold a hearing today at 2 pm, Mountain time, to hear testimony about this report from its author. This hearing will be live-streamed for those who want to watch it.
On a personal note, this is my third major report to be published in the last month. Four weeks ago today, the Center of the American Experiment released my 20,000-word report on the effects of COVID on Minnesota and Twin Cities transportation. A week later, my 8,000-word report on Denver traffic safety was released by the Colorado Auto Dealers Association. The Phoenix report brings my word count above 40,000 for just these three reports in four weeks.
Increasingly it seems that these rail transit plans have nothing to do with transport and are just ways to spend tax money on capital intensive projects that cater to planning and construction interests. Looking at the California high speed rail, BART to San Jose, and Caltrain to downtown San Francisco, these only make sense in terms of spending lots of money for construction, not a cost effective method of transport.
As far as sales tax increases for roads, I feel roads should just be paid for out of gasoline taxes, and gasoline taxes should only pay for roads. This is an imperfect method of fee based incentives, but much better than sales tax increases.
And how’s Phoenix traffic now??
Nightmare.
Cities are geographically limited to how many vehicles fit on city streets. Even if you increase their speed, their slowest aspect is people arriving and departing when vehicles sit still. Congestion is byproduct of specific orientation and offload times.
Inevitably city reaches a point of diminishing returns where additional lane capacity serves no further point. Like adding more duct tape to a collapsing deck…..inevitably falls.
….As such what’s happening now. Adding 10,000 lane miles of new highway adds ten thousand lane miles of maintenance. In good economy this can be absorbed, in bad economy or recession nationwide absorbing this maintenance burden is undesireable or impossible. In industry and economy; infrastructure costs curb revenue/profitability so their aim is to have as little infrastructure as possible. LESS they need, the less they have to spend.
Pattern of suburban sprawl is city or town uses new tax revenue of home sales as it grows to expand infrastructure…in a hint of dubious Ness the city may pilfer some those funds to finance infrastructure closer to its core. Because the infrastructure in the outskirts is new…it’s easily absorbed as it can handle a decade of abuse with only having to patch cracks. As that decade comes to pass, the city having spent the money on itself…. now relies on outer capacity of exurbs to finance critical repair. Leaving suburban infrastructure to fall apart until new economic bond measure forms. Think it can’t happen to you?
Just look at Flint, Michigan
Detroit
New York in 70s
Atlanta / sandy springs in 90s, 2000s.
South Bend when Buttigueg was mayor…..
Yea, we can’t afford to build or maintain desperately needed highways but building mass transit that nobody rides is a wise investment. Makes perfect sense.
this makes me wonder if just adding many new buses for commuting problems on existing roads might not be better and cheaper while letting the point to point efficiency of vehicle travel cover may trips.
On average, city residents commute 38.1 minutes to work – one-way – about 12.3 minutes longer than the average Arizonan. https://www.inmaricopa.com/maricopa-long-commute-pinal-county-census/#:~:text=On%20average%2C%20city%20residents%20commute,than%20the%20average%20state%20resident. i don’t know if this is true…buaside from tuscon there really arent many metro areas in Arizona…it may be for the most part kntside of phoenix metro tuscosn an flagstaff you have to drive 20 miles anyway in about 25 minutes. is 38 minutes in a 4 million plus metro that bad?