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Skagit River Bridge Collapse

By | | Transportation
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Within minutes of the announcement that a bridge on Interstate 5 in Washington state had collapsed, people posted comments saying that this was further proof that our infrastructure was in terrible shape and that America was becoming a third-world country. The comments then descended into a debate over whether the Repubicans or Democrats were to blame for this sorry state of affairs.

Click image for a larger view. Flickr photo by Martha T.

This morning, the Washington Department of Transportation announced that the collapse happened when an oversized truck hit an overhead span. The 58-year-old bridge’s most recent maintenance inspection, in 2010, found that it was in “better than minimum adequacy to tolerate being left in place as is.”

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Getting Highway Numbers Right

By | | Transportation
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“Gasoline taxes and tolls pay for only a third of state and local road spending,” claims a report released yesterday by the Tax Foundation, a supposedly independent, non-partisan group. “The rest was financed out of general revenues.” According to the group’s calculations, users paid just $49 billion of the $155 billion cost of roads in 2010, the last year for which data are available.

The Antiplanner is the first to admit that highways are subsidized. But do subsidies cover more than two-thirds of the costs of roads? No way. The Tax Foundation, which claims to be “guided by the principles of sound tax policy: simplicity, neutrality, transparency, and stability,” is simply wrong.

First, the group counts federal aid to states as “general funds.” In fact, 100 percent of that federal aid comes from gas taxes and other user fees such as taxes on large trucks and tires.

According to the Federal Highway Adminitration’s Highway Statistics table HF-10, the feds collected $35 billion in gas taxes in 2010, of which $29 billion was given to the states for roads. For some reason, though the Tax Foundation counts state gas taxes as user fees, it doesn’t count federal gas taxes as user fees.

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Highway Cost Overruns

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Numerous state highway programs have suffered cost overruns, say the Gannett papers (which include USA Today). What’s striking from the story, however, is how small and rare the cost overruns really are.

The papers found overruns in 19 states, but they focused on projects that actually had overruns and did not reveal how many projects had no overruns. Of the overruns they found, many were less than 2 percent, most were less than 5 percent, and only three–in New Jersey, New York, and Ohio–were more than 10 percent. The unweighted average was around 7 percent. Since Gannett did not discuss any projects that had zero overruns, the real average must be much less.

This contrasts sharply with rail transit cost overruns, which have steadily averaged around 40 percent. Nearly 10 years ago, Bent Flyvbjerg reported that transit cost overruns in the United States averaged 41 percent while highway overruns averaged 8 percent. More recent research has found similar rail overruns, but the Gannett analysis suggests that highway overruns remain well under 10 percent.

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The Washington Times Gets It Wrong

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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The Antiplanner generally appreciates the efforts of the Times, a fiscally conservative paper that tries to watchdog government agencies that waste tax dollars. But an editorial last Friday about highway user fees missed the point.

The article was written in response to Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report on highway user fees. “The claim is that driver’s aren’t paying their fair share because the $35 billion collected in federal gasoline taxes doesn’t cover highway spending,” the Times charged. That, however, is a misrepresentation of the CBO report.

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Intercounty Connector Opens

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Maryland’s Intercounty Connector opens for traffic today, either one day or 41 years late depending on how you count. The toll road connects Montgomery and Prince George County in the suburbs of Washington, DC, an area that has grown by more than 75 percent since the road was first planned in the 1960s.

Click to download a larger map.

Although only 7.2 miles of the six-lane road opens for traffic today, the full 18.8 miles will open in 2012. At a total cost of $2.6 billion, the road costs an average of about $23 million per mile, which is typical of some urban roads but high for a rural road. About $350 million of the total cost was for environmental mitigation and enhancement.

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Superstreets Relieve Congestion

By | | Transportation
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With many transportation planners have given up trying to relieve congestion or, worse, are trying to increase congestion in order to persuade people out of their automobiles. So it is refreshing to see some innovative ideas that will actually relieve congestion on the highways used for around 80 percent of our travel.

One idea is known as superstreets, in which major streets are given priority over cross streets. Vehicles on the cross streets can cross the major streets only by getting on the major street, making a u-turn, and then turning right onto the cross street. As described in this report from North Carolina State University, this greatly reduces both the time required for traffic signals to cycle and the number of conflict points between the two streets.

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Another idea is the diverging diamond interchange, which has its own web site. Under this system, vehicles on the secondary highway actually cross over and run on the left side of the road for the length of the interchange, which again reduces the signal timing (or the need for any signals at all for many drivers) and the number of points of conflict.

These and other ideas have been compiled in compiled in one document by an Idaho planning agency. Their costs are relatively low and would do much to save people time and fuel.

Strong Towns: If a Little Is Good, More Must Be Better

By | | Regional planning, Transportation
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Guest post by Charles Marohn

There is no question that the greatest force that shapes the form of American cities is transportation. And, since the National Defense and Highways Act of 1956, the federal government has dictated that the country’s transportation system would be based almost exclusively on the automobile. While we won’t overlook the improved standard of living and prosperity this has created, we do argue that we have long since crossed the threshold of diminishing returns on this approach. If America is to have true prosperity going forward, we need to reexamine our transportation investments and the land use pattern they induce and choose approaches that pay a higher rate of return.

America’s cities of the industrial era are sometimes romanticized by the ill-informed. While “efficient” from a pure land-use standpoint, these were not places of prosperity for the masses. Living conditions were horrid by today’s standards, with poor sanitation and environmental quality leading to rampant disease and high mortality rates. No American today would desire to live in such a place.

There were two groups of people, however, that avoided the urban suffering of the industrial era. The first was the wealthy, who could live on larger properties in and on the outskirts of town and, during the most suffocating times for one’s health, could escape entirely to the countryside. The second were farmers. While a tough life, farmers avoided what Thomas Jefferson called the “pestilence to the health” found in the city.

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Federal Highways and Urban Form

By | | Regional planning, Transportation
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Note: This is the first of what may become a series of interblog debates between the Antiplanner and Charles Marohn of the Strong Towns Blog.

Many opponents of low-density suburbs — areas they derisively call “sprawl” — argue that Americans would not have chosen to live in such areas unless they were subsidized or forced to do so. One of the most important such subsidies, they claim, is the Interstate Highway System.

“For more than a generation,” argues former Milwaukee Mayor and current head of the Congress for the New Urbanism John Norquest, “urban sprawl sprung up with federal assistance [such as] excessive road building . . . that interfered with the free market.” He adds that, “urban superhighways should be relegated to the scrap heap of history.”

Would our cities look a lot different if the federal government had not built the urban interstates (which were the first major urban highways built with federal assistance)? I argue that the differences would be minor.

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This Just In: Highways Are Subsidized

By | | News commentary, Transportation, Useful Data
38 Comments

The Pew Charitable Trusts looked at highway revenues and found that they fail to cover highway costs. Only 51 percent of the cost of highways came from user fees in 2007, says Pew.

According to a Pew data file, 2007 highway user fees totaled to $98 billion while “non-user revenues” spent on highways totaled to $70 billion and another $25 billion came from bond issues. I’ve checked Pew’s source data (table HF-10 from Highway Statistics) and the numbers are accurate.

However, the Antiplanner has a few quarrels with Pew’s interpretation of the data. Most important, Pew counts as “user revenue” a number that the federal government identifies as “highway user revenues used for highways,” which in 2007 was $97.9 billion. But users actually paid $124.5 billion. Just because federal and state officials diverted most of the different to mass transit and non-transportation related funds doesn’t mean they aren’t paid by users.

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