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Two-Month Extension for Highways/Transit

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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The House of Representatives voted yesterday to extend federal funding for highways and transit for two months. The Senate is expected to pass similar legislation later this week. While transportation bills normally last for six years, this short-term action, which followed a ten-month extension last fall and a two-year extension in 2012, has proven necessary because no one has been able to rustle up a majority agreement on the federal role in transportation.

For those who haven’t followed the issue, the federal government collects about $34 billion a year in gas taxes and related highway user fees. Once dedicated to highways, an increasing share has gone for transit and other uses since the early 1980s. Compounding this was a decision in 1998 to mandate that spending equal to the projected growth in fuel taxes. When fuel tax revenues stopped growing in 2007, spending did not, with the result that annual spending is now about $13 billion more than revenues.

Under Congressional rules, Congress must find a revenue source to cover that deficit. The Antiplanner’s colleague at the Cato Institute, Chris Edwards, thinks that the simple solution is for Congress to just reduce spending by $13 billion a year. That may be arithmetically simple, but politically it is not as too many powerful interest groups count on that spending who have persuaded many (falsely, in my opinion) that we need to spend more on supposedly crumbling highways.

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Making Transportation Less Wasteful and Unfair

By | | Transportation
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The Antiplanner traveled from Louisiana back to Oregon yesterday and didn’t have time to write a lengthy post. So here is an op ed for your consideration. It briefly summarizes a report about federal funding of rail transit published by the Cato Institute last week.

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Rail Transit and Reauthorization

By | | Transportation
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The Cato Institute will publish a new report tomorrow looking at the inequities of federal transit funding. Antiplanner readers can download a preview copy today; many of the results in the paper have previously been reported here.

The Antiplanner has argued for years that federal transit funding was inefficient because it encouraged transit agencies to choose high-cost alternatives in any transit corridor. The new paper shows the results of this inefficiency: transit agencies that have persuaded local politicians to go along with these high-cost alternatives have ended up with as much as eight times more federal transit dollars per transit rider than agencies that settled for low-cost alternatives.
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Making War on User Fees

By | | Transportation
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The Highway Trust Fund hasn’t worked, says a new report from the Eno Transportation Foundation, so Congress should consider getting rid of it and funding all transportation out of general funds. In other words, the transportation system is breaking down because it has become too politicized, so solve the problem by making transportation even more politicized.


Click image to download this 3.2-MB report.

Eno (which was founded by William Phelps Eno, who is known as the “father of traffic safety”) claims this report is the result of eighteen months work by its policy experts. They should have worked a little longer, as the report’s conclusions would only make things worse.

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Congress Should Get Out of the Transportation Business

By | | Transportation
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Oregon Senator Ron Wyden has bravely proposed to pass a three-month transportation bill. Three more months, he says, will give Congress a chance to figure out a long-term solution. The only problem is that Congress had three months three months ago and did nothing.


Would you buy a used transportation system from these people?

Meanwhile, Senators Chris Murphy (D-CT) and Bob Corker (R-TN) have proposed to increase gas taxes by 12 cents a gallon. Considering that the gas tax hasn’t been increased in more than 20 inflation-filled years, this would seem to make sense.

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Obama’s Stealth Transportation Bill

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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In order to highlight the need for a new transportation bill, President Obama is visiting the Tappan Zee Bridge today (which, ironically, is likely to increase delays to commuter). Tappan Zee is one of about 10,000 bridges that–like the Skagit River bridge that collapsed almost a year ago–is considered “fracture critical,” meaning the destruction of one key part could lead the entire bridge to fall down. However, the state of New York is currently building a replacement bridge that will not have this fault.


The destruction of just one part of this bridge could cause the entire center span to collapse. On the other hand, the bridge has lasted 59 years, and probably could last quite a few more without anything destroying one of the fracture-critical parts. The bridge may be in poor condition for a number of reasons, but being fracture-critical is not one of them. Flickr photo by waywuwei.

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Transportation Cliff or Pothole?

By | | Transportation
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Recent news reports have zeroed in on Washington’s next cliff, the transportation cliff that is expected to happen when the federal Highway Trust Fund runs out of money sometime this summer. Most of these articles have a hidden agenda: to increase spending for transit even though transit now gets 20 percent of federal surface transport dollars but carries little more than 1 percent of the travel carried by automobiles (about 55 billion passenger miles by transit vs. 4.3 trillion passenger miles in cars and light trucks). This article will help explain the politics of the transportation cliff.

1. Why are we about to go off a transportation cliff?

Since 1956, federal highway programs have been paid for out of federal gasoline taxes. These taxes go into the so-called Highway Trust Fund (“so-called” because it’s not very trustworthy) and then are distributed to the states for highway construction and maintenance. In 1982, Congress began dedicating a small but growing share of gas taxes to transit. Today, more than 20 percent of federal gas taxes are spent on transit, and there is no guarantee that the remaining 80 percent goes for highways, as Congress often diverts some to such things as bike paths, national park visitor centers, museums, and other local pork barrel.

Congress reauthorizes this spending every few years. Traditionally, an authorization bill provides a spending ceiling. But the 2005 reauthorization bill made spending mandatory, meaning the ceiling was also the floor. When the 2008 financial crisis led to a reduction in driving, gas tax revenues failed to keep up with spending. Since then Congress has had to supplement gas taxes with about $55 billion in general funds in order to keep the Highway Trust Fund from running out of money.

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The Highway Trust Fund Is Doomed

By | | Transportation
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Congress is wrangling over how to spend federal gas taxes, with the Senate wanting to spend about $15 billion per year more than revenues while the House modestly wants to spend only about $10 billion per year more than revenues. But according to the Congressional Budget Office, the money they have to argue about will soon dramatically decline.

Obama’s fuel economy rules, the CBO says, will reduce per-mile fuel consumption faster than the increase in driving. As a result, by 2040 total gas tax revenues will decline by more than 20 percent. That means less money for highways, transit, bike paths, and whatever else Congress wants to spend the so-called Highway Trust Fund on.

The House and Senate conference committee will begin meeting on May 8 to iron out the differences between the bill that passed the Senate and the one that passed the House Transportation Committee but not the full House. Republican members on the House side include Mica (FL), Duncan (TN), Young (AK), Hanna (NY), Shuster (PA), Capito (WV), Crawford (AR), Beutler (WA), Cravaack (MN), Ribble (WI), Buschon (IN), Southerland (FL), Lankford (OK), Camp (MI), Tiberi (OH), Hastings (WA), Bishop (UT), Upton (MI), Whitfield (KY), and Hall (TX). Several of them, including Mica, Shuster, and Young, are known to be fond of pork barrel.

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Transportation Bill Going to Conference Committee

By | | Transportation
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The House and Senate plan to hold conference committee negotiations over the transportation reauthorization bill. Early this year, the House Transportation Committee had approved the most fiscally conservative reauthorization bill considered by congress since 1991, if not since 1982. Yet the bill never reached the floor of the House due to opposition from fiscal conservatives who said that the bill wasn’t fiscally conservative enough.

So the negotiations will center around the Senate bill, which is far from fiscally conservative in any sense of the word. It requires far more deficit spending than the House bill. It continues to divert a huge share of federal gas taxes to transit, which the House bill would have ended. And it includes all sorts of provisions that have nothing to do with transportation. In short, it is basically a continuation of the 2005 law with a few minor expansions of government power and spending.
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Naturally, House Democrats are elated. Transportation writer Ken Orski says it is likely that numerous “questionable items . . . have been slipped into this massive 1,600-plus page bill” (which is nearly twice as long as the House bill had been). The real fiscal conservatives in the House better do everything they can to kill the conference bill or the gamble they waged killing the House bill will come back to bite them.

Congress Extends Transportation Bill 90 Days

By | | Transportation
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The Senate reluctantly agreed to a 90-day extension of the 2005 transportation bill. This means the federal government will continue to spend more money on transit and highways than it collects in gas taxes and other highway fees.

Senate Democrats rancorously blamed the 90-day extension, as opposed to the two-year extension passed by the Senate, on laziness. “They run off on their vacation and leave the people twisting in the wind,” said Barbara Boxer (D-CA). “They sent out a signal that America should be ready for hardship,” she continued.

But, as noted here before, it is less laziness than it is a fundamental difference in views. For the past several years under the 2005 bill, Congress has been spending more than it takes in. This means it has three choices: raise taxes, cut spending, or continue to deficit spend. No one is talking about raising taxes, at least not while the economy is still recovering.

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