What does House passage of a health-care bill mean for transportation and planning issues? For one thing, the bill just passed includes the now-familiar (but wrong) assumption that we can make people healthier through social engineering. More important, it means some in Congress are going to start gearing up for reauthorization of federal surface transportation programs (even though no one seriously believes a bill will be passed in 2010).

One idea that has been around for awhile is for an infrastructure bank. But as faithful Antiplanner ally Ron Utt points out, what people call an infrastructure bank will be far from a true bank. Instead, it is likely to turn into an open-bucket pork fest in which states and cities come up with the most wildly expensive, inane projects to make sure they get “their share” of the take. Yes, at least some of the money the bank gives out will be in the form of loans, but it will be easy for states to “borrow” money against the taxes they expect to collect someday from their taxpayers.

The bigger debate, of course, is going to be between collective transport and personal transport. The door-to-door convenience of driving is so great that, even with huge subsidies, it is hard to imagine collective transport ever taking significant market share away from the automobile. And yet people fantasize endlessly about the benefits of high-speed rail, streetcars, and so forth.

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The White House released its proposed 2011 federal budget today, including the transportation budget. For the most part, this budget is an extension of past budgets, but it includes a few new programs.

First, the budget includes $4 billion for a National Infrastructure Innovation and Finance Fund, also known as an “infrastructure bank.” The Antiplanner has a couple of problems with this idea. First, infrastructure should be paid for out of user fees, not tax dollars. Second, unlike many other transportation funds, which are distributed based on specific formulas, this fund will be an “open bucket.” This will give states incentives to come up with the wackiest, most expensive transportation projects.

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Chairman Oberstar and the leadership of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee want to spend $500 billion on surface transportation over the next six years. This is a huge increase over the $338 billion authorized over the last six years.

Page 4 of the plan’s executive summary “provides $337.4 billion for highways.” But, in fact, only $100 billion of this is dedicated to highways; most of the rest is in “flexible funds” such as CMAQ and the Surface Transportation Fund that can be spent on either highways or transit. Nearly $100 billion goes for transit, and $50 billion goes for high-speed rail. The remaining $12.4 billion goes for safety programs.

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Members of the House of Representatives submitted their requests for 6,868 earmarks for the next reauthorization of federal surface transportation spending. That’s only about 500 more than the number that was officially in the 2005 transportation act (an “official” earmark is numbered in the bill; the asterisk in the linked table indicates there were several hundred more unnumbered earmarks).

At $136 billion, the total cost of these earmarks would be almost six times as much as the $24 billion cost of earmarks in 2005. Of course, this is far from the final total. The House Transportation & Infrastructure Committee says it may pare these down. On the other hand, the Senate is likely to add to the list.

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While House Transportation Committee Chair James Oberstar talks about spending a lot of money, the Senate transportation chair, John D. Rockefeller IV, has a different agenda: he wants to reduce people’s driving. He thinks the next transportation reauthorization bill should include goals of reducing per-capita driving, reducing transportation-related greenhouse emissions by 40 percent, and reduce the amount of freight carried on highways by 20 percent. (His actual goal is to increase non-highway freight by 10 percent, but since slightly less than a third of freight goes by highway, that works out to a 20 percent reduction in highway shipping.)

The Antiplanner has a few problems with these goals. First, several states, including Oregon and Washington, have set goals of reducing per-capita driving, but none have succeeded. Per-capita driving has declined only when gas prices dramatically increased (a 40-cent-per-gallon increase in gas taxes wouldn’t be enough) or incomes dramatically fell due to a recession.

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