2002
The Last Word

Kirk Landers

Vice President
and
Editorial Director

2001 Archive

See also: Our View

Us, A Year Later

At the beginning of this calendar year, the editors of Better Roads presented you with a cover-to-cover redesign of this 71-year-old magazine. As redesigns go, ours was a somewhat radical one. We expanded the breadth of subjects the magazine covers, we added many new magazine formats, we increased the number of editorial pages we publish each month, and we altered the graphic appearance of the publication.

Sweeping redesigns like ours are always fun to plan and terrifying to present to the audience. Ours was preceded by a great deal of subscriber research, but that was still no guarantee loyal readers would like the changes and new readers would be drawn to the magazine. We said as much in this column last January, writing, “Of course, no matter how much research we do, and no matter how ambitious our intentions, we won’t know how we’re doing until you see the final product and let us know what you like and what you don’t.”

As we close the first year of the “new” Better Roads, early indications are that the redesign has been a success.

A survey of subscribers conducted early in the year gave the magazine and the redesign an enthusiastic endorsement. Agency readers, long the bedrock audience of Better Roads, said they liked the changes, and contractor subscribers, many of them new to the magazine, indicated they found the new content interesting and relevant to their work.

There’s no chance success will go to our heads, however. In phone calls and letters, agency readers let us know every month when we make a misstep. A half dozen or so took the opportunity to excoriate us on the July-issue cover photo, which combined a bucolic cliff-side mountain road with a rusty guard rail that seemingly ended where the road curved treacherously.

Contractors, too, have a way of keeping editorial egos in check. While the overall evaluation of our redesign was very favorable among these subscribers, about 20% said they weren’t actually aware there had been a redesign.

While subscribers were the first priority of our redesign, advertisers were an important second priority, and they have responded positively, too, allowing us to keep investing in the magazine. In a very difficult business climate, we expect to finish the year with about 15% growth in advertising revenues compared to 2001, which was up about 25% from the previous year. Fueling this increase is a steady influx of new advertisers, and we are optimistic that the trend will continue in 2003.

One of the quality investments we are making in 2003 is a contributing editor agreement with Tom Kuennen, one of the highway industry’s most accomplished writers. Tom’s tenure in the road industry spans some 17 years and includes a long stint as the chief editor of Roads & Bridges and many award winning articles, including a series in the mid-90s for Construction Equipment that laid out the case for a transportation reauthorization act of unprecedented proportions. Industry lobbyists aggressively distributed reprints of that series on Capitol Hill as part of the effort that resulted in TEA-21.

Tom will write a major feature for us every month, enriching a staff of experienced, accomplished veterans that already includes editor-in-chief Ruth Stidger, who has won more of trade publishing’s prestigious Jesse Neal awards than any other writer in our field.

So we are off to a promising start, but with lots of work yet to be done. We thank you for your time, loyalty and input, and we promise not to take any of that for granted.

The Taxing Question

Last summer, the American Road and Transportation Builders Association floated the concept of a fuel tax increase as part of the next transportation bill on capital hill.

And lived to tell about it.

Now, the concept seems to be gaining favor. Although the Bush administration has publicly opposed any kind of tax increase, some conservative stalwarts in the House and Senate have been indicating support for the concept of a fuel tax increase as a necessary investment in the transportation infrastructure of the United States. Many moderates from both parties are thought to be supportive of a major increase in federal transportation funding and the consequent fuel tax increase. So, for now at least, a breakthrough bill is possible.

What is especially interesting about the ARTBA proposal is the clarity with which it links sensible goals for the next transportation act with rational, documented, third-party cost data for achieving those goals.

The group’s three main goals for the new act are to reduce deaths and injuries on highways through targeted capital investments, keep traffic congestion at current levels through 2009, and at least maintain the current physical condition of the nation’s roads, bridges, and transit systems.

To arrive at a federal transportation budget target, ARTBA uses data developed by the American Association of State Highway Transportation Officials for its Bottom Line report, a projection of total transportation spending needs for the next 20 years.

For the record, using constant year-2000 dollars and not allowing for inflation, AASHTO says it will take a capital investment of $92 billion a year at all levels of government to maintain current conditions and performance of U.S. highways, and $125.6 billion annually to achieve all of the economically beneficial improvements outlined in a U.S. Department of Transportation study covering the same period.

To calculate the federal funding need, ARTBA noted that, historically, the federal share of highway capital investment has been 47%, and applied that number to the AASHTO number. The group also factored in inflation at 2.4%, the average for the Bush administration’s 2003 budget.

Using those numbers, just to maintain the current status of our roads, the next transportation act would need to provide highway funding of $47.7 billion in FY 2004 and increase incrementally to $53.6 billion in 2009. The $47.7 billion for 2004 represents something akin to a 50% increase in federal funding compared to the peak year in TEA-21. And that’s just to keep things as they are.

To make all the positive-payback improvements in congestion, safety, and the condition of the nation’s roads and bridges, federal funding would start at $65.1 billion in FY 2004 and rise to $73.2 billion in 2009.

Add to these eye-popping numbers another $14 billion annually — that’s what the American Public Transportation Association says is needed to meet minimum national transit needs — and you have a persuasive case for increased spending and, necessarily, increased revenues.

Part of the ARTBA proposal for the highway aid program is to re-appropriate about $5 billion in annual revenues that are not currently going into transportation. These items include spending down the highway trust fund balance ($2 billion a year), transferring ethanol revenues from the General Fund to the highway account, ending the $0.051-per-gallon ethanol subsidy, and crediting interest on the highway account balance. In addition, the group proposed that the fuel tax be indexed for inflation.

These revenue enhancements add a little over $5 billion to highway program revenues in 2004, and increase to $9.2 billion extra in 2009. To that, ARTBA proposes increasing the federal fuel tax by about $0.02 each year from 2004 through 2009. The net affect is a highway program that starts at about $35 billion in 2004 and increases to $60 billion in 2009 — a spending plan that would at least maintain current levels of congestion, safety, and physical condition. The ARTBA plan would also increase transit funding $1 billion a year.

The ARTBA plan is well conceived and worth supporting. And don’t take the Bush Administration’s anti-tax policy for granted. Former president Ronald Reagan, the definitive fiscal conservative, endorsed a $0.05-per-gallon user fee in 1982 and thus laid the ground work for the modern-day federal transportation program in America.

Gridlock Tactics, Again

Reader Steve Womble, a Florida highway professional, responded to the September Last Word column with the observation, “Your perspective seems to be based on the goal of providing an immediate solution to the congestion problem using the long established answer: more roads and bridges.”

Steve has been swapping e-mails with us for months because we share a common anguish — how to solve America’s terrible traffic congestion problems without paving all the surface area in every major metropolitan center of the country.

With a title like Rail Transit Won’t Save Us, many readers may have assumed, like Steve, that we are espousing a roads-only solution to congestion, but that is not the case. We believe a multi-faceted approach is the only way to solve the problem, with increases in road and bridge capacity one of many tactics to be used. Here are some of the others:

Regional zoning. Sprawl is the leading cause of traffic congestion in many areas, and the leading cause of sprawl is the availability of bigger, better houses for less money in exurban greenfield developments. Trouble is, the houses are cheaper because transportation infrastructure costs aren’t part of the price; the infrastructure will be built later, and people from all over the region and the state will pay for it.

We think regions need to establish reasonable impact fees for greenfield construction. This won’t stop new construction but it will stop subsidizing it and, perhaps, retard the pace of sprawl.

Long-life pavements. The least expensive, least painful way to expand the capacity of existing roads and bridges is to reduce the amount of time lanes are closed for repairs and reconstruction. The brutal traffic gridlock of 1999 and 2000 was the result of a red hot economy coinciding with an historic peak in road rehabilitation. If you can get eight years out of a surface course instead of six, you should reduce lane closures by a very substantial percentage. Similarly, if the rest of the road can last 50 years instead of 30, lane capacity lost to reconstruction will be drastically reduced.

Truck lanes and tollways. Truck tollways were offered up as a way to give the truck lobby bigger rigs without squishing any more regular motorists than necessary. We’re still personally squeemish about sharing the road with bigger trucks, but the notion of creating special truck lanes in congested areas has a ring of logic to it. It could enhance traffic safety, and it could enhance pavement life by reducing loads on the cars-only pavement and letting highway engineers focus load-bearing pavement designs on the special lanes.

True, this is the kind of capacity-growing solution that makes environmentalists paranoid, and it would require rights of way in the very places where they are hardest to get, but the concept deserves consideration because of its other potential benefits.

Bike lanes and routes. Reader Womble is an advocate of bike lanes and routes, and so are we. There were substantial sums of money earmarked for this and other alternative forms of transportation in TEA-21, but no one seems to have gotten behind the concept in any public, big-picture way. Bicycle provisions should be a part of many highway designs just for safety sake, but it wouldn’t hurt to have design embellishments that could enhance their value for commuting.

Will bike lanes solve the traffic crisis? No, but in some places they might help a little, and at the least they will save the lives of some citizens who will otherwise be killed or injured in accidents with cars and trucks. If you think about it, that’s what sidewalks do, too, and they have worked out pretty well for western civilization over the past century or two.

Rail transit. We’re not against it. Our point was simply that you could spend untold billions of dollars every year for the next 10 years developing rail transit in America and still less than 5% of Americans would be using rail for local transportation. It’s not the solution, it’s part of the solution.

September 2002

Rail Transit Won't Save Us

Last month, the Sierra Club released a report on what it considered the best and worst transportation projects in the United States. Smart Choices, Less Traffic covered 49 transportation projects in 31 states and, to no one’s surprise, the best projects were primarily rail transit installations, while all of the bad projects were projects that increased highway capacity.

As these documents go, the Sierra Club’s work seems to be thoughtful, well intentioned, and well researched. Their objections to a number of road projects were based on threats to wetlands and other vulnerable ecosystems; one such project is in the area where many of us at Better Roads live and recreate, and the concerns are valid.

Many other objections are based on the premise that new freeways and expansions of existing ones inevitably create more sprawl and more congestion.

No project better reflects the futility of the Sierra Club’s blanket condemnation of roadway expansion than its ringing condemnation of the new 12-lane Woodrow Wilson bridge across the Potomac River between Virginia and Maryland.

The club pans the project because planners chose to expand vehicle lane capacity rather than accommodate a transit line that would “double the bridge capacity, connect existing Metro stations, and provide transit to a minority community.”

If only that were true! Rail transit is a great luxury for those who can take advantage of it, and the Washington, D.C. metro system is quite possibly the best of the best. The thought of extending the system into the suburbs must certainly appeal to everyone in the area. But it’s unlikely in the extreme that a transit line would carry as many passengers across that bridge each day as the equivalent vehicle lanes.

Indeed, the Sierra Club’s endorsement of all transit projects, no matter where, no matter how much they cost, betrays a surprising naivete about the congestion situation we are in.

Here are a few facts about that situation.

In the 15-year period from 1985 to 2000, the U.S. population increased 15%, passenger vehicle miles increased 54%, and transit/rail passenger miles increased about 25%, according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics.

Now, if you’re a transit fan, the good news is that, between 1995 and 2000, the rate of increase in vehicle miles and transit miles was very similar — 13% and 12%, respectively. But if you’re trying to solve congestion problems, here is the bad news: transit/rail accounts for less than 1% of all the passenger miles traveled in the U.S., while vehicle transport accounts for about 89% of all passenger miles.

Hopefully, transit’s share of market will rise in this decade as a payoff for tens of billions of dollars of federal fuel tax revenues that have been invested in transit since the early 90s. But let’s face it, even if rail/transit’s share of U.S. passenger miles doubles between 2000 and 2005, it will still account for less than 1% of U.S. travel. No matter how much we spend, no matter how much we hope, transit won’t solve our congestion problems. At the very best it can provide a small degree of relief, primarily in large urban areas.

The scenario is the same if you just focus on how people get to work. And it’s essentially the same when you compare truck transportation of freight to rail and other means.

Should we continue to invest in rail transit? Absolutely. But let’s be realistic. Cars and trucks and roads and bridges are the backbone of our transportation system and the prime movers of our economy. If we want our economy to grow, we have to be able to increase the transportation system’s capacity too, and that means expanding our roads and bridges.

Feeding the Golden Goose

It was the best of times and it was the worst of times when the leaders of the federal government addressed the assembled highway lobby last June at the National Conference on Transportation and the Economy.

Hosted by the American Road and Transportation Builders Association, the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the conference featured such leaders as Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta, chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Jim Jeffords, and chairman of the House Subcommittee on Highways and Transit Thomas Petri.

One after another, the leaders stepped to the podium and spoke of their personal passion for good roads and efficient transportation, the bi-partisan support for investment in transportation infrastructure, and their optimism for an aggressive federal transportation program to succeed TEA-21.

But they also made clear there is no appetite in Washington, D.C. for increasing the federal fuel tax to increase revenues for transportation spending.

This being an election year for the House and Senate, it’s not surprising that tax increases are a taboo subject just now. But the reluctance of the political leadership to consider revenue increases for the highway trust fund is going to cast a pall over the creation of the new transportation program.

Here is where we stand right now. Highway Trust Fund receipts have been running between $31 and $32 billion annually for 2001 and 2002, and are expected to barely inch forward next year. Last year, for the first time in decades, trust fund outlays actually exceeded receipts, and that condition will persist through 2003, causing the balance in the trust fund to decline. Next year, the fund will spend $7 or $8 billion more than it takes in.

The good news is, the historical balance in the trust fund is enough to fund deficit spending for many years to come. The bad news is, the cumulative balance in the trust fund is just an obscure theory. In big government, like big business, what you don’t spend you lose. The theoretical balance in the Highway Trust Fund has been spent by someone else on something else; it’s one of the items on the asset side of the federal ledger, but as you may have noticed, there are a lot more items on the liability side these days.

What makes this all so problematical is that the goal of pro-highway leaders in Congress is to achieve a program that keeps road spending at the $40-billion annual level and that would most likely exceed receipts until or unless the economy goes into another boom period.

Fiscal conservatives in Congress and the administration will have a hard time going along with what most will regard as a sort of deficit spending.

Meanwhile, road interests from highway users to highway administrators know very well that even a $40-billion annual program is not adequate to achieve improvements in the overall condition of the nation’s roads and bridges. The most conservative estimates for serious improvements hover around the $50 billion annual spending level.

We can hope for some creative reauthorization law writing and math to alleviate some of the cash crunch in the next transportation bill. For example, Congress cut trust fund receipts a few years ago by eliminating interest accruals to the fund and by reducing taxes on gasahol. They can restore interest accruals without making anybody’s eyes flutter, and industry lobbyists may have enough traction to get a compromise tax on gasahol.

In addition, the highway lobby will undoubtedly make a bigger issue out of how much fuel tax revenue gets spent on mass transit, bike paths, and the other highway-alternative programs. Reducing expenditures for these programs would be unfortunate and untimely, but if we can’t afford to feed all the mouths in the transportation nest, we better make it a point to feed the golden goose.

Bigger, Longer Trucks?

What would you say if the Congress of the United States asked you whether or not we should allow longer and heavier commercial trucks on federal-aid highways?

Last spring, the National Research Council — a group that Congress does ask to answer such questions — made headlines by publishing a study by the Transportation Research Board which concluded that larger, longer trucks might improve the efficiency of the highway system and should be given trial consideration.

Predictably, commercial trucking interests were elated and highway safety groups were dismayed. An Associated Press story on the report included a statistic from the National Transportation Safety Board indicating that trucks over 10,000 pounds comprise 3% of the registered vehicles, 7% of the traffic, and 9% of all fatal accidents.

Add to that the expense of designing roads and bridges for heavier vehicles, and dealing with shortened pavement life expectancies, and you have a scenario that doesn’t seem to make much sense.

But the TRB was coming at the question from a different angle. They started with the proposition that the United States has a huge investment in infrastructure for moving people and goods from one place to another, and their challenge was to see if it could be used more efficiently.

What they found for sure was that you can’t accurately predict what the fallout would be from increasing truck size. For example, while big trucks seem to cause more deaths than other vehicles, bigger trucks might not exacerbate the situation. In fact, the study points out that oversize rigs are relegated to non-interstate highways now, where they may well constitute a bigger safety hazard than they would on limited-access roads. In addition, if by allowing bigger trucks we reduced the total number of rigs on the road, you might have a decline in truck-related accidents and deaths.

The point the TRB made is that right now, there is no data, no reservoir of facts, one can use to predict how 90,000-pound trucks would affect safety on the interstates and other federal-aid highways where they are currently banned. They also characterize data on the effect of changing truck weights on bridge costs as being inadequate and unreliable.

The TRB committee recommends that further study be conducted on the affect longer, heavier trucks would have on traffic safety, including giving 80,000- to-90,000 pound rigs interstate access in one or more volunteer states to see how things work out. The committee also recommends that further study be given the question of what kind of bridge improvements would be required by the move to bigger rigs.

What’s missing from the report is any sense of what benefit the citizens of the United States would get from allowing bigger trucks on federal-aid roads. It’s an important point. By any estimation, bigger trucks would mean a bigger national investment in road and bridge maintenance and construction. So, what’s the payback? If all we get is a tenth of a cent off on each can of peaches and box of cereal we buy, the benefit might not even be worth the research to determine if it’s feasible.

If the payback is that U.S. industry gains some competitive advantage in world trade, then the research is important and should be done. But improving the efficiency of moving freight in the U.S. won’t necessarily improve the competitiveness of domestic companies, since imported goods would seem to benefit from the same efficiencies.

By all means, let us constantly evaluate how efficiently we are using the U.S. highway system, and let us always keep an open mind about making changes required by changing times, new opportunities, and competitive pressures. But let’s not just make a change because it’s possible. Let’s determine first, to the best of our abilities, whether or not the change will bring a benefit worth having.

When Free Trade Died

Free trade’s most ardent and persuasive advocate has crashed and burned in a sea of hypocrisy this year, and legions of capitalists connected to the construction industry are still wondering how it could happen.

In a few short weeks, the Bush administration has imposed stiff tariffs on steel to protect the domestic industry from a list of international cheaters that includes virtually all countries with a steel industry, and the U.S. International Trade Commission has imposed 27% duties on Canadian softwood imports to save the domestic industry from the intimidators of international trade to the north.

Meanwhile, Congress passed a farm support bill so generous it would make a communist blush.

American capitalists — the real ones, not the whiney wimps running for cover now — are going to have to live with the bitter fact that free trade died when Bill Clinton left office.

Even before other nations retaliate, America’s sudden conversion to protectionism is bringing some pain to the American economy.

Small- and medium-volume manufacturers of steel goods fear that foreign competitors will now be able to undersell them in their own market because the foreign competitors can use cheap foreign steel while they have to use expensive U.S. stuff. Exports are out of the question. High volume manufacturers of steel products have the market power and, in many cases, the international production capacity, to get around the immediate problem of high priced domestic steel, but they will have to deal with retaliatory measures from foreign governments. One of the casualties could be lost factory jobs in the U.S.

The softwood tariffs will substantially increase the cost of a new home in the U.S. since Canadian imports, about one-third of the U.S. softwood market, are used primarily in home construction and remodeling. One risk to Americans is that the increased cost of homes will cause a decline in new home demand and gut one of the most robust segments of a struggling U.S. economy.

Another risk is that we have clearly shown our country to be the playground bully of international trade: all hot air and bluster until somebody pokes us in the nose, whereupon we wet our national pants.

I was in South Korea in the early ‘90s when that country signed a trade agreement with the U.S. that opened its rice market to cheap U.S. imports. The national assumption in South Korea was that its domestic rice producers would be brutalized by imports, but they did it anyway because if they wanted to trade with the U.S. they had to be free traders.

Of course, Korean rice held up very well against U.S. imports because it’s a lot better than U.S. rice, but that’s another story.

The point is, now that it’s our turn to take a beating, we’re flinching.

Even that wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t for the fact that we have been proselytizing to the world on every global street corner for 20 years about the righteous purity of free trade. Our sudden switch to protectionism and subsidies is the economic parallel to a religious evangelist leaving the pulpit for loose women and hard drugs.

The highway industry can only hope that the damage done by U.S. hypocrisy is limited to civilized retaliation by other governments. But if the economy sags under the weight of higher steel prices, higher home prices, and increased government spending, budgets for road and bridge improvements will surely suffer.

May 2002

Work Zone Story

As ceremonies go, the dedication of the National Work Zone Memorial was proceeding nicely, right up until the time the survivors of people killed in work-zone crashes started talking.

It was a sunny, windy April morning in Capital Heights, Maryland and the road industry was congregating to kick off National Work Zone Awareness Week by dedicating the American Traffic Safety Services mobile memorial listing the names of victims of work-zone accidents. Congressman James Oberstar, the ranking Democrat on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, was the featured speaker, the one who attracted reporters from the daily news media, and he performed admirably — knowledgeable, articulate, and to the point.

He was followed by similarly articulate, intelligent, and refreshingly brief speakers representing several of the industry and government associations sponsoring the event.

Their message was important and clear: more than a thousand people are dying each year in work-zone crashes — don’t call them accidents, we were admonished — and virtually all of them could be avoided if motorists were more aware of work-zone dangers and respectful of speed limits.

They already had me feeling guilty...for years of wanton speeding, for not doing enough to support work-zone safety in Better Roads, for even now not wanting to slow down to work-zone speeds when there is a large vehicle with an angry driver behind me who obviously wants to go faster.

Then came Amy Snyder, a college-aged young woman from Pennsylvania. Her father, a Pennsylvania DOT employee, was killed in a work-zone crash in 1999.

Her story is haunting, even now. She was in high school, sitting in an ambulance during a demonstration by paramedics at her school, when the crew was called away to an accident.

That afternoon, her father did not show up to drive her home. She waited and waited and finally decided that something must have come up and made her own way home.

Something had come up, of course. That night she found out that the event the paramedics dashed off to was the very same work-zone crash that killed her stepfather, the man who had always picked her up from school, and the father she loved deeply.

Amy’s words were straight forward enough, but her telling of this story was laced with grief and sorrow and pain, so much of it that her audience — a jaded collection of reporters, politicians, and association leaders — was reduced to misty eyes, muffled sniffles, and quiet sobs, though a few had the courage to weep openly.

Amy Snyder goes to school now on a Highway Workers Memorial Scholarship sponsored by the American Road and Transportation Builders Association, and her appearance at the memorial dedication undoubtedly had a great deal to do with why the story was picked up by many newspapers around the country. Ms. Snyder transformed work-zone safety from a discussion of statistics into a story of human tragedy and loss.

She got to me, that’s for sure. Whatever the work-zone safety people need from Better Roads they will get, from this point on. My personal donation, modest though it may be, is in the mail to one of the scholarship funds — ARTBA and ATSSA both sponsor scholarships for children of fallen highway workers.

And for the rest of my life, when I enter a work-zone area, it will be at the posted speed, no matter how big the vehicle behind me, no matter how miffed its driver.

The Reauthorization Dash

The furor over highway spending cuts in the Bush administration’s proposed FY 2003 budget is creating unprecedented levels of grassroots support for road and bridge investment just as debate is about to begin on the reauthorization of the national transportation act, or TEA-21, as the current act is known.

In one remarkable week at the end of February, Congress and the Bush administration were inundated with bipartisan voices representing state and local interests asking that all or most of the proposed highway spending cuts for 2003 be restored. Leading the way were the associations representing governors, mayors, and state legislators, and they were supported by groups as disparate as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the International Union of Operating Engineers.

While the highway industry won’t get as much federal money in FY 2003 as it did the previous year, the cuts will be shallow, thanks to the input of state and local government representatives. And, even more important, the senators and representatives who will take part in the reauthorization debate start out knowing that the folks back home care about federal highway funding.

In previous reauthorization debates, the early months of the debate found pro-road lobbyists looking for ways to keep congressional staffers awake when the subject of roads came up, so little did most offices care about highways. So, road and bridge advocates are starting the reauthorization process in a better position than ever before.

Still, the debate over the next transportation act promises to be long and contentious, and highway interests are still vulnerable.

The first problem is the economy, which will not recover fast enough in 2002 to replace revenues that are being lost to tax cuts, increased defense spending, and the war on terrorism. With federal revenues flat or shrinking, the competition for funds will be severe as the reauthorization bill is being debated.

In that environment, highways are a big target. Supporters of other government spending programs see billions of dollars of discretionary money there. Environmental groups that associate highways with the destruction of habitats and air quality will see highways as a good place to cut spending and they will campaign vigorously for it.

And within the transportation arena, roads compete for attention, and to some degree funding, with airports and mass transit, two areas of the national transportation picture that have a very high profile right now.

In this kind of environment, it’s not hard to paint a scenario in which a good-hearted senator or representative regretfully votes to reduce highway spending so that unspent trust-fund revenues can counter-balance spending for some other program.

To avoid this potential setback, the road industry has to achieve one more milestone in the reauthorization debate: it has to convince Congress and the nation’s news media that the work the industry does is important. Congressional leaders and their staff people need to understand that roads and bridges wear out, that it costs more to rebuild a road than it costs to build it in the first place, and that aggressive maintenance and repair programs can save untold billions of dollars in the long run.

Congressional leaders and their staff people need to associate the highway industry with innovation and integrity, too. The industry needs to make them aware of the great strides that have been made in road engineering, pavement quality, and prevention practices, because this is the professionalism upon which trust is built.

And the industry needs to impress on our national leaders that motorist safety, transportation efficiency, and air quality all demand that increased road capacity be part — emphasis on part — of the solution to gridlock.

If the highway industry can make these points and sustain the grassroots support that has already formed, the United States has a very good chance of getting the aggressive highway program she needs.

March 2002

A Call to Action

As February dawned on the U.S. economy, the transportation dilemma got dumped on the federal government like a smelly bag of yesterday’s supper.

First, Amtrak served notice that it would need an extra $1.2 billion in cash or it would have to start closing train service to an unspecified number of cities and towns.

Then Delta Airlines announced losses in the hundreds of millions of dollars for the last fiscal year, and United Airlines announced losses of more than a billion dollars for the same period. This, even after the infusion of hundreds of millions of dollars from the federal government.

And finally, Bush Administration administered the transportation coup d’grace by calling for a 30% cut in highway spending in its budget request for the next fiscal year.

The Administration rationalized its call for highway cuts by citing forecasts for declining fuel tax revenues, but the truth is, there is so much money in the Highway Trust Fund it would take years and years of cheap gas and recession-era travel habits to spend it down. The truth is, highway spending just isn’t sexy enough for presidential politics and hasn’t been since Ronald Reagan made government a dirty word and government spending an abomination before all that is right and just in the world.

Of course, anti-highway sentiment is not nearly an exclusive right of Republican presidents. Though he campaigned for a few days as the infrastructure president, then candidate Clinton didn’t get the bounce he wanted from that identity and abandoned it during the campaign. As president, he opposed increases in highway spending, though he was smart enough to keep out of the way when the House of Representatives, led by Pennsylvania Republican Bud Schuster, gave transportation in general and highways in particular a badly needed shot in the arm in the ‘90s.

So President Bush’s initial budget request should come as no surprise to the highway industry. Many before him have taken transportation for granted and focused on issues worthier of Presidential attention.

Fortunately for the country, the House and Senate have usually listened to the wise counsel of highway professionals and their lobbyists and reversed presidential cuts in road and transportation spending. And it is that time again for agencies and contractors and their associations and advocates. It is time to re-educate senators and representatives and their staffs with letters and e-mails and petitions and fly-ins.

The most important message is that this is important, legitimate stuff. Roads and bridges wear and crack and break down and must be repaired and replaced in a timely manner to assure public safety and efficient movement of people and commerce. It’s expensive when done in a timely manner and much, much more expensive when it isn’t. Indeed, we were just starting to atone for decades of neglect when we were so rudely interrupted by a recession.

The other point to be made is the estimated 360,000 construction-related jobs that would be lost if the President’s budget were passed without change. All the corporate tax cuts in the world will not replace that many middle-income jobs, and the damage to the economy could be enough to stall a recovery. We’re not advocating the creation of a jobs bill; the legitimacy of our proposition is that the work is important and road users have already paid for it.

So sit down with your 2002 calendar and set aside time each month for writing letters, supporting your associations’ activities, and getting otherwise involved in the political process. There is educational work to be done, and you are one of a very small number of people who is qualified to do the teaching.

February 2002

Bridgethink, Revisited

There are three great truths about bridges.

First, there is no such thing as a small bridge project. Even a small bridge is technically complex and really expensive. Big ones involve degrees of engineering and stacks of money that are incomprehensible to most average citizens.

Second, bridges are the foremost engineering marvels of the U.S. and Canadian highway systems, masterpieces of science and math that support incredible loads over seemingly impossible spans.

Third, most of the bridges that the average citizen would call beautiful were built decades or centuries ago.

I will concede that there is a simple and massive elegance to the thousands of gray concrete arches that cross our rivers. And there is a fair degree of awe inspired by the tangles of gray concrete arches that loop and roll in spaghetti-bowl expressway interchanges.

I also concede that to a civil engineer, an architect, and even many artists, there is real beauty in our thousands of modern gray concrete bridges.

But for the great unwashed masses of North American motorists, these structures look a lot alike and are, therefore, plain. As in boring.

Am I missing something or have we become such an uptight, buttoned-down, dollar-squeezing people that we no longer value building something that quickens the pulse and gladdens the mind just to see it? Would we build London’s Tower Bridge today? Would we build New York’s Brooklyn Bridge today?

Would anyone in their right mind propose city bridges with the ornate accoutrements of Paris’ bridges over the Seine?

Not likely. We can get just as many people from one side of the river to the other for less upfront cash by building something bare-naked practical and doing it again on the next river and the next. This is pretty close to the architectural vision of the old Soviet Union. Surely a continent populated by rich capitalists who enjoy ostentatious displays of personal wealth can do better than this. What’s the point in having an overpriced Lexus or Mercedes if the only pedestal you can put it on is an unpainted slab of concrete?

Nothing against unpainted concrete, but we can do better, if only by painting it once in a while.

We can add variety to our bridges with brick, tile, or rock fascia, like the old-timers did. We can splurge and go with mildly to wildly impractical designs now and then, possibly even adding something special for pedestrians and bicyclists and joggers.

If all else fails, we can use the politics of appeasement to add color and individuality to our modern bridges. To please liberals, we can round up convicted graffiti artists and let them work off their debt to society by doing what they love to our bridges. To please conservatives, we can make them buy their own paint.

January 2002

Your ‘New’ Better Roads

Welcome to the 2002 edition of Better Roads.

As we enter the magazine’s 71st year of publication, it has a new look and a substantially expanded content. In magazine parlance, it has been redesigned, from its graphics to its editorial mission to its feature and department formats.

Our goal from this issue onward is to publish a magazine that keeps North American road professionals constantly informed about trends, developments, ideas, and best practices in the engineering, construction, maintenance, management, and repair of roads and bridges. This is a broader focus than Better Roads had until recently, and we have committed to running substantially more editorial pages to accomplish all we are setting out to do.

In execution, we seek to carry over the traditional strengths of Better Roads, especially authoritative articles on road and bridge management practices written by hands-on experts in departments of transportation throughout the U.S. and Canada. We are also continuing to focus on management topics like vegetation management, dealing with snow and ice, safety, and traffic control. And we hope to continue to receive the constant flow of thoughtful, well crafted letters to the editor which have long added luster to this magazine, even when they have contained stinging criticism of our work.

To those traditions we are making the full spectrum of road technology part of our basic editorial focus, from new practices in pavement design, to new construction and repair techniques, to the latest advances in equipment and materials. We aspire to accomplish this with articles of remarkable depth, bright, informational graphics, and text that is easy to read, even after a long day.

Redesigns are typically undertaken every five years or so to keep a magazine fresh and its staff challenged to explore new ground. They are never easy. Layout grids get altered, production schemes get redone, writers have to explore new subjects. No one is as efficient as they were under the old system, and issues are often late as a result.

But the hardest part is not knowing how readers will respond. We did our best to hedge our bets: Many hundreds of you were kind enough to participate in a detailed survey we conducted last summer to test our ideas. From that project came the decision to give road construction and repair high priority, and to provide in-depth coverage of important new road construction and maintenance equipment.

Of course, no matter how much research we do, and no matter how ambitious our intentions, we won’t know how we’re doing until you see the final product and let us know what you like and what you don’t. To that end, we would appreciate any comments or criticisms you can find the time to share with us in the days ahead.