The Last Word

Kirk Landers

Vice President
and
Editorial Director

2002 Archive

2001 Archive

See also: Our View

Of Bikes and Buses

On a recent press tour in Asia, a group of construction editors had the opportunity to spend a few days in Beijing, China, a city of 14 million that, like the country itself, seems to be entering a period of explosive economic growth and prosperity.

To many of us, the single most striking contrast between Beijing and western cities is the city’s unique reliance on bicycles and public transportation. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of commuters go to and fro each day via bicycles, while thousands or millions more pack cheek to jowl in a sea of buses. Still others use the city’s subway system, while just a small — but growing — fraction of the population uses the automobile to get around.

On the surface, it seems like a transportation planner’s dream come true. Yet Beijing’s traffic gridlock on an average day seems to be as bad as the worst day in North America’s most congested metropolitan areas...and it will certainly get worse as affluence spreads in the years to come.

Beijing’s traffic planners face the same challenges we face on this continent. Despite the high population density, the city covers a huge landmass; 14-million people take up a lot of space even when most of them live in high-rise communities. And commuting patterns are subject to change as new businesses form and take root and old businesses move to better locations.

Bicycle transportation sounds idyllic, but in real life, weather makes it the mode of last resort. During our stay, it snowed in the area and the ambient air temperatures dropped well below the freezing mark. Foul weather affected bicycle commuting the same way it affected vehicle travel — it caused longer trip times, reduced traction, and increased the risk of accident. And it had to make travel uncomfortable, if not miserable, for even the hardiest commuter.

Bus transport was better only in that it provided shelter from the weather and delegated responsibility for steering and braking to a third party.

So Beijing can look forward to a rapid conversion of bicycle and public transportation commuters to the private automobile as more and more locals find middle-class incomes in the country’s burgeoning economy.

And that, for Beijing, may be the biggest nightmare of all. Its surface transportation system is based on vast, wide avenues rather than limited-access freeways. Left turns can consume 20 minutes or more of time cueing up for the opportunity to flash across a half-dozen lanes of traffic, and opportunistic drivers take their chances without much regard for traffic signals — ultimately creating gridlock in every direction.

How Beijing will cope with its growing wealth — and with the huge influx of tourists expected for the 2008 Olympic Games — is a fair question. The city seems to have the physical potential for an expanded subway system, and a monorail system is part of the city plan for the Olympics. But rail systems are expensive to build and to operate, and it’s not likely the city will be able to create enough rail capacity to solve its congestion problems.

Which will bring Beijing back to its road capacity, and the dire need to expand it, even if the grand plan is to continue making public transportation and bicycles the primary commuter conveyances.

And that’s the lesson Beijing reinforces for transportation planners everywhere. The complex transportation needs of the modern city can only be met by a multi-modal approach and a willingness among the taxpayers to invest seriously in transportation solutions.

Cars Make You Fat?

Never mind that California has put an action hero in its governor’s mansion, or that the Chicago Cubs are perilously close (at this writing) to stumbling into the World Series, the apocalypse is not upon us.

One sure sign that normalcy prevails is the recent report issued by the Surface Transportation Policy Project, a lobby group that opposes roads as the source of pretty much everything evil in U.S. society today. What sets STPP apart from other environmental groups — and the pro-road lobby, too, for that matter — is a willingness to issue “reports” based on faulty or fictional data, just to get a burst of publicity for their interests.

The group issued its latest revelations in September, hoping to derail Congressional debate over the reauthorization of the federal transportation act.

Measuring the Health Effects of Sprawl asserted that federal and state transportation policies are substantially responsible for the increase in American obesity.

Really.

The STPP report got high profile coverage in the news media, even though its conclusions brushed aside consideration of highly publicized diet trends that favor high-fat, high-carbohydrate fast foods and prepared foods.

For the record, the American Road and Transportation Builders Association, a pro-road lobbying group, is publicizing a study by three Harvard economists that correlates the rise in obesity in the U.S. and other countries to access to new food technologies and prepared foods. They concluded that America’s obesity problem stems from the number of calories consumed, not the number expended. The biggest problem was the number of calories eaten as snacks among U.S. men and women, which nearly doubled between 1977 and 1996.

The economists considered transportation trends as a possible cause, only to find that the change to cars as a primary way to commute had substantially run its course by 1980. “In 1980,” they wrote, “84% of people drove to work...In 2000, 87% drove to work.”

They also found that the average person’s recreational time increased from 27 minutes per day in 1965 to 47 minutes in 1995. The full report is on the Journal of Economic Perspectives Web site (www.aeaweb.org/jep).

Of course, no reasonably intelligent, moderately educated person in this day and age should need to read a report to know that food, not cars, makes you fat. The wonder in all this is that a collection of worldly, college-graduate reporters and editors, many of them hard-boiled skeptics of the first order, would pick up and pass on such unadulterated tripe.

Cars make you fat? In a country where the fastest growing food product is Krispy Kreme donuts? Right. And wheels give you cholesterol.

Come on, media mavens. Let’s do a better job of covering the transportation debate. There are legitimate positions on both sides of this issue that are getting pushed out of the national dialogue in favor of a bunch of publicity hounds who have an attitude and an agenda and nothing else.

The Jobless Recovery

Confusion is spreading fast in economic prognostication circles as capitalism’s best and brightest number crunchers try to make sense of an economy that seems to be growing at a robust rate yet isn’t generating new jobs.

This not only challenges economic tradition, it shatters the one law of physical science that U.S. politicians have always held sacred, to wit: “a rising tide lifts all boats.”

We have the rising tide, it seems, but it’s not floating everyone’s boat.

Explanations for this strange phenomenon range from Republican economic policy to Democratic economic policy to the North American Free Trade Agreement. Republicans are the target of Democrats, and vice-versa, and NAFTA is the target of every out-of-work hourly worker in North America. Politically neutral economists have yet another theory: our economy is haunted.

Before panic sets in, we should all realize that our economy changed dramatically in the 1980s and 1990s. Unlike the rapid recoveries of the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s, the recovery from the 1990-91 recession was slow and painful. The statistical growth expressed by things like gross domestic product numbers rose for at least two years before the average person on the street started to feel confident about his or her job and economic future. It wasn’t until the middle of the decade that unemployment gave way to worker shortages as the country’s biggest labor problem.

On the other hand, the period of economic growth continued for the rest of the decade, lasting nearly twice as long as the growth cycles of previous decades.

What changed? Almost everything. Government monetary policies are more sophisticated. Companies are light-years more advanced in controlling inventories and responding to demand. Automated manufacturing reduces the direct relationship between economic growth and employment.

And, perhaps most of all, our economy is far more integrated into the global economy than it was at the dawn of the 1980s. What we produce is sold globally, and what we consume is sourced globally.

Thus, when our economic “tide” begins to rise, it affects not only the boats in U.S. harbors but also those in NAFTA, Asian, and European waters as well, because more of the things we consume come from these places than did in our economic past. This is especially true of goods that require a high degree of human labor to manufacture, because those products are being made in lower-cost labor markets, and that has muted the initial affect of our recovery on employment numbers.

It will be a while before our recovery is strong enough to generate significant growth in American jobs, and things may get worse before they get better if the stalemate over the next federal transportation act continues in Washington, D.C.

As we go to press, the Bush Administration and Congress seem to be at an impasse over the new bill, and the non-partisan American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials has issued a report estimating that the cost of a short-term extension of the old program, rather than the timely enactment of a six-year bill, will cause $2.1 billion in project delays and the loss of 90,000 jobs.

Needless to say, those are good jobs and they will be lost at a time when new jobs of equal value are not being created by economic growth.

In contrast, quick passage of an aggressive transportation program that addresses both congestion and the condition of our transportation infrastructure would give all incumbent politicians — including President Bush — something tangible to set before the American electorate to show that they are doing something about jobs.

Most of the Congress is willing to pass an aggressive new transportation program strictly on the basis of the national need for it. For the Bush Administration, something stronger is needed, and this may finally be it.

Brewing TEA-3

These are times that try lobbyists’ nerves. The glorious six-year run of the Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century — TEA-21, in Beltway vernacular — will expire at the end of September, and as of mid-August, the prospects for a new federal transportation act seem grim.

The problem is as basic as taxes. The Bush Administration can barely tolerate the taxes that are already in place, and will not contemplate a tax increase of any kind, no matter what, no matter why. For this reason, the administration and a core of loyalist members of the House of Representatives are pushing a transportation package that would, in essence, reduce federal spending on roads over the term of the bill.

In the other corner is a bipartisan group of moderates, liberals, and even a few conservatives favoring a very aggressive spending program that includes increasing the fuel tax and indexing it for inflation.

The gulf between the two positions is enormous, and the consequences for motorists, road contractors, and highway agencies are monumental.

The Bush Administration’s proposal works out to a little over $30 billion a year in federal highway spending: roughly $20 billion a year lower than federal and state estimates of what it will take merely to sustain current road and bridge conditions as the number of vehicles and vehicle miles traveled continues to increase.

In contrast, the spending package proposed by Representative Don Young (R-Alaska), chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, would increase the fuel tax and raise road spending every year, topping out at about $60 billion for roads in the last year of the bill. The hallmark of Young’s bill is progress: improving the condition of the roads and maintaining or improving the current levels of congestion.

It isn’t at all unusual for the House Transportation Committee chairman to advocate an aggressive road program, and it isn’t unusual for the incumbent administration to regard the entire program with a complete lack of enthusiasm. No U.S. president ever got elected for having a strong roads program, not even Dwight D. Eisenhower, but many a congressman and more than a few senators have used the local jobs created by highway spending to help their re-election prospects over the years. So presidents from Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush have held their noses while their respective Congresses enacted transportation-spending bills.

What makes this confrontation different is that, perhaps because of his father’s experience, George W. Bush has a take-action aversion to tax increases of any kind, so unlike other presidents, this one is apparently unwilling to delegate the matter to Congress. This, even though a number of voices for bedrock conservatism in American politics have given him public dispensation for increasing the highway user fee, provided the returns are invested in the transportation system.

President Bush’s opposition would matter less were it not for the fact that he remains a very popular leader both with the general electorate and within the Republican Party. Fellow Republicans, including Chairman Young, will be very reluctant to vote against the administration’s wishes when the showdown comes.

Highway users and the highway industry have a brief opportunity to change the minds of key right-wing voices in this debate. The challenge is to convince the administration and key legislators that the need for improved pavement condition and expanded capacity is too great to ignore, and that increasing a user fee will not incur the wrath of conservatives in the elections to come. Obviously, this message will mean a lot more coming from conservative constituents than from liberals or moderates, so if you are a card-carrying, involved Republican — and you believe in the need to improve our roads — it’s time to start sending letters and e-mails to your party’s brightest and best.

Thanks, from us to you

This issue marks an important milestone for the employees and owners of Better Roads. It is the largest issue in the 72-year history of our magazine — the most editorial pages, the most advertising pages, and the most total pages.

This marks the third time this year we have published a record-size issue, an unlikely development in a very tough business year in the construction industry. Indeed, these milestones are difficult to enjoy when so many of those who have made our success possible have endured such arduous business conditions themselves.

So, rather than celebrate, we wish to thank our readers and advertisers for the support you have given us, this year and over the past several years as we have attempted to create a publication that serves the informational needs of highway professionals in the best traditions of business journalism. We have a long way to go before we can walk with a swagger and, fates willing, we’ll never get quite that far. Swaggering confidence in a business like ours is an invitation to disaster because no one actually needs the services we provide, at least, not in the sense that businesses will collapse if we disappeared tomorrow.

On the other hand, if we perform our services well, we can provide a worthwhile service to our agency and contractor readers: we can help them do their jobs better. And if we are successful at that, readership of Better Roads will grow and our pages will be an effective place for marketers to communicate the features and benefits of their products and services for the road and bridge industry.

We have invested heavily in achieving readership, from assembling a staff of editors and contributing authors that counts their construction industry experience in decades, to printing many more editorial pages in each issue than publishing-industry norms would dictate for our level of advertising volume. And we have been rewarded with a growing number of subscribers who say they read Better Roads regularly and prefer it as a source of road construction and maintenance information.

We have also focused on being good corporate citizens, supporting the industry’s associations and common interests to the best of our abilities. Our efforts range from inviting a wide range of industry groups to air their opinions about the forthcoming federal transportation act in the monthly column “Countdown”, to the creation of editorial supplements in conjunction with organizations like the American Concrete Paving Association (in this issue), the Asphalt Recycling and Reclaiming Association (July ‘03), and the National Asphalt Pavement Association (coming in November ‘03).

Our commercial reward for these efforts has been an increasing amount of advertising, from large and small advertisers alike. We try to make doing business with us easy for these firms, and for the many prospects who have not yet done business with us. Our efforts have ranged from keeping our rates at moderate levels, to creating optimum advertising positions throughout the magazine, to making it easy for readers to reach advertiser Web sites via www.betterroads.com, one of the most used conduits between road professionals and suppliers in our industry.

The entrepreneurial owners of Better Roads and our wonderful staff members are not getting rich from our work, but we are paying the bills and we are having an indecent amount of fun doing what we are doing. The only way it could be any better would be to keep doing it better, and that’s our goal. In the end, that’s the only meaningful way we can say thanks to the readers and advertisers who have gotten us this far, and that’s what we’ll do.

Congestion Pricing

The city of London made headlines in gridlock circles last February by imposing stiff fees on vehicle usage in the central city during normal business hours. We’re not talking about a toll road, here, we’re talking about a user fee — a very stiff user fee of $8 per day — for the entire area.

If you have ever tried to drive in central London during business hours, you probably understand how desperate the situation is. Despite the existence of an extensive rail and subway system, and despite the availability of a prodigious fleet of really nifty buses, London’s surface streets have been ensnarled by endless hordes of vehicles for decades.

According to World Highways Editor Alan Peterson, prior to the imposition of the daily user fees, the congestion zone was entered by an average of 40,000 vehicles per hour. Peterson said daily traffic totaled about 250,000 vehicles making 400,000 movements into the zone.

The city fathers hoped to reduce congestion by 10 to 15% and raise upwards of $200 million a year with the imposition of the user fee.

Limiting access to your central business district is a radical and dangerous step to take, but London’s problems are special. Expanding road capacity — something that is at least theoretically possible in most North American metro areas — is probably out of the question in London. After a thousand years or so of continuous occupation and development, central London’s real estate is pricey and spoken for. The purchase price of a lane’s worth of London real estate might be enough to purchase an entire developing nation.

So London’s government is trying to thin the traffic by limiting it to the very wealthy and the extremely desperate. Everyone else can access the central city via sidewalk, rail, or bus. Or do business elsewhere.

And that, of course, is the rub. Does it make sense to limit commercial traffic in a center of commerce?

Sooner or later, anti-road environmental groups in North America will fall in love with this model and recommend it for congestion-plagued cities on this continent, but it will probably fail in London over the long term, and it will certainly fail here. In fact, in a way, it has already failed here. The high cost of driving, entertaining, living, and conducting business in major North American central cities has seen a steady growth of these activities in suburbs and exurbs while the inner cities plateau or decline.

London’s dilemma is a stern reminder to city leaders throughout this continent that there are no easy or cheap solutions to congestion problems, and that time can make unresolved problems worse, not better. Somewhere in that magnificent city’s hierarchy, a cluster of realistic planners is wishing that a few centuries ago there had been a brilliantly progressive transportation planner working with a brilliantly persuasive Lord Mayor to create and implement an efficient road system that would give them today something that could be expanded and enhanced.

For the cities of North America, mere children compared to the great capitals of Europe, this time right now, today, is “a few centuries ago”....the time for bold solutions and brilliantly progressive thinking and leadership.

The Fuel Tax Dilemma

When fuel prices were peaking last spring, someone resurrected the old comparison to what other retail fluids cost. Back in the fuel-crisis ‘70s, the news media occasionally made such comparisons. It was the e-mail item de jour in early April of this year.

With gasoline then inching toward the $2 per gallon mark, the e-mail item listed the per-gallon equivalent cost of 10 fluid products, ranging from Lipton Ice Tea at $9.52 per gallon, to Vick’s Nyquil, at $178.13 per gallon. Evian water worked out to something over $20 per gallon.

“So next time you’re at the pump,” read the anonymously authored e-mail, “be glad your car doesn’t run on water, Scope ($84.48/gallon), Whiteout ($25.42/gallon), or...Nyquil.”

Well, okay. The point of the exercise was to show what a good deal gasoline is. And, even though it makes no sense to compare bulk commodities to small-portion packaged goods, gasoline really is a good deal.

What the author of the e-mail failed to consider is that gasoline and diesel fuel are not discretionary purchases for millions of businesses and citizens. Most people won’t buy a gallon of Nyquil in a lifetime but tens of millions of us will burn a gallon or two of motor fuel today. When the family budget is being stretched, we can forego mouthwash, pre-mixed ice tea, and many other retail fluids, but we still need motor fuels to get to school, work, the grocery store, and so on.

Which is why, when fuel prices rise sharply, as they did early this year, we hear expressions of pain throughout the economy. It affects large businesses just as surely as it does small ones because fixed costs are going up at a time when revenues aren’t. And, for the same reason, it affects every individual and family operating on a tight budget, which is nearly all of us, regardless of income.

This may have added significance to the road industry today compared to past years because the aggressive proposals for the next federal highway program all include some form of indexing — making the fuel tax rise and fall with inflation.

Road advocates have wisely based the indexing on general inflation, not the volatile price of gasoline and diesel fuel. But that doesn’t remove all the risk. A period of sharply rising inflation could make a rising fuel tax a target for beleaguered businesses and citizens. We take moderate rates of inflation for granted today, but we shouldn’t. As we keep learning, economies are too big, too complex, and too interlocked with other economies for mere mortals to truly control them.

One protection against this would be to build into the legislation a pre-ordained pressure relief mechanism that would cap the fuel tax at a reasonable level during a period of high inflation. That may very well be in discussions even now, given our recent history with the RABA provisions in TEA-21.

Another approach would be to keep taxpayers — and elected officials and the media — informed about the progress that is being made as a result of their investment in roads, bridges, and mass transit. This is a daunting task, especially if you try to take it down to the local level, where people live and where it matters most. And yet it can be done. Organizations like the Associated General Contractors and The Road Information Program already deal very effectively at the state and local level in justifying important projects. If the powerful organizations that comprise the Transportation Construction Coalition continued working together after the next federal transportation plan is passed, they could generate an annual report to highway and transit users. It could, in many cases, start at the local level, detailing progress made on pavement conditions, road safety, bridge soundness, and traffic capacity and work up to the state and federal level.

These organizations also have the prominence to command an audience with the news media and with state and local politicians, thus ensuring the wide dissemination of the information.

This is the ultimate safeguard, because people who feel they are getting a return on their investment aren’t likely to cancel the investment when times get tough. And it could only help sell the public and their representatives on the advantages of transportation investment the next time Congress sits down to ponder a spending bill.

The Cleaning of the Diesel

The Bush Administration waited until tax day, April 15, 2003, to unveil an environmental initiative that actually made the environmental lobby happy. That was when EPA administrator Christie Whitman announced the administration’s proposed 2008 emission regulations for off-highway diesel engines.

For about 24 hours, that announcement actually competed with war news for major coverage in the news media.

Is it that big of a deal? Yes. Is it controversial? Not very. Was it unexpected among manufacturers of engines and equipment for construction, mining and agriculture? Not at all.

In fact, the process of cleaning up off-highway diesels has been under way for some time. The first set of regulations — Tier 1, in the industry vernacular — started phasing into law in 1996. Engine manufacturers had years to prepare for those regulations and, in fact, had contributed their expertise to the writing of them.

Tier 1 regulations were phased in at different times for different engine-size categories between 1996 and 2000. Tier 2 standards started phasing in the next year, with 302- to 602-horsepower engines going first. This year, 2003, has seen Tier 2 regulations kick in for two engine-size categories that are very popular for construction equipment — 100 to 173 horsepower, and 174 to 301 horsepower. You may have noticed that the adoption of Tier 2 engines has inspired a flood of new model announcements from machine manufacturers this year.

Tier 3 regulations will phase in between 2005 and 2008, and now we have affirmation that Tier 4 will kick off in 2008. Off-highway diesels are already a lot cleaner than they were in 1996, and by the end of Tier 4 — in 2014 — they will be as close to immaculate as we can imagine...today.

Users of construction equipment are being affected and will continue to be affected by the march toward tougher emissions standards.

On the positive side, the air really will be cleaner and the public will have fewer reasons to object to heavy equipment working in their neighborhoods.

On the negative side, don’t expect any price breaks on engines for some time to come. The research and development needed to hit these emissions goals is very expensive, and engine builders will have to recoup their costs.

On the positive side, there is going to be real differentiation between competing engine models for the next decade or so, and the consumer will ultimately benefit from this — not in lower prices, but in manufacturer competition to improve performance, longevity, and reliability in the face of new technology.

On the negative side, by the time Tier 4 comes along, the industry will have to switch to low-sulfur fuel; industry sources think fuel prices may increase at that point as refiners cover their investments in different refining processes — but the expectation is that prices will ultimately settle back to pre-low-sulfur levels.

Retrofitting new emissions technology to older engines is going to be part of the equipment owner’s life from here on out, too. The good news is that engine makers are investing heavily in creating technology that can be retrofit to earlier-series engines without exorbitant expense. The bad news is, some equipment users may be forced to retrofit portions of their fleets in order to work in metropolitan regions that are designated non-attainment areas for air quality. Industry leaders expect the number of non-attainment areas to expand significantly in the months to come, so this is not a small consideration.

Tier 4 regulations aren’t law yet. The proposal will receive public comment from now through the summer before being finalized. Though some modifications may take place, the fact that the Bush Administration has taken a pro-active position on off-highway emissions is proof that the process will continue for the next decade, so we should all start adjusting to it now.

A Bright Ray of Hope

You may have missed the good news amid the winter’s constant grind of headlines about war, terrorism, and economic difficulties. Hidden beneath all the gloom was an event that some of us would consider a minor miracle.

In the month of February, in the year of our Lord 2003, the Senate and the House of Representatives agreed to set the federal highway budget at $31.8 billion for fiscal year 2003, and President Bush signed the spending plan into law.

For those in the industry who followed this little drama, it was the upset of the year in national politics, only slightly more likely than France invading Iraq or Congress outlawing campaign contributions. Just a few months ago, the deal on the table was $27.7 billion, up from the Bush administration’s initial salvo of $23.8 billion, but neither the administration nor its loyal House conservatives was willing to move from there.

Fortunately, several groups continued to lobby aggressively for the $31.8-billion package, including the American Road and Transportation Builders Association, the construction industry’s primary highway lobbyist. These industry stalwarts kept the faith in the Senate, where Democrat and Republican moderates were firmly behind the $31.8-billion package. And they spread the gospel in the House, where there is now gathering bipartisan interest in anything that will breath some life in state and local economies.

The importance of this spending bill on the future of U.S. roads and bridges can’t be overstated. Congress will spend the next six months shaping the next surface transportation act, due to take affect on October 1, and a radical cut this year would have set a disastrous keynote for that legislation.

In that debate, the industry’s selfish interests are firmly aligned with the will of the American people. Polled in the midst of a hard economy, with gasoline prices up $0.27 a gallon, the stock market sinking, and unemployment going up, an incredible two-thirds of likely voters told Zogby International pollsters they believe there is a transportation capacity crisis, and nearly all of them — 64% — said they would support an annual $0.02 per gallon increase in the federal fuel tax if the money was used exclusively for roads, bridges, and mass transit.

Commissioned by ARTBA, the Zogby poll was taken in February. The results showed that support for an increased fuel tax and road and transit improvements was virtually unchanged from an earlier July 2002 Zogby poll for ARTBA.

While our industry lobbyists will spend the next six months keeping information like the Zogby poll in front of legislators, they will also need the active, grass roots support of all who work in the industry. Though we are often led to believe that campaign contributions are the stuff of political persuasion, the truth is, nothing is more effective in getting a politician’s attention than a few thousand letters and e-mails and office visits from citizens taking the time to make their interests known.

To that end, mark your calendar to participate in the Transportation Construction Coalition fly-in April 29-30 at the Renaissance Washington Hotel in Washington, DC. Participants will hear industry speakers, then be directed to the offices of their senators and congressmen to increase awareness of the importance of the reauthorization debate on Capitol Hill.

There will be more fly ins as the year goes on, and calls from a variety of industry associations to write letters to key people at key times in the debate. Do yourself and your industry a favor: do it. It’s an investment in democracy, and in the future of U.S. highways and bridges.

Taxation or Ruination?

What America Needs from TEA-3

We are entering the home stretch of the debate over the next federal transportation bill, and that debate promises to be a difficult one. In addition to maintaining the condition of the nation’s roads, there is a clear need to expand highway capacity in many metropolitan areas throughout the country in order to relieve gridlock that curtails economic growth and reduces the quality of life for people in those areas.

But capacity expansion is far more controversial than pavement safety and repair, the bedrock issues of TEA-21. Capacity expansion is bitterly opposed by a wide variety of environmental groups and, because it will require a substantial increase in fuel taxes, it is likely to get opposition from many fiscal conservatives, too.

As the debate rages on, it will be important for highway professionals to register their expert opinions with leaders in congress and the administration. Here are the points we encourage Better Roads readers to raise in the months to come:

Increased Federal Funding: The U.S. Department of Transportation estimates it will take $42 billion a year for the next six years from the federal highway program to maintain current levels of traffic congestion and maintain roads in their current condition. To reduce congestion, say the DOTs, federal spending of $52 billion annually would be required.

Leading industry associations offer variations on those numbers, and opposition groups will contest all of them. As a minimum goal, the industry needs to push for incremental increases in federal highway spending that reach $52.5 billion by fiscal year 2009; in 2000, federal funding was $30.3 billion. The industry should also support increasing mass transit funding to $12.5 billion a year by fiscal year 2009; in 2000, federal funding hit $4.6 billion.

Raising Revenues: To accomplish a significant increase in highway and mass transit investment, we need to implement five actions.

Under the category of “Truth in Bookkeeping”, we need to draw down the Highway Trust Fund reserves annually; under the current system, the trust-fund balances are routinely held hostage and never spent on roads or mass transit.

Similarly, interest needs to be paid on trust fund balances.

To make sure transportation spending power keeps pace with inflation over the course of a six-year program, fuel taxes should be indexed to the Consumer Price Index.

To enhance the trust fund, gasohol needs to be taxed at the same rate as gasoline, and the revenues should go into the trust fund, not into the General Fund as is the current practice.

And we need to increase the federal fuel tax between $0.02 and $0.05 per gallon.

Enhancing Performance: One of the best ways to improve roads and transit is to eliminate things that have created inefficiencies in the past and retain features that have worked. What has worked are guaranteed authorizations and the budget firewall, and we should retain those features in TEA-3.

What needs tweaking is RABA — Revenue Aligned Budget Authority. In TEA-21, RABA demanded cuts in highway and transit spending based on a single year of lower forecasted revenues. We favor a plan that would index fuel taxes higher if lower revenues are being forecasted so that we can maintain the continuity of the road and transit programs.

And most of all, we need to streamline project delivery. This is a delicate and contentious area, but worth the agony of investigation because we are currently losing untold millions of dollars to litigation and wasted time as projects take years and years to go from the proposal stage to an actual project. What is the difference between a healthy, spirited debate over the environmental soundness of a road project and pure stalling and delaying tactics? We need to draw that line and adopt regulations that will cut years off the pre-project life of legitimate, important highway projects.

It’s not too early to begin corresponding with your elected congressional representatives on these topics, and it’s not an exaggeration to say that, in this difficult fiscal climate, we need all the voices we can muster to pass a sound transportation program.

A Mixed Outlook for 2003

Okay, how bad is it going to get in 2003?

State and local tax revenues have still not recovered from the economic shock waves from 9/11. Indeed, the National Governors Association just issued a report saying states are facing their most dire fiscal situation since World War II. And road agencies won’t be getting much help from the feds — Republican majorities in the U.S. Senate and House assure that 2003 federal highway spending will be cut by about $5 billion, in accordance with the Bush Administration’s wishes.

So the sky is falling in the highway industry, right?

Not really. Just as the industry responded gradually to infusions of new federal investment in the early TEA-21 years, it is responding gradually to tight money now.

Dr. William Buechner, chief economist for the American Road & Transportation Builders Association, expects the domestic U.S. highway construction market to increase 2 to 3% in 2003. Buechner based his 2003 forecast, in part, on a survey of state transportation departments in which most respondents said they expected no disruptions or cuts in their 2003 programs.

Our own quick survey of government agencies in late November got similar results, leading us to conclude that, on balance, road and bridge work will continue on a pace very similar to 2002.

Asked how their agency’s 2003 contract lettings would compare to 2002, half of the state and province agencies responding to our survey said they would be about the same, while 25% said they would be less and 25% said they would be greater in 2003. A statistical push.

Among city and county agencies, 26% predicted increases while 21% forecast decreases in lettings — another statistical push.

The two areas where government agencies seem to be cutting are payroll and capital equipment. Tom McDonald of Omaha described a fairly typical scenario — the city’s 2003 budget is about equal to 2002 actual, but in 2002 the city had to cut $775,000 that had been primarily earmarked for replacing 10-year-old dump trucks. “The problem here is, it takes a lot of years to get the fleet back on an acceptable replacement schedule,” says McDonald.

Short term there could be problems, too, if Omaha gets a hard winter: the aging truck fleet and a hiring freeze has reduced the city’s snow removal capacity.

Similar dilemmas face highway professionals throughout the frost belt for 2003.

Our survey also found that spending on materials for road maintenance and construction looks to be about even with last year at both the state/provincial level and among city/county agencies. Similarly, most agencies expect work output by in-house crews to continue at 2002 levels, though local agencies forecasting increases in output outnumbered those forecasting decreases by 23% to 9%.

Meanwhile, prospects for fiscal relief seem to be improving. While business and industry leaders are still hunkered down for a long siege, many leading economists see definite signs of economic growth taking shape and with growth comes improved tax revenues. The recovery is young and fragile, to be sure, and subject to reversal by war, pestilence, and other acts of outrageous fortune, but we are headed in the right direction.

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.