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December 2005
Major Events of 2005
Year end journalism is riddled with
looks back and looks forward, and we’re as guilty of that as
anyone. Still, it can give you some perspective, especially
after a rancorous year like 2005 has been, to reflect for a
moment on the major events of the past year, and what they might
mean going forward.
Here is my personal list of major
transportation-related events in the U.S. that I think will
impact our industry and our country in the months and years to
come.
Finally, a Highway Program. How
divisive are national politics in the United States these days?
It took two years and nearly 6,000 earmarked projects to pass a
federal transportation act, but it finally got done in 2005.
True, it is mediocre legislation at
best, lacking any relevance to solving the nation’s problems
with inadequate road capacity and marginal pavement and bridge
conditions. But passage of even a mediocre bill brings good news
for motorists and the industry — many state DOTs that had held
back on major projects until funding was secure are now shifting
into high gear. Traffic will be hellish in many places for the
next several years, but vital work is going to get done and the
road and bridge industry will be working at full capacity.
The Chamber Steps Up. This may
turn out to be the most significant event of the decade in
roads. Late in 2005, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce issued the
second part of a two-phase study of America’s highway and bridge
needs. In it, the Chamber, a leading bastion of fiscal
conservatism in the U.S., spelled out the huge funding gap that
currently exists at all levels of government and laid out the
most comprehensive blueprint yet published on how to meet the
funding needs of our transportation system.
Two things are especially important
about this document. First, it provides unimpeachable testimony
to fiscal conservatives and skeptical moderates that the
transportation crisis is real and must be dealt with. Second, it
addresses the need to find a new financing mechanism to replace
the fuel tax.
Infrastructure Strikes Out. World
coverage of the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina and her
high-velocity siblings in the Gulf of Mexico last fall brought a
great opportunity for a national dialogue about the adequacy of
U.S. transportation infrastructure in times of crisis. How
adequate were the roads used by hundreds of thousands of
evacuees fleeing the coast in advance of the storms? Would it be
cost effective to make more bridges “storm proof” given the
evidence of storm-proofed bridges’ ability to survive Katrina
(see “Hurricane Katrina’s Toll on Bridges,” November 05 Better
Roads)? How did the highway system perform in the less urban
coastal areas of Mississippi and Alabama?
While there was some dialogue about the
ecological infrastructure of the area, a public probing of the
adequacy of our roads and bridges never made it into the
national spotlight.
New Financing Formulas. This was
the year that highway interests, the Chamber of Commerce, and
even some political leaders began publicly airing concerns about
how roads will be funded as vehicles become increasingly fuel
efficient and as gasoline and diesel fuels are replaced by
alternative fuels in the future. This is a momentous decision
for America and one that needs support from a broad political
spectrum.
Ideas on the table so far range from
indexing the fuel tax, to charging vehicle fees to hybrid and
non-gas-burning vehicles, to a not-too-futuristic concept of
charging motorists for vehicle miles traveled.
I encourage everyone to make their own
list of major highway events for 2005, if only for the good of
your mental health. Until I sat down to think about this, my
strongest impression of 2005 was its monumental divisiveness in
U.S. politics. It was all that, but it turns out we did more
than disagree. A lot more. And here’s hoping the trend continues
in 2006.
November 2005
One-Armed Bandits
Tell me again: why should automobile and
truck users pay for the rehabilitation of the Gulf coast, the
war in Iraq, the new Medicare drug program, and the various
spending excesses of the current Administration and Congress?
A ring of so-called fiscal conservatives
keeps offering up the proposition that the billions of dollars
of pork-barrel projects in the new, long-delayed federal
transportation act would be much better spent on disaster
relief.
Who can argue with them? It’s
eliminating government waste and putting the money to a nobler
use, right?
Well, no. It’s mostly just bait and
switch. Since the passing of TEA-21 in the ‘90s, the fuel tax
has been a user fee as a matter of law, collected from people
who use our roads to pay for road maintenance, safety,
replacement, and enhancements.
So why should a cab driver in San
Francisco or a trucker in Florida carry the burden of deficit
reduction while the roads they depend on for a living get more
decrepit, more crowded, and less safe?
Why should the very people who voted for
all the spending programs and tax cuts that have put us in this
fiscal position get off so lightly? They enjoy taxpayer
subsidized transportation everywhere they go.
Here’s an idea. How about taxing them
for the equivalent of the pork dollars in the highway bill and
putting their money in the deficit reduction plan?
I know. I know. It’s naive in the
extreme. But what a delicious thought. To get tax relief, they
then have to do what they should have done in the first place —
kill all the pork projects in the bill, rescind new spending
initiatives until revenues are found for them, and cut only the
taxes we can afford to cut.
But I digress.
Diverting highway funds into the general
budget has no merit. Zero. None at all. If a conscientious
senator or congressman wants to rail against pork barrel
projects, by all means, support their attempts to return the
pork money to the Highway Trust Fund where it can be allocated
by highway professionals. But if they can’t get that done, we
are better off as a country with the money right where it is,
pork or not. The truth is, the vast majority of the earmarked
projects are legitimate transportation projects and they will
bring benefits to every region of the country.
As for the leaders who want to correct
Congress’ pork-barrel excesses after the fact, by spending the
money on something else entirely, they remind me of the old-time
college football coach who solved his problem with a weak-armed
quarterback by cutting off the kid’s throwing arm. It worked.
The team
didn’t win another game all season, but
the one-armed quarterback never threw another interception.
October 2005
Taxing Questions
Hurricane Katrina’s legacy should be the
ultimate morality tale about the importance of infrastructure,
about what happens when it fails, and thus, why it must have
priority in public planning.
But that message isn’t getting through
to everyone just yet. Last month, 22 Congressmen saw fit to
co-sponsor a bill that would suspend the 18.4-cent-per-gallon
federal fuel tax for a month to reduce the impact of high-priced
gasoline on consumers. At least a dozen states have similar
legislation being proposed for suspending state fuel taxes.
One way or another, suspending fuel
taxes just adds to the accumulation of public debt without
solving the real problem behind fuel prices, which is supply and
demand.
We can take some hope in the fact that
the proposed House bill would reimburse the highway trust fund
with other federal revenues. Ordinarily, politicians would just
let infrastructure work back up, accumulating debt in undone
work rather than real dollars. This was the guiding philosophy
behind the new Transportation Act, which is woefully inadequate
for dealing with the festering problems of moving commerce and
people in the United States.
So we should be glad that the
Congressmen trying to provide price relief to consumers would at
least acknowledge that the Highway Trust Fund needs to be kept
solvent, and that work needs to go on.
On the other hand, you have to wonder
about the fiscal sanity of a group of people who would increase
the federal debt with a discretionary tax cut at a time when we
have a public debt of almost $7 trillion (that’s trillion) and
we are adding more than $1.66 billion in new debt every day to
fuel budgeted government obligations as well as new ones, like
the humanitarian efforts on the Gulf Coast.
I don’t know about you, but when I see
interview after interview with people who have lost everything
they have in the world, the prospect of paying upwards of $3 a
gallon for gas doesn’t seem like a terrible burden to bear while
we sort out the demand and supply situation.
So here’s an idea. Let’s encourage our
elected officials to stop talking about tax cuts and start
taking responsibility for the overwhelming obligations we have
taken on...the ones that add up to a shortfall of $1.66 billion
every day.
And let’s make sure our elected
officials and our fellow citizens understand that, when
necessary infrastructure work goes undone, there is no savings —
it’s just another form of debt that comes due when the bridge or
the pavement fails, or when the ambulance can’t get to the
hospital because of gridlock, or when a central city can no
longer be accessed from the surrounding area and its core
businesses begin to evacuate.
September 2005
Tomorrow's Aggregates
Everyone knows that urban sprawl spawns
traffic congestion, diminishes air quality, and reduces open
space and wildlife habitat. These are among the most publicized
ills attributed to that particular malady, and they have stirred
a spirited national debate for many years.
At the other end of the emotional
spectrum, one of the least known affects of sprawl is its
suffocating impact on aggregate mining. Few things are harder to
get these days than a permit to open a new aggregate operation
in or near a population center. If things continue on the same
track, in a few more years it will be easier to hitch hike to
the moon (where at least one aggregates company has investigated
mineral rights) than to open a new aggregate mine in the United
States.
And no wonder. Who wants to live next to
an operation that creates a stampede of heavy trucks every
morning, and shakes the ground with blasting every afternoon?
So as populations have spread further
and further into the hinterlands from city centers, there have
been more people to fight aggregate mining permits in more
places. It’s just starting to become an expensive problem in a
few places, but it won’t be long in coming to a metro area near
you.
At the core of the problem are two
truths: construction consumes prodigious amounts of cheap
aggregate, and what makes aggregate cheap is short
transportation routes.
The consumption statistics are
staggering. In road construction, aggregates comprise about 94%
of asphalt and roughly 80% of concrete. According to the
National Stone, Sand and Gravel Association, every mile of
interstate highway contains 38,000 tons of aggregates.
Structures consume huge quantities of
aggregates, too — the average home uses about 400 tons of the
stuff, according to NSSGA. That’s not a misprint — 800,000
pounds of stone, sand, and gravel!
Production and delivery costs vary
endlessly, but a couple of years ago one company estimated that
trucking costs for aggregate typically ranged from 6 to 12 cents
per mile per ton. It takes surprisingly few miles of hauling
distance to reach a point where transportation costs start
exceeding the cost of the aggregate itself. This number varies
by area, but it is typically measured in dozens of miles, not
hundreds.
This is relevant to road builders and
other construction interests because as old operations are
retired and replaced by new ones that are much further from
population centers, the cost of aggregates delivered to a job
site in the population center is going to increase at an
inflationary rate.
There are rational, inexpensive actions
that can be taken to alleviate the problem before it becomes
acute.
One is to make sure we are getting
maximum use from the resources we have now. For example, a group
of pavement and aggregate engineers had a lively discussion on
the Web site
www.aggregateresearch.com earlier
this year about changing a California specification for concrete
to allow the substitution of manufactured sand — a by-product of
rock crushing operations — for natural sand to deal with the
shortage of natural sand in the area.
But the most effective action that can
be taken now is getting government agencies to anticipate future
aggregate needs, locate viable deposits that are not currently
surrounded by homes, and zone them for mining while it is still
possible.
August 2005
Earmarks and Demonstrations
When Congress passed the Intermodal
Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA) in 1991, the
precursor to TEA-21 in 1998 and TEA-LU in 2005 (we hope), the
news media and fiscal conservatives set upon it as pork
barreling run amok. Several hundred “demonstration projects”
were attached to the bill, each one earmarking federal funds to
build “special” projects in the districts of influential
Congressmen.
Most of the Congressmen were Democrats —
they were the majority party in the House then — and while the
actual worthiness of the various demonstration projects has
never been made clear, virtually none involved the demonstration
of new technology or techniques, the original meaning for that
expression.
When TEA-21 passed a Republican
controlled House, we found that the party in power had nothing
to do with how much pork got attached to the transportation act.
There were even more special projects attached to TEA-21, though
those of us who rejoice at signs of harmony in our contentious
democracy were able to take great pleasure in the fact that the
majority Republicans allowed their Democratic colleagues to feed
at the trough in proportion to their numbers in the House.
TEA-LU has not yet emerged from the
House/Senate conference committee at this writing, but the House
legislation had no fewer than 1,000 earmarked projects attached
to it and it is widely expected that all of those projects will
be retained by the conference committee. Indeed, a few weeks ago
some were speculating that the Senate would like to do some
slurping of its own.
If you cling to idealistic notions about
how government should operate, the one positive development
since ISTEA is that we have dropped the ruse of calling these
attachments “demonstration projects.” The new word, “earmarks”,
is much more accurate, especially if, when you hear the word,
you think of a person with multiple piercings removing metal
objects from their head while you watch.
If you can conjure up that word and that
image before every meal, we can probably start a new diet craze.
Fiscal conservatives can take some
solace in the fact that the pork projects don’t increase the
amount being spent on roads, they just reduce how much is
directed by road professionals at the state level. In addition,
the vast majority of the projects are probably worthwhile and,
at worst, are getting priority they don’t deserve.
But those in the road industry,
conservative, liberal, idealistic or worldly, should take no
solace in the affect pork barreling is having on the public’s
perception of transportation funding. It is negative. All
negative. And if the trend toward more and more pork continues
in the next transportation act, the road industry could find
itself with a monumental credibility problem, facing a hostile
public that is united by its disillusionment about the entire
process.
How we Americans get the pork out of the
process, or at least put a ceiling on it, is not clear to anyone
at this time. As long as most of us think it’s okay when our
Representative comes home with a big project — and most of us
do, regardless of our personal politics — our Representatives
are going to focus on bagging the big ones.
July 2005
Losing Control
A few miles from our office, two
well-traveled U.S. highways cross at an intersection which is
further complicated by a commuter rail line that runs parallel
to one of the highways.
On a good morning, coming south on U.S.
45, you miss the trains and get across U.S. 14 in one
light...and you’re golden. Rush hour traffic moves along the
rest of the road through Chicago’s north and northwest suburbs
very nicely.
But on a bad morning, you can spend an
eternity trying to go north or south at this intersection
because every train that stops at the Des Plaines station stops
the traffic on U.S. 45. The station is about a stone’s throw
from the intersection.
This morning, I spent nearly 20 minutes
of a 45-minute commute trying to move four blocks, from the
north side of the intersection to the south side of the railroad
tracks. The backups caused by a succession of trains making long
stops at the station was exacerbated by a traffic signal system
that, for reasons known only to the gods of traffic and verbal
obscenities, changed to a sequence in which the green light for
north-south traffic was reduced to the duration of a strobe
light in a disco joint. Three or four cars per lane would get
through on each green, then the traffic mass would sit for an
eon or two while the traffic on U.S. 14 got the green. Of
course, there wasn’t any traffic on U.S. 14 because that traffic
didn’t have to stop for the trains.
Unfortunately, this wasn’t a one-off
occurrence. This is how the intersection has worked for all the
years I’ve used it.
As a citizen of a nation that once went
to war about a tax on tea, I couldn’t help wondering why no one
has shot the village traffic engineer yet over this equally
severe injustice. Surely a jury comprised of automobile
commuters would find this a justifiable homicide, and possibly a
civic action worthy of a medal of some kind.
Personally, I wasn’t upset about the
delay. I wasn’t late getting anywhere and I invested in a
ridiculously excellent sound system last time I bought a car, so
I enjoyed those long minutes in the sunshine with my fellow
citizens.
Unfortunately, my fellow citizens
weren’t nearly as mellow as I was about the delay. When my small
group finally made it through the intersection and across the
tracks, my fellow motorists, fueled by pent-up anxieties, were
ready for some serious street racing. We were a soccer mom in a
minivan, a gangsta dude in a beater, several regular suburban
professionals in clean practical cars, two Yuppies in
ostentatious SUVs, and an editor in a little red hot rod that
housed more horsepower than brains. As our flotilla passed over
the tracks, engines roared, wheels spun, and eight drivers with
barely the skill to parallel-park a kiddie car in one shot were
blasting through the suburban air in hopes of arriving first at
the next stop light, and thus making up five or 10 seconds of
the lifetime lost at the last intersection.
Some of you aren’t laughing, right?
People who vent their frustrations in this manner are the worst
nightmare of every traffic engineer in the world, but they are
real and they are a very high percentage of the people who drive
on crowded roads.
Now, consider this: in April, USA Today
cited a recent study by the Federal Highway Administration that
found 68% of traffic agencies in the U.S. do not have a
documented management plan for their traffic signal operation,
and 57% said they don’t conduct routine reviews of traffic
signals within three years. I think my problem intersection is a
product of those deficiencies and, obviously, there are many
more like it in the country.
Anxious drivers don’t have a right to
drive dangerously, but by the same standard, traffic agencies
shouldn’t get a pass on doing their jobs just because they are
understaffed. If you’re not able to monitor signalized
intersections regularly, please, figure something out. When the
soccer mom in the mini van starts winning these anxiety dashes —
and this one was very close — civilization as we know it will
surely perish.
June 2005
Pain and Process
One of the most shopworn credos of our
democracy is the constant admonition of politicos, media, and
academia that we citizens should support our democracy by
participating in it.
With this in mind, our small company
participated in the Transportation Construction Coalition’s
April fly-in and spent a day asking senators and congressmen to
support the long-delayed federal transportation bill.
If you have never done this, I recommend
it — but with the warning that it probably won’t feel especially
fulfilling.
The highlight of this particular
experience was being allowed to join the contingent from the
Illinois Road and Transportation Builders Association, a large
and well-organized group led by several professional lobbyists
and a number of politically active, well-connected contractors.
Thanks to their contacts and hard work, I was able to join
groups that had personal meetings with one Illinois senator and
several congressmen.
Personal meetings are not easily won.
Representatives and senators have very little time to invest in
small-group meetings, so most of us regular citizens end up
being seen by an aide or an intern when we visit.
Having penetrated the inner offices of
Capitol Hill for the first time, I found the theater of these
visits even more commanding than the substance of them.
Lobbyists get their audiences with
elected leaders because they represent a lot of people, and
because they have a message and deliver it quickly.
It was fascinating to watch how this
played out. Our group leaders made it their responsibility to
keep the meeting moving and to avoid overstaying our welcome,
and that allowed the senator or congressman to converse in a
relaxed manner.
For the record, it was impressive how
well informed each politician was on the transportation program
and its impact on the people of Illinois. As for the theater, it
was impressive how smoothly non-committal professional
politicians can be when you hit them with a touchy complexity on
an issue. In our case, the touchy complexity was this: most
members of the Illinois fly-in delegation favored a rapid
enactment of a new transportation act over all other
considerations. While most other fly-in participants were urging
support for the then-rumored Grassley-Baucus amendment that
would add $11 billion to the program, the majority of the
Illinois delegates did not want to risk delaying the bill with a
drawn-out struggle in the House/Senate conference committee or a
presidential veto.
Regardless of party affiliation, the
politicians we called on were naturally inclined to go for the
bigger budget. The most important business of being a senator or
congressman is making sure your state or district gets its fair
share of federal funds. In the transportation debate, Illinois
is a donor state and its transportation programs have been
gutted in recent years due to state budget problems as well as
the delays in passing the federal program. More federal money
for the program seems like a logical antidote, but our group
felt that the extra money would never overcome the damage of
another lost construction season.
Was it worth participating in the
fly-in? In the end, yes. But the pay-off wasn’t a feel-good kind
of return on investment. The only contribution I brought to the
process was providing a new face in the background for lobbyists
whose messages are already generally known. On the other hand,
being part of the headcount is important: if no one does it,
your lobbyist is not effective. It’s like being an extra in a
movie crowd scene — no one knows who you or the other extras
are, but if none of you are there, there’s no crowd scene.
Democracy is a plot that works best with a lot of crowd scenes,
according to the lobbyists.
One footnote to our experience: having
ridden the coattails of professional lobbyists to gain audience
with the leaders of our democracy, publisher Mike Porcaro and I
decided to see how we’d do on our own, making a cold call on the
other Illinois senator. We got as far as two young interns
wearing telephone headsets and staring at computer monitors in
the outer office. There we stood in silence for several minutes
before one sighed, looked up, and said, “Yes?” He spent three
minutes tolerating our presence in the halls of Congress, but
was very professional about it, never once yawning and not
wasting taxpayer time asking for our business cards or having us
sign the guest register.
May 2005
Pothole Season, Redux
Back in early April the online edition of
USA Today carried a story from The Christian Science
Monitor which proclaimed this “one of the worst pothole
seasons in years because it has been so cold and wet in so many
parts of the United States.”
Author Ron Scherer quoted people in many
different parts of the country, including California, Ohio, New
York, and Colorado. There was also a quote from a Chicago
automotive store doing a brisk business in replacement wheels
due to a local pothole. Many of us on Better Roads live
in the Chicago area, and our winter wasn’t unusually cold or
wet. But it would not be surprising to hear that the “pothole
season” is unusually bad here — the state of Illinois gutted its
road investment program two years ago, making a decline in
pavement conditions inevitable.
Many other states and cities are
experiencing the same circumstances, as governments use
transportation funds to plug holes in other areas of the budget.
As pavements sink further into decline and
more motorists suffer damages and discomfort, don’t expect
taxpayers, reporters, or politicians to make the connection
between investment and results. The local news stories we’ve
seen present a breathtaking variety of naiveté and ignorance
about how roads get bad.
Some blame bad materials for potholes.
Others blame corrupt contractors and/or highway agencies. Still
others chalk it all up to government waste. Granted, these are
sometimes the culprits in road problems, but for every mile of
problem pavements due to these inadequacies there have to be
hundreds of miles of problems stemming from inadequate
investment.
The general ignorance about what it takes
to build a good road, to maintain it, and to replace it when
that time comes is even more troubling than the current funding
woes because it will help to perpetuate those funding woes.
Anyone who assumes bad roads are the product of corruption or
incompetence will oppose a solution that involves adequate
funding.
Rather than trying to defend the competence
of government or the integrity of contractors, our industry
needs to educate taxpayers, reporters, and politicians on what
it takes to have good roads. We’re not talking about the
chemistry of concrete or the physics of asphalt here, just the
basics:
-
What it costs to build a lane-mile of
city freeway; to overlay a county road; to implement a
2-inch mill-and-fill; to make a full-depth repair.
-
What makes pavements fail — age,
fatigue, poor drainage, etc. — and the basic symptoms of
each.
-
What’s involved in repairing a
residential street, from the cost of the crew to the cost of
the materials.
-
How traffic volume affects pavement
life.
-
How long various types of pavement
usually last and what affects their life expectancies.
Will hundreds of citizens show up for a
seminar on this stuff? Not without employing one of the seven
sins as an incentive. But that only means educating the public
and the media can’t be done quickly or easily. It can be done
gradually, though, with a committed effort over a long period of
time.
A good start would be to issue a detailed
press release on every major project your agency commissions,
explaining what work is being done, why it’s needed, and why it
costs what it does. A pro-forma summary of the bidding process
would help, too.
Will every news release get picked up by
every news organization you send it to? Of course not. And many
journalists won’t read all the details either. But some will,
and as they become more sophisticated in their reporting on
roads, the competition will also.
April 2005
More Bang for the Buck
While companies that derive a living
from road work are going to do just fine under the auspices of
TEA-LU, the next federal transportation bill, highway agencies
at every level of government are going to be severely challenged
to maintain pavement quality in the face of growing traffic
volumes and modest budgets.
One strategy that will help most
agencies deal with this challenge is giving priority to
preserving sound pavements, as opposed to the traditional “worst
first” strategy that dedicates the road budget to problem
pavements.
Speaking at the joint annual meeting
last month of the Asphalt Emulsion Manufacturers Association,
the Asphalt Recycling and Reclaiming Association, and the
International Slurry Surfacing Association, Emily McGraw, P.E.,
described how the North Carolina DOT used non-recurring funding
to create a dedicated prevention program that has treated
several thousand miles of pavement over the past five years.
McGraw, the state’s Pavement
Preservation Engineer, described a multi-faceted prevention
program that includes research into the effectiveness of
different materials and techniques in various NCDOT
applications, as well as special training for pavement managers
and work crews.
The agency’s training investment was
rich and diverse. The foundation was NHI courses covering
maintenance, selecting appropriate pavements for intervention,
and integrating preservation with an overall pavement management
program. In addition, the DOT encouraged key personnel to
participate in industry meetings like the one McGraw addressed
so that they would be exposed to a wider range of thinking and
experience — an unusual investment in this era of bare-bones
agency budgets, and one that hundreds of other agencies would do
well to emulate.
Along with everything else, North
Carolina has invested in a new maintenance management software
system — and training field personnel in its use — and
integrated it with the agency’s Pavement Management System.
This is the kind of systematic approach
to prevention that can stretch the effectiveness of road budgets
over time. In terms of cost effectiveness, McGraw said
prevention represents a 6 to 1 savings versus worst-first
practices because it uses low-cost interventions to keep good
pavements in good condition.
And that is the promise of prevention:
By using a planned versus a reactive approach, an agency has
fewer miles of pavement slipping into poor condition each year.
That allows the agency to focus its high-ticket intervention
dollars more effectively and ultimately to start reducing its
inventory of defective pavements.
Like so many other agencies, the North
Carolina DOT now faces the challenge of getting recurring funds
for the program, though with an established program in place
their chances would seem to be good.
March 2005
Lingering Concerns
Well, we will probably have a
transportation bill passed into law this spring, and it will
represent at least a modest increase in federal spending
compared to the last years of TEA-21, the federal program that
expired a year ago.
That much seemed certain last month when
the Bush Administration issued a budget for FY 2006 that
proposed transportation spending at the same level being
proposed by the House Transportation & Infrastructure committee.
With the House and the Administration on the same page for total
spending, and with road advocates in the U.S. now desperate for
some kind of bill, most pundits seem to think things will happen
quickly from here on out.
Like most others in the industry, we
applaud that prospect. State road programs have operated under
financial duress for more than a year, and the short-term fiscal
relief offered by this legislation is sorely needed. Similarly,
the infusion of federal dollars will boost work for contractors
and construction workers at a time when other construction
markets are cooling down.
But we should not consider the highway
portion of this impending new transportation act to be a
panacea. There are several clouds hanging over this legislation,
beginning with the donor-state conflict. Put simply, there is
not enough highway money in the Administration and House bills
to guarantee that each state gets back at least 95% of the
federal fuel taxes they collect.
How legislators tiptoe around the donor
state issue may get very tense. For example, according to the
American Association of State Highway and Transportation
Officials, the House proposal is said to have a “reopener”
provision that would stop the flow of highway funds after two
years if Congress fails to provide additional revenues to
guarantee donor states a 95% return. With the Administration
cutting nearly every other non-defense budget and unalterably
opposed to a fuel tax increase, it’s hard to see from where new
revenues would come.
Of course, that provision may not make it
into the final legislation. More troubling, by far, is the
prospect that this was the last best chance America had to
increase its federal program to levels that would allow both the
restoration and the expansion of her major interstates and
highways. Increasing numbers of economists are beginning to
issue warnings about where the price of oil is heading, and
their logic is compelling: With the economies of India and China
beginning to flower, a prosperous middle class of historic
proportions is mushrooming in Asia, and bringing with it energy
demands that are likely to push oil prices to levels once
thought extraordinary. If we couldn’t increase the fuel tax on
$2 per gallon gasoline, how politically feasible will it be to
increase the tax if fuel prices reach $3 or $4 per gallon?
And, just to complete the nightmare
scenario, if a surge in crude oil prices sets off even a modest
amount of inflation, the spending power of the federal highway
program may actually decline in its later years, forcing still
more compromises in our highway infrastructure.
When you look at it that way, the “reopener” provision in the
House bill is something the industry should get behind.
February 2005
Calculating Payback
How much is a life worth?
If you want to see someone twitch, just
ask that question of a politician in a leadership position that
includes budget responsibilities.
It came up again in late January when
the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration published a
report evaluating the effectiveness of the automobile safety
standards imposed since 1960.
As with any statistical study, there are
a lot of different ways to slice and dice the data.
For example, NHTSA estimates that
government-mandated safety standards have added $829 in costs
and 125 pounds to the average passenger car since 1960. During
the same time period, the study estimates that more than 328,000
lives have been saved by those safety standards. That makes it
seem like a good return on investment.
Looked at another way, though, the issue
is more complex. When the total cost of these safety
technologies is divided by the number of lives saved, it works
out to about $544,000 per life.
Is that a good return on investment?
Well, if you figured your own life was
one of those saved, the answer is easy. But what if you feel
certain that neither you nor anyone you love would be one of the
people saved by this technology? Would you still favor the
investment?
Just to make the issue even murkier,
consider this: In 2002, the latest year for which there was
data, seat belts accounted for more than half the lives saved —
more than expensive technologies like air bags, energy absorbing
steering columns, and other mechanical improvements combined.
Should we have stopped with the safety
legislation after seat belts? Would we be a better society if
the total cost for a saved life was closer to $200,000 than
$500,000 per life?
It’s a conundrum worth pondering for the
road industry, where similar choices abound. For example, a
deteriorating pavement needs improvements costing $1 million per
lane mile to preserve the integrity of the base and bring the
surface up to agency standards for smoothness and skid
resistance, but a study reveals that the $10 million project
will only prevent a few accidents a year. Furthermore, the same
study projects that as the roadway deteriorates, the number of
severe accidents will decline because vehicle speeds will
decline.
You might chuckle at that example, but
here’s a real one: You manage a 4-lane, limited access highway
in a metropolitan area. It was built in the 1970s to handle a
traffic load that was exceeded less than a decade later. Its
current traffic volume is more than double the original design.
It is the site of daily gridlock morning and evening. It needs
to have another full lane in each direction, longer exit and
entrance lanes, and major sections of the existing road need to
be reconstructed.
Naturally, environmental groups oppose
the improvements and some local taxpayers oppose the
fund-raising measures that would have to be implemented to pay
for it. Local businesses find the gridlock aggravating, but
aren’t threatening to relocate. The road is not producing
alarming safety statistics. The general population would like
the road improved, but it’s not a campaign issue. The local news
media is indifferent to the issue.
Do you find a way to improve the road
anyway, because good roads make good communities? Or do you go
with the flow?
January 2005
A Road Map to
Transportation
Almost unnoticed, except by the highway and
construction press, was the mid-December announcement that
Transportation Secretary Norm Mineta was re-upping for the
second term of the Bush Administration.
In a town abuzz about the next head for
Homeland Security, the health status of the Chief Justice, the
war preparedness of U.S. military trucks in the Middle East, and
the usual flotsam and jetsam of political intrigue, it's no
surprise that the Mineta announcement caused barely a ripple in
the capitol's waters.
In fact, it is usually that way with
transportation. Quick: who was the transportation secretary in
the Clinton administration? In George H.W. Bush's
administration?
It is a low-profile job in the best of
times, and the best of times are when the sitting President is
merely indifferent to transportation. But this is not the best
of times. By all appearances, this president is somewhat
negative about transportation, or at least the roads and bridges
part of it. Presiding over the past four years of transportation
activity is a little like being the life guard at a beach on the
Arctic Ocean: lots of territory, no action. The transportation
reauthorization act that perished ignominiously last year was a
rare opportunity to accomplish something monumental, but it ran
afoul of election year politics and was shot dead.
When debate starts up on reauthorization
this year, everyone expects Secretary Mineta to slip into his
familiar role, pitching a plan that reduces real-dollar spending
on roads and bridges despite worsening congestion and continued
population growth. Like a good soldier, he is expected to sell
the single virtue of the president's plan that it won't cost
motorists another penny. That will probably be enough, unless
the House Republicans feel more pressure to bring home jobs and
money to their districts than the pressure they get to vote the
President's line.
Well, life goes on. The road industry will
do just fine, no matter what, and it's not likely anyone outside
the road industry will ever trace the growing transportation
woes of the country back to this missed opportunity.
But if you're Norm Mineta, there has to be
a nagging voice at the edge of your conscience asking, "Is this
the best I can do with the accumulated expertise of a lifetime
in public service? Is it enough to just stand guard over an
empty beach and win praise for not complaining about the
loneliness and the cold?"
Please, Secretary Mineta, strive for more.
Sell this president on the merits of doing what needs to be done
for transportation. Sell him on the importance of expanding
capacity and maintaining the condition of the road and transit
infrastructure. Sell him on the political viability of this
course. Yes, it would cost a couple cents a gallon more, but
motorists won't argue with the tax as long as the money goes
back into transportation. Survey after survey has shown this to
be true. It's a chance to do something significant, something
the country really needs, something that would live beyond the
president's last term.
It's a chance to create a roadmap by which
this country can begin solving its festering transportation
problems, a roadmap that is as important to our future now as
the Eisenhower interstate highway system was in the 1950s.
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