In the wake of the Minneapolis bridge disaster, transportation
journalists are searching for local bridges in danger of collapse.
This is already stimulating proposals for huge tax increases for
new infrastructure.
The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that the U.S.
has a $1.5 trillion backlog of infrastructure projects. But this
number should be taken with a grain of salt, as it merely sums the
wish lists of more than a dozen different interest groups. Efforts
to fulfill these wishes would become pork fests providing
absolutely no assurance that money will be spent where it is really
needed.
The problem is not inadequate funding. The real problem with
deteriorating bridges and highways is a ponderous transportation
planning process under which it takes decades to do anything.
Case in point: a 2004 inspection of the Sellwood bridge in my
old hometown of Portland found it so riddled with cracks that
engineers closed it to trucks and buses. In a sane world, they
would have started building a replacement right away.
In fact, a private company offered to replace it by 2010, but
local planners rejected the proposal. They expect to take until at
least 2017 to plan and build a replacement.
Moreover, the planning process allowed parochial local interests
to prevail over the best interests of the region as a whole. A
recent Portland news article quotes a Sellwood neighborhood
resident saying that, when they finally do replace the Sellwood
Bridge, the new one cannot have any more capacity than the old
because “we’re not interested in becoming a freeway” for people who
live outside the neighborhood.
This is an all-too familiar refrain. In 2001, the Oregon
legislature approved the replacement of hundreds of Oregon bridges.
But, even though Oregon’s population has more than doubled since
most of those bridges were built, transportation planners decided
no new bridge should have any more capacity than the bridge it
replaced.
Automobiles provide more than 80 percent of American passenger
travel and have greatly contributed to our wealth, health, and
social well-being. Yet transportation planning in too many cities
has been taken over by anti-auto groups aiming to divert billions
of dollars of highway user fees to rail transit projects that will
never carry more than 1 or 2 percent of urban travel.
In 1996, for example, Minneapolis-St. Paul planners decided that
future “expansions of roadways will be very limited” in that
region. “As traffic congestion builds,” planners hoped,
“alternative travel modes will become more attractive.”
Since I35-W is one of the most congested routes in the Twin
Cities, proposals to replace and expand the bridge there would have
been opposed by anti-auto interests. Instead, they built a costly
light-rail line that actually increased congestion on parallel
highways.
Rail transit offers an illusion of being environmentally sound.
But today’s cars are as safe, clean, and energy efficient as any
transit system in the country. If we need to reduce greenhouse
gases, we will do it through new auto technologies, not by reducing
our automobility.
As a matter of principle, infrastructure spending should be
based on markets and user fees, not political whims and caprices.
If users are not willing to pay the cost, we don’t need the
infrastructure. But when users will pay, government shouldn’t
prevent them from getting the facilities they need.
Local, state and national legislators who want to meet America’s
transportation needs should replace transportation planning laws
that delay needed improvements with systems of user fees that
ensure funding for the things we really need — like bridges that
don’t fall down.
