The American Spectator

Reader Mail

(Page 7 of 12)

br> -- Michael Tobias /p>

The Bridge to Nowhere may not make a good talking point but is a heck of a good object lesson especially for Republicans who are easily snared into supporting boondoggles like convention centers, sports stadiums and anything else that has someone converting a dollar amount of government spending into a specific number of jobs. It is not easy to tell a good infrastructure project from a bad infrastructure project if the only criterion is how many jobs or votes will it yield.

Transportation value is complex but, it can be boiled down to performance parameters such as cost per person or user, cost per year compared and the resultant transportation benefits. No politician has the staff or the time to evaluate this so they go by how many votes the project is worth. The expertise to do these studies used to reside in state highway departments but has been declining in quality over the past few decades. Everybody thinks that they can be a traffic or highway engineer if they could only hold some kind of government office from councilman to Federal legislator.

There probably never has been a golden age of objective transportation project selection, but since the Clinton Administration, I think it can be proven statistically, the quality of the decision making has deteriorated in direct proportion to the increase in non-technical people engaged in the process. This includes NGO's and the people we never needed before in Rural and Metropolitan Planning Organizations which are required by federal law. Any project selection routine that alleges to provide objective input concerning human lives lost, property damage and the value of time lost would eventually move a state into ever increasing efficiency and even lower insurance rates, if it were valid. The Bureau of Transportation Statistics keeps such statistics and I see no indication that things are getting better except in the realm of a few improvements made by car companies to the vehicle.

The Bridge to Nowhere was a really big fat chocolate cake with plenty of economic development icing and a lot of little job nuts and cherries on the top. Since Alaska is and has been a net importer of transportation tax dollars, there probably was not any additional incentive to send a sample to some accountants to find out if eating it would have any long-term problems beyond the initial salivary impact and lick smacking so easily heard at the Chamber of Commerce.

p>Considering there are so many people who have wolfed down these infrastructure atrocities and come back again and again for more, Governor Palin's change of heart is a modern day Road to Damascus experience that most will never understand and rarely see. br> -- Danny L. Newton br> Cookeville, Tennessee /p> p> ...ASK DAVE FREDDOSO br> Re: Quin Hillyer's

topics:
Transportation, John McCain, Barack Obama, Sarah Palin, Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, Television, Earmarks, Satire, Sports, Environment, Books, Hollywood, Constitution, Law, Russia, NATO, Energy, Alaska, Oil