Steps towards transportation reform

In 2005, Congress funded the National Surface Transportation Policy and Revenue Commission; its mission was (it completed its work on July 7th, 2008) to analyze the current and future needs of America’s surface transportation.  The complete reports is hundreds of pages and megabytes, but they synthesize their findings into ten main policy initiatives.

I am not going to go into too much detail, but the report wants to see the current number of government transportation reduced to 10 focal ones:

1. Rebuilding America: A National Asset Management Program
2. Freight Transportation: A Program to Enhance U.S. Global Competitiveness
3. Congestion Relief: A Program to Improve Metropolitan Mobility
4. Saving Lives: A National Safe Mobility Program
5. Connecting America: A National Access Program for Smaller Cities and Rural Areas
6. Intercity Passenger Rail: A Program to Serve High-Growth Corridors by Rail
7. Environmental Stewardship: A Transportation Investment Program to Support a Healthy Environment
8. Energy Security: A Program to Accelerate the Development of Environmentally Friendly Replacement Fuels
9. Federal Lands: A Program for Providing Public Access
10. Research, Development, and Technology: A Coherent Transportation Research Program for the Nation

Though the report correctly identifies rail as the missing link in our country’s infrastructure, it nonetheless does not come across as radical enough.  Its suggestions hide behind an overemphasis on new committees, increased interdepartmental coordination, better state involvement, and enlightened civic and business leadership.  And it devotes more space to maintaining and expanding our current highway infrastructure instead of emphasizing the importance of massive support for intercity rail, expanded freight capacity, and, just as important, urban redesign.  (Sidewalks, bike lanes, white concrete, &c are all surfaces and positively impact transportation, but they receive no focus from the report.)  Moreover, there is structural tension between supporting rural livability and reform of transportation to promote efficiency and independence: the history of our highway programs is the history of making life easier for people who live far from cities.  Just because a small town does not have four lane highway does not mean it should.

(Completely unrelated, the report ubiquitously refers to America as “the Nation.”  It’s not talking about the magazine, and the phrase sounds slightly reverential.)

More alarming than the report’s timid recommendations are the data it reports on current funding shortfalls and the political difficulty of plugging that gap.  I will go into a deeper analysis of the financial figures in a later post, once I have read the report in greater detail, but suffice it to say that our current funding gap runs into the hundreds of billions of dollars; in the next eleven years, the gasoline tax needs to rise by at least 79 cents.  As the report acknowledges, no one likes to pay taxes, but the absence of new taxes is even worse than their presence: further deterioration of infrastructure, increased automobile casualties, more congestion (less happiness), and increased transportation costs (more expensive products).