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We Don't Need More Highways
Hugh Pickens writes "When it comes to infrastructure, politicians usually prefer shiny new projects over humdrum repairs. A brand-new highway is exciting: There's a ribbon-cutting, and there's less need to clog up existing lanes with orange cones and repair crews. So it's not surprising that 57 percent of all state highway funding goes toward new construction, often stretching out to the suburbs, even though new roads represent just 1.3 percent of the overall system. Now Brad Plumer writes in the Washington Post that many transportation reformers think this is a wrong-headed approach and that we should focus our dollars on fixing and upgrading existing infrastructure rather than continuing to build sprawling new roads). UCLA economist Matthew Kahn and the University of Minnesota's David Levinson made a more detailed case for a 'fix-it first' strategy. They noted that, at the moment, federal highway spending doesn't get subjected to strict cost-benefit analysis, and governments often build new roads when they arguably shouldn't (PDF). And that's to say nothing of data suggesting that poor road conditions are a 'significant factor' in one-third of all fatal crashes, and cause extra wear and tear on cars."
do we really need more gas guzzlers chugging along a bunch of asphalt strips to no where?
No, it's the selfish U.S. electorate that thinks that everyone needs their own car that prevents more efficient transportation from being built. It's not "duh gubmint" preventing anything. If that were the case why is it that the governments in Southeast Asia built all sorts of high-speed trains and extensive rail and bus systems?
Most people, when asked to choose between "has the probability of saving a few lives" and "will definitely shave five minutes off my commute" will opt for the latter in a landslide. That's why we get new roads.
Zoning determines "how much" house you can build on a property. Single family only? Up to 2-3 family? Apartment, 3 stories or fewer? Larger? Parking requirements? All of that is determined at the local level in most United States states. Highway money is typically spent by the states. They decide which projects get funding, etc. Additionally, most new highway projects aren't long distance projects -- they're circular ring roads or spokes into cities. The funding for the highway infrastructure is nearly all federal. The US Congress decides how much money to spend on highways.
As a result, there is very little coordination, and we end up with sprawl because of it.
Making matters worse, high speed rail is clearly state-to-state infrastructure in most cases (San Fran to L.A. notwithstanding). However, the rail infrastructure isn't federal -- it's state. That means if you want to improve a rail corridor along five states, you need five sets of funding, five sets of state decision making, etc. That's one federal gov't, five state gov'ts, and dozens of local gov'ts all getting in each others way.
Building new roads is easier. Costs more, wastes more, but there are fewer barriers -- fewer abutters adjacent the road to complain, less pain caused by orange cones and lane reduction during construction, etc.
For better or for worse, our very government structure is designed in such a way that makes road repair/expansion far more difficult and painful on both politicians and constituents.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
While the US is sitting in rusting cold war transport networks and wondering who to blame ... ...
Your highways where built for troops and war... and getting your political elite out of cities
ie very efficient transportation - just not for you.
China is funding a rail system in Turkey for $35 billion.
http://www.todayszaman.com/newsDetail_getNewsById.action?newsId=277360
Long term thats China to Spain and England by rail. No roads, no shipping.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
An interesting study shows how the cross-bronx expressway was almost instrumental in destroying the vibrant pre-war south bronx neighborhoods. Point being that they divide and destroy communities.
The problem is that the government made a huge commitment to interstate roads after the war (ww2) and basically put them everywhere without regard for communities. This was a failed government policy driven by lobbyists from oil companies/auto makers and misguided politicians who wanted to bring the autobahn stateside.
But if you look around the world you will see governments and communities thriving based upon public transport and planning that is not all automobile based. So the answer would be to vote in politicians that realize this and work towards more sustainable transport and planning.
Now to reform the wretched election laws in this country of ours....
Despite the rambling, the TFA made it's only salient point with the following:
Compared to repairing existing roads, new road construction is the cheaper option, even with the costs of additional steps such as planning and grading. Repairs are incredibly expensive and inconvenient for exactly the above reason; it's much harder, much more dangerous, and much slower work to repair a surface in active use, and in the meantime some fraction of that infrastructure is put out of use. When you do need to make significant repairs, what you end up with is Carmageddon, which users can't put up with for long periods of time.
Simply put, many of these major roads are too important and too busy to take out of commission for any period of time for repairs. Your best option quite often comes down to building a parallel track, at which point the original track becomes free for repairs (or more historically, decommissioning).
I read the linked paper, and while interesting, it typifies one of the critical flaws in the extreme Libertarian model - there are a set of cases where for-profit private enterprise is a bad solution, such as where it is not practical to provide an reasonably large number of easements to setup competing infrastructures. Where constraints exist that facilitate natural monopolies, history has shown that it IS in the public interest to preclude predatory practices, as unchecked for-profit private enterprise will always seek maximum return on investment, leading to predatory practices. While it is true that modern government bureaucracies have demonstrated themselves to be extremely inefficient managers of infrastructure, they are arguably better than an unchecked predatory monopoly. Legal mechanisms like the Sherman Antitrust Act, while anathema to an extreme Libertarian, have proven highly valuable in the past. And circling back to the original point, given the critical nature of roads, and the time period required to execute a a negative feedback cycle through the legal system, I personally believe that unfettered privatization of all roads would be a good way to grind a modern civilization to its knees.
Neil Degrasse Tyson said one of the most profound things I've ever heard. He said growing up he thought Congress was made up of Doctors, engineers and scientists. He was shocked to find out who was actually running the country. The point is how can a politician make a judgement call on an engineering project? How can a Congressman restructure Medicare when they don't know anything about medicine? What about the environment or NASA? The argument would be we invite in experts and have studies done. The truth is they invite in lobbyist for advice who are mostly retired politicians. They don't do reports on every project considered and most Congressional studies are biased and they lack the education to know the difference. The whole mess starts to make sense when you realize the country is being run by a bunch of non professionals. How many actual economist or even accounts are in Congress and they handle all the money! Do you know the most common profession Congressmen come out of? The law as in lawyers. Congress should be made up of an even mix from all major disciplines. We need experts running the country not people skilled in cutting deals!
It's symptomatic of our culture which is much more about "buying new" then "repairing old". This comes somewhat, I admit, out of economic reality: for most of our consumer goods it really is cheaper to replace than renew.
But the approach holds through larger purchases as well - homes and cars, for example. Few people have the skills or interest to fix them up to 'like new' condition, when it's easier (especially now in terms of housing) to get a brand new one dirt-cheap.
I live in a 100+ year old home, and it has its charms, certainly, but I'm well aware that (given my lack of construction skills/desire) it would have made more sense to just buy a new home instead. (Thank god my father in law is unbelievably skilled in construction, and that he loves his daughter apparently without limits.)
To the point, though, this is the accommodation (if not a driver) of urban sprawl. I live in the Twin Cities and if you drive around the perimeter you STILL see waves of new home construction - where are all these people coming from? Is this just urban flight?
It's one of the reasons I try to patronizing Dunn Brothers coffee as much as I can; I don't know if it's corporate policy, but around here they've deliberately placed their stores in really old buildings and paid the (high) cost to refurbish and bring them up to code, instead of grabbing a slot in the shiny new strip mall a half-mile down the road. In Eden Prairie, they even saved an historical brick home that the local preservationists couldn't afford to maintain/hold, turning it into really a terrific coffeeshop.
-Styopa
Plus the hour drive to the airport, and the two hour wait before hand for security and boarding, and the hour drive at the other end of the flight to your destination. So, yeah.
Is more public transport. The automobile and fossil fuels are a dead end. We (The USA) need to start putting out infrstructure dollars in repairing existing infrastructure as well as building out rail/light rail infrastructure. Commercial air travel has become less and less customer oriented and will eventually be for rich people only, on the airlines schedule.
"The Brady Bunch is back...working homicide"
Whenever I commute (as infrequently as possible), I cannot help but look and see the tens of thousands of dollars that each individual has chosen to spend on transportation, and imagine what spending a tenth of that money would have done for public transit.
It's a hidden tax which impacts the middle class most severely. It is a spectacular inefficiency, and in my opinion one of the strongest arguments against Libertarianism.
The other strong argument against Libertarianism is reality.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
The efficiency of mass transit goes up at least linearly with population density. In the US, only some large city routes reach break-even for mass transit versus individual transit, and in most of those one pays a cost in transit time in order to realize the relative gains for other resources. (Side note: Many of those routes depend on subsidies to gain enough riders for break-even, and those cities' transit systems tend to have a lot of other routes that don't break even.)
the us rail system is setup for freight and that ties up the tracks.
To add high speed will take a lot of building.
Honestly this is the big reason. The freight guys have control. When I took the commuter train to DC, we'd be sidelined because we had to wait on a freight train going by. Freight has a much higher profit than a bunch of folks riding the train to work and less hassle.
[John]
Shit better not happen!
The United States in 2010 spent over 130 billion dollars on new cars alone.[1] [2] Preliminary reports suggest the total for 2011 was higher.[3] Also in 2010 Americans spent $479 billion dollars on gasoline.[4] [5]
There are about 250 billion cars in the US[6], using a very rough estimate of $10,000 per car[7], that's $2.5 trillion dollars' worth of passenger vehicles. I'm not even going to get into the costs of road maintenance.
I would post statistics on fuel efficiency/energy use per passenger mile but I suspect that you're not a complete idiot. A 2002 APTA study put total public transit costs at ~$39 billion annually.[8][pdf]. Do you see how the one number is a couple orders of magnitude lower than the other one?
I can keep hauling out statistics, but [8] is a pretty comprehensive overview of the subject. Among the other BTS statistics? The "hidden tax" I mentioned is on average 10% of annual income. Other sources claim double this number. As with medical care, no other country on Earth comes close to spending as much money per capita. That above $2.5 trillion figure is more than the US annual federal revenues. The US spends as much money on new cars annually as the national budget of Greece -- which has the 24th largest budget (by expenditures).
In summation, given the roughly two orders of magnitude difference between spending on personal vehicles and mass transit, my previous statement was entirely correct.
For further comment on Libertarianism, see here.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.