Transports of woe

With every jolt from its crumbling blacktop, I-95 between Washington and New York reminds travelers of the nation’s need for better roads. No one passing the ruin of the Minneapolis bridge that once carried I-35 over the Mississippi River needs such a reminder. Its deadly collapse last year was a lesson that decent infrastructure isn’t just a matter of making travel convenient and comfortable, nor even just a matter of keeping U.S. businesses competitive.

Building highways and bridges costs money, and there’s the rub. Negotiating ideological differences over how to pay for road and rail projects will be difficult when Congress takes up a new highway bill next year. But the stakes are high and ideological differences should not be allowed to nix new thinking.

The need for compromise was highlighted last week when a bipartisan commission offered recommendations on how to rebuild U.S. surface transportation. The report is chock-full of insight and good ideas, but was immediately attacked by some politicians, including Transportation Secretary Mary Peters, who dissented from the panel’s recommendations because they included an increase in the federal gas tax.

Peters argues the fuel tax is ineffective and does not reflect demand for specific road improvements. She favors tolls and congestion pricing to pay for new highways and repairs to old ones. She also argues for more state and local government funding and a smaller federal role.

Tolls and congestion pricing aren’t bad ideas, which the commission recognized by including them in its revenue source recommendations; it’s fair to ask people using the nation’s busiest roads and bridges, particularly at peak times, to pay.

But the commission concludes that such user fees won’t meet the nation’s needs, which it reckons at a minimum of $225 billion invested annually over the next 50 years. If the deterioration of transportation infrastructure is to be halted and reversed, the focus is likely to stay on gas tax revenues, which have served as the main source of highway funding for decades.

It is also unrealistic to think that necessary improvements can be made without sustained and substantial federal involvement, just as was the case during the Eisenhower administration when, as most people agree, road-building paid great dividends.

With the nation now clearly in need of an infrastructure upgrade, it will be vital when Congress takes up its next highway bill to rein in the earmarks that otherwise divert precious federal funds away from fundamental improvements that benefit the whole country toward piecemeal spending that benefits only a small locality and the pol who made it happen.