Fixing The System For Highways

Obviously, it is not just the bridge that is broken but the system. How could the sensible maintenance of bridges have been so neglected, Americans ask?

The answer is the usual one. Liberals. There was a time when government didn’t do too much, and one of the major tasks that people expected of it was infrastructure. There used to be a joke that the job of the Secretary of Commerce was to light the lighthouses and put the fishes to bed every night.

But then came liberals. And they expanded the menu of programs for which government was responsible. In particular they vastly expanded social programs, the payment of cash directly to people for not doing anything, or not doing very much.

Then came liberal environmentalists. They decided that we were “paving over America” and they set to work to block the building of highways. Much better spend the money on mass transit, they said, and so the states all renamed their Highway Departments as Departments of Transportation.

Not surprisingly, as highway building became controversial, it didn’t happen too much. For politicians, it was too hard to push against the special-interest opposition in favor of the general interest.

Now it is time to do something, but what?

Peter Ruane is president and chief executive officer of the American Road & Transportation Builders Association, and he writes that:

We need and deserve a system that not only invests in reconstructing, repairing and maintaining aging highways and transit network but also invests in intelligent transportation systems that facilitate efficient and safe movement of goods and people.

You have to agree with him. And, if you need something to concentrate your attention, there is this:

Since the mid-1990s, China has built 25,000 miles of new, multi-lane highways and has announced plans for 52,000 miles of modern expressways by 2020 — more than the 46,000-mile U.S. Interstate system.

So what does Ruane suggest?

For the sake of safety and global competitiveness, the U.S. must focus on pushing through in 2009 a real 21st-century transportation bill — one that will be the envy of the world, not the bane of millions of American drivers and businesses.

That’s where I have a problem. Any transportation bill passed in Congress today is going to be wasting a huge amount of resources just buying off liberals with enormous environmental studies and mitigation, and building useless bike paths and light rail.

You can understand why liberals don’t give a damn about the economic benefits of a good transportation infrastructure. They aren’t integrated into the economy like the rest of us. They are well-born trust-funders, or they are tenured professors, or they are well-born trust-fund environmentalists or they are government managers, or they are government employees or they are government pensioners of all ages. What do they care about freight hauling and intercity highways?

Is it really worth while having to buy liberals off?

I’d say that the freight haulers and the road builders would do better to get together and fund the transportation improvements they need without public money.

Here in America we are at least a generation away from utterly discrediting liberals. So we need to develop strategies to cope until we can set public policy without having to buy them off with outrageous bribes.

But the government can help by selling the concept for new transportation corridors. Look at the fuss over the so called NAFTA Super Highway from Mexico north through Texas into the heartland of America. Paleo-Conservatives are bent out of shape on this one because evil foreign Mexican trucks, using special FAST lanes at the border crossings, will be speeding like bullets into the heart of the United States.

The problem is that the Bush Administration is trying to configure the NAFTA Super Highway under a blanket instead of making it into a national show-piece. You can understand why: unions are opposed because containers will be unloading at Mexican ports. Liberals are opposed because they hate concrete. Environmentalists are naturally opposed to the idea of building a ten lane highway anywhere. Motorists are opposed to toll roads.

Sooner or later we’ve got to stop this tip-toeing around and go public with a new program of transportation improvement.

But let’s try to minimize the role of the government. Right now, government just doesn’t work.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.