BIKE: Brookings on pork and sprawl

[rcbaker]

MetroView
The Brookings Institution
May 17, 2004

Cement and Pork Don't Mix

Robert Puentes, Senior Research Manager, Economic Studies


Two weeks ago, Congress came within a whisker of shutting down the
nation's highway and transit programs and furloughing thousands of
federal employees. Only after a highly partisan debate was the Senate
able to reach agreement on another extension to the Transportation
Equity Act of the 21st Century (TEA-21) that will keep these programs
functioning—at least for another two months.

And what happens then?

Senate and House leaders are supposed to conference soon to hammer
out the discrepancies between their TEA-21 reauthorization proposals.
This they will do under the cloud of the threat of a presidential veto.

But the differences are not arguments over policy. As far as Washington
is concerned, transportation is all about the money—how much and who
gets it.

The Senate's $318 billion bill, after all, is $30 billion more than the House
has proposed—which is another $30 billion more than the White House
offered a year ago. And that's essentially the debate, which so far has
been a fight about pork, not principle.

Yet this is bad news for disgruntled commuters and businesses. It is
particularly bad news for the metropolitan areas where most Americans
live and work and where almost all meaningful traffic congestion occurs.

The sad fact is that the national transportation system is broken and in
dire need of fundamental reform. That is why billions and billions of dollars
of additional federal investments, without significant reform, will do
precious little to ameliorate the transportation problems of the modern
metropolis.

Right now, the federal surface transportation law does as much as any
cluster of programs to influence the spatial form and social fabric of our
cities and suburbs. Most notably, a growing body of research based on
actual investments clearly shows that major highway projects do not
necessarily create new jobs or spur economic growth so much as shift
economic activity around a metropolitan area. The result is that cities and
older suburbs frequently look on helplessly as commercial strips decline
and infrastructure crumbles as growth follows new public investments out
to the suburban fringe. That is why the extension and expansion of
highways truly is what the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan called it: part of
the federal government's "hidden" urban policy.

For this reason, the nation desperately needs a frank and vigorous debate
over the future of transportation policy. Encompassing more than just
concrete and pork, such a debate should try to answer three basic
questions:

Question #1: Who is in charge of transportation decisions? Current law
puts state departments of transportation in the driver's seat on
transportation decisions. Yet metropolitan areas (many of which cross
state lines) are the places where most Americans live and work. But even
so, metropolitan areas make decisions that dispose of only about 10 cents
of every transportation dollar they generate even though local
governments within metropolitan areas own and maintain the vast majority
of the transportation infrastructure.

In view of that, Congress badly needs to overhaul the governance of
transportation programs, recognize the primacy of metropolitan areas, and
align the geography of transportation decisionmaking with the geography
of regional economies, commuting patterns, and social reality. To this
end, it should build on reforms in the 1990s and devolve greater
responsibility and resources to metropolitan entities. These institutions
are, after all, in the best position to use transportation funding in tandem
with land use, housing, workforce, and economic development policies. At
the same time, the new policy should require state decisions to be tied
more closely to the demographic and market realities of metropolitan
areas and the vision and priorities of metropolitan leaders.

Question #2: What solutions fit the transportation challenges of the
modern metropolis? The current system's approach to transportation
solutions is narrow and outmoded. Most state transportation departments,
for example, still believe they can build their way out of congestion. Yet
congestion is a product of many factors—low-density settlement patterns,
employment decentralization, shifting consumption patterns, and market
restructuring. That's why study after study shows that building more is not
the best strategy for reducing congestion.

Congress, therefore, needs to move beyond transportation-only solutions.
Federal law made some efforts, mostly ignored, to integrate transportation
decisions with local and regional decisions on land use, housing and
economic development. Those efforts should be expanded. At the same
time, the new law should encourage the greater use of market
mechanisms—such as tolls and congestion pricing—to ease congestion
on major thoroughfares at peak traffic times. The city of London is
successfully experimenting with pricing schemes in its central business
district.

Question #3: How do we make transportation decisions accountable?
Federal transportation programs return more money to state and local
governments than any other federal initiative involving physical
infrastructure. Yet unlike other state and local bureaucracies that receive
federal funding—such as state welfare departments, state education
departments, and local public housing authorities—state transportation
departments are held to few performance standards.

Since that is the case, Congress should move aggressively to hold all
recipients of federal funding to a high standard of managerial efficiency,
programmatic effectiveness, and fiscal responsibility. To that end, the new
law should establish a new framework for accountability that includes
tighter disclosure requirements, improved performance measures, and
rewards for exceptional performance. Congress also needs to create a
transportation system that is much more responsive to citizens and
business. The more citizens and businesses inform transportation
decisions, the better those decisions will be.

Change will not come easy to the transportation sector. The many
deficiencies of transportation politics and practices are deeply rooted—in
constituency and money politics, in state governance, bureaucracy, and in
the history of metropolitan development. Cement and pork have become
inextricable. Yet change has to come if we are going to have livable
communities, competitive economies, a healthy environment, and fiscal
responsibility.

Yogi Berra is purported to have said, "If you keep doing what you always
did, you'll always get what you always got." Well, this summer the nation
faces transportation challenges that will not be resolved by pouring more
and more money into a broken system. Systemic reform is needed and
probably will only happen if transportation policy is vigorously debated in
the public realm.

Lacking that debate, Washington is stuck with a choice between three
clunker pieces of legislation because neither Congress nor the White
House gets it:

It's not how much you spend, but how you spend it.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.bicycleaustin.info/private.cgi/forum-bicycleaustin.info/attachments/20040620/8c7d8758/attachment.html