BIKE: NYTimes.com Editorial: The Roads Are Paved With Pork

[Patrick Goetz]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/12/opinion/12thu3.html?th&emc=th

Editorial:
The Roads Are Paved With Pork

Published: May 12, 2005

An immense pork-laden highway spending bill is trundling through 
Congress like some surreal demonstration vehicle for the nation's skewed 
values. The Senate is busy angling to balloon the plan beyond the $284 
billion maximum approved by the House, prompting the Bush administration 
to threaten a veto and gruffly lecture lawmakers against resorting to 
"accounting gimmicks" that promise "to spend money that doesn't exist." 
But lawmakers, who have heard those veto threats before, are greedily 
ignoring lessons in fiscal prudence from a White House that rewrote the 
book on runaway tax cuts and deficit spending.

At a moment when the price of the nation's dependence on foreign oil has 
never been starker, the six-year bill contains an 80-20 spending formula 
that grossly favors the private automobile over public transit. It 
continues with a record 3,800 pet projects inserted by House members in 
their role as self-appointed masters of the transportation universe. 
Hundreds more are ready for ladling out in the Senate. And despite the 
deteriorating state of the nation's roads, Congress is not even spending 
its highway pork on highways. The bill is stuffed with 
graffiti-elimination plans, snowmobile trails, tourist sidewalks and 
trolleys, parking garages, and even a national Packard museum, 
presumably as a memorial to when gas guzzling began in earnest.

Many pork projects may have local value. But few would be ranked as 
priorities by state highway and transit professionals, who are the 
qualified experts on what's truly needed.

Lawmakers are hardly embarrassed by their trophy projects. The most 
successful earn affectionate nicknames like "Mr. Concrete" - that's 
Representative Don Young, the Alaska Republican, who as chairman of the 
Transportation Committee earmarked 39 projects worth $722 million for 
his state. Mr. Young is already famous for his "bridges to nowhere." One 
$200 million project would create a span almost the size of the Golden 
Gate Bridge for 50 residents of Gravina Island. That's a boondoggle of 
$4 million per capita. A project for another sparsely populated tract 
has a price tag of $2.3 billion. Meanwhile, about one in four existing 
bridges are badly in need of repair across the nation.

President Bush's veto threat is aimed at keeping the bill at $284 
billion, but that's a pitiful target when it lets bridges to nowhere go 
forward at the expense of the common good.