Focus transportation funding on priority projects
Congressional earmarks for transportation projects are distorting spending priorities and delaying improvments to America's air and surface transportation infrastructure and those delays impose huge costs on national productivity and competitiveness, according to an analysis by Bruce Katz and Robert Puentes in the March issue of The Atlantic, aptly titled "Clogged arteries." Katz and Puentes equate the unfocused investment to thickly-spread peanut butter.
A better approach, they argue would be to allocate the $50 billion in annual surface transportation spending where the probems are. Cities are being shortchanged, they say.
The nation's 100 largest metropolitan regions generate 75 percent of its economic output. They also handle 75 percent of its foreign sea cargo, 79 percent of its air cargo, and 92 percent of its air-passenger traffic. Yet of the 6,373 earmarked projects that dominate the current federal transportation law, only half are targeted at these metro areas.
And infrastructure investment is critical to jobs creation, they explain:
In the past, strategic investments in the nation's connective tissue-to develop railroads in the 19th century and the highway system in the 20th-turbocharged growth and transformed the country. But more recently, America's transportation infrastructure has not kept pace with the growth and evolution of the economy. As earmarks have proliferated, the government's infrastructure investment has lost focus. A recent academic study shows that public investment in transportation in the 1970s generated a return approaching 20 percent, mostly in the form of higher productivity. Investments in the 1980s generated only a 5 percent return; in the 1990s, the return was just 1 percent.
Check out their interactive map estimating road-traffic congestion in 2010. The cost of congestion, including added freight cost and lost productivity for commuters, reached $78 billion in 2005. Half of that occurred in just 10 metro areas.
Comments
Log in or create a user account to comment.