Mobility

Roads cost a lot of money. Each year, the U.S. invests nearly $100 billion to build or reconstruct roads. Society doesn’t do this to create jobs in the highway construction industry. We pay our gas taxes and vehicle fees for mobility: to deliver ourselves, the goods we want and the services we seek, in a reliable, efficient, cost-effective manner. A nation’s highway infrastructure is directly related to its international competitiveness and job creation. Claiming our dividend on this investment depends on how well roadway agencies the highway system, perhaps even more than the number of lane-miles we’ve built.

When weather, construction zones, traffic incidents, etc. close or clog our roads, the congestion is more than just inconvenient, it’s expensive. Our roadways are arteries of commerce well illustrated by the development of just-in-time logistics. Snowfighting failures cost workers their wages when businesses and factories close – and, longer term, can cost them their jobs since jobs disappear from communities that cannot assure reliable highway operations. Some retail sales will be postponed if a blizzard closes the roads, but other sales just “disappear,” economists calculate. When economic activity stalls, so do tax revenues. In 2004, the Salt Institute commissioned Global Insight, Inc. to model these variables and project the impact of a day when snow and ice closed down the roadways. The study found enormous costs associated with blizzards which might shut down roadways in a state or province. The methodology was conservative, considering only three variables, not including crash data or personal injuries. For example, in Iowa, a single day’s paralysis would cause workers to lose more than$38 million in wages, merchants to forego $20 million in lost retail sales and governments would collect $4.5 million less in taxes. The survey included 12 U.S. states and two Canadian provinces.