Bridges to Somewhere
Congress needs some new thinking on road funding.
Saturday, August 4, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT
The cause of Wednesday's bridge collapse in Minneapolis isn't yet known, but that hasn't stopped the tragedy from reigniting the debate over the condition of U.S. "infrastructure," which has to be the ugliest word in the English language. It's even uglier when Congress and the building lobby use it as an excuse to spend more without rethinking their own contributions to the problem.
Nobody denies that our roads and bridges are feeling the stress of age, more drivers and heavier truckloads. It's possible that the I-35W bridge collapse over the Mississippi was the result of such stress, specifically from the bridge's underwater supports having eroded. According to the Reason Foundation, a font of information and good sense on transportation issues, nearly 148,000 U.S. highway bridges were deficient in 2005. That's nearly one in four across America.
Minnesota, notably, was fifth best among the 50 states, with only 13% of its bridges deemed deficient. Rhode Island's highway crossings were in the worst shape, with 53% reported to be deficient. When a state racks up that kind of performance, its politicians are a lot worse than "deficient." According to Reason, 36 states had a bridge deficiency rate of 20% or higher. This doesn't mean they're about to collapse, but it does signal the need for repair and eventual replacement. (See www.reason.org.)
The hair-trigger political impulse, from states and Capitol Hill alike, is that this means the feds need to spend more money. But it's hardly the case that taxpayers have been stingy. In 1991, the five-year highway cost $151 billion. By 1998 it was up to $217 billion, and in 2005 a Republican Congress agreed to spend $286 billion and would have spent far more had President Bush not threatened a veto.
What matters as much as the amount, however, is the pattern of such spending. And you will not be surprised to learn that along with greater highway spending came more Congressional earmarks. What the Members giveth, they also taketh for themselves. In the 1981 highway bill, there were all of 10 earmarks. A decade later there were 1,850, and by 2005 the earmarks had multiplied to 6,371, or nearly 10% of total spending.
Alaska alone received 119 earmarks in the 2005 highway bill, worth $941 million. To put a sharp point on the matter of spending priorities: The $250 million in emergency appropriations now flying through Congress for Minnesota is slightly more than half the amount appropriated to Alaska for the "Bridge to Nowhere" and "Don Young's Way," two of the more infamous earmarks from the 2005 bill.
A main problem with these earmarks is that they often supersede the more urgent repair and replacement needs identified by state and local officials. Earmarked funds in past highway bills would go unspent because the vanity projects were unwanted and typically require some state matching funds. A full five years after the 1987 transportation bill, for example, no less than 64% of its earmarked money was still unspent because states had more urgent priorities for their share of the spending. By 1997, 55% of the $6.2 billion in earmarks from the 1991 highway bill had gone unspent. We can't report the same numbers for the 1998 and 2005 highway bills because the federal Transportation Department stopped disclosing the figures, lest it embarrass Members of Congress.
Some new thinking is in order. As Steve Malanga argues, privatized road and bridge projects can be good for drivers and taxpayers alike. Congress also needs to return power to the states to set priorities. Twenty-five years ago, with the interstate highway system nearly complete, Ronald Reagan proposed just that: Let the feds maintain the interstates and return the rest of the gas-tax revenue to the states to use as they saw fit. States can make politically motivated mistakes too. But more local spending, less cynically allocated, combined with private investment, is far more likely than current habits to replace bridges before they collapse.
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