Posted on 02/11/2013 12:43:44 PM PST by Lorianne
America’s highway system, once a symbol of freedom and mobility envied the world over, is crumbling physically and financially, the potentially disastrous consequence of a politically driven road-building binge.
President Barack Obama, state transportation officials, civil engineers, road builders and business groups all say that the country needs to invest trillions of dollars in its infrastructure, yet there’s little consensus on how to finance it or what the most pressing needs are.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the country needs $14 billion in additional federal funds each year just to maintain highways and $50 billion more to improve them.
There’s no single cause of the financial squeeze, and federal data reveal only part of it. Some states have raised their own gasoline taxes to pay for highway construction and maintenance and to depend less on federal funding. Others haven’t changed their gas taxes in years and rely on federal money to make up for it.
But federal government analysts, taxpayer advocates and transportation experts have warned for at least a decade that many states were spending too much on building highways and too little on fixing them, and that their maintenance costs would skyrocket if they didn’t change course. “We’ve engaged in a dangerous game of deferred maintenance,” said Brian Taylor, a professor of urban planning and the director of the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.
(Excerpt) Read more at star-telegram.com ...
Stop spending highway funds on other crap would be a good place to start.
Exactly. Every time I hear about "our crumbling infrastructure," I think, "it wouldn't be crumbling if we just spent the money we already pay in taxes to fix it."
“Stop spending highway funds on other crap would be a good place to start.”
Exactly! Here in Minnesota with our transportation money we get massively subsidized light rail that no one rides, bike paths for bikers who dont pay for them, new roads that are obsolete before they are completed and potholes....lots and lots of potholes.
Don’t get me started on the DFW Airport Connector Project, all it has done is added 30 minutes to my daily commute during construction, and for what? It wasn’t needed, other than for featherbedding.
We wildly over subsidize public transportation (The people mover in Detroit is taxpayer funded at a rate of about 97%) while paying for bike lanes and hiking trails.
Then there’s the high speed fail fantasy.
Fixed it.
The city near me used 6 figures out of transportation money to repave a mile of bike trail.
When I was a kid the bike trails I had were dirt paths or dirt roads.
The ugly secret is that highway repair companies are often rotten, and they lobby state legislatures hard to keep repairs using cheap materials that only last a few years. They will fight to the death to prevent quality road repairs, because it would put them out of business.
Many years ago, Phillips Petroleum created what amounted to Kevlar road bed. When laid down before the asphalt, the roadway would last much longer. But road repair companies bitterly fought it, and even had it outlawed in several states.
Another issue is paved roads that don’t need to be paved.
Where I used to live the dirt roads were all paved to support trucks building oil infrastructure. 20 years later the heavy trucks are gone and those roads are still maintained as paved roads despite only seeing 10 or 15 cars per day.
I live on a dirt street and its just fine.
That wouldn’t surprise me one bit.
Pork has a pernicious effect on many things.
Good point.
So far you are the only one who has commented on the actual gist of the article ... that we are building more roads than we need and more than we can maintain.
I hated to admit it but it was one thing that Jenny Granholm actually got right.
And now, our “republican” governor wants to either raise gas taxes or the sales tax to 8% to pay for road maintenance. There’s already another bill in the legislature that would skim 8% off the revenue increase to maintain bike paths and hiking trails.
Texas used to have the best roads in the nation. Now days, they’ll rattle your teeth out.
“Stop spending highway funds on other crap would be a good place to start.”
Amen....
Remember that traffic on some interstate highways is intentionally choked to divert drivers to other parts of each state doing the choking. Tourism, revenues,...
I fought this battle in the past...to prevent governments from using toll roads as piggy banks for enriching friends, as I suspect Governor Perry (here in Texas) was doing.
But I have a good income now, so I don’t care if it costs me 20 cents per mile to drive on a road that costs 1 cent per mile to maintain - I can afford it, and if others don’t step up to stop this robbery, screw them.
That's why many of those old highways lasted for decades without any significant repair and why the new ones have to be dug up every couple of years and re-done.
America’s roads are crumbling?
Kinda surprising, considering workers get paid every summer to repave the same roads they paved the summer before.
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