Funding Roads, Subsidizing Transit

by Alex Marshall, Editor, Spotlight on the Region

The ancient Romans had a saying: To make a road straight, you often need to make someone's neck crooked.

This chilling refrain vividly sums up an obvious fact: Building a road is a manifestation of power, particularly state power. Carving a road across multiple jurisdictions and property lines -- not to mention varying terrain -- can be done only by an institution that can override the wishes of any one individual.

This was true in the days of the Roman Empire, whose mighty roads still exist and even carry traffic in some parts of Europe. And it's true today. In the exercise of that authority, local, state and federal governments spent more than $150 billion on roads in 2005, according to the most recent federal Highway Statistics report. That's comparable to what we spend annually on waging war in Iraq. 

Much of that road money is spent here in the Northeast and the Tri-state region. But as gas prices climb both here and nationally, people are increasingly turning to something Tri-staters have always used more than anyone else: transit. In fact, a May 10th New York Times article by Clifford Krauss about surging transit use talked of commuters "abandoning their cars and taking the train or bus instead." 

But even as this trend occurs, transit users and personal automobile users continue to operate within very different policy frameworks, not to mention bureaucracies. When we talk about transit, we usually talk about "subsidizing" it. When we talk about roads, we talk about "funding" them. The S word doesn't come up, even though it's tax dollars that are used for both. Even if you exclude the gas tax (which some people incorrectly label a user fee, a subject for another day) highways and roads still get gobs of tax money, and much more of it, than transit. 

Part of the way toward a saner set of transportation policies would be to start changing our language. We should be clear that almost all forms of transportation get public money. As Petra Todorovich makes clear in the lead article in this issue, "A National Plan for Meeting America's Infrastructure Needs," heavy government infrastructure investment over the centuries, ranging from canals to interstate highways, created this nation's basic patterns for commerce and development. The question is not whether public money is used, but what utility the public gets out of it, and how does our funding shape the usage of the good. 

Part of the blame for our confused thinking goes to conservative and libertarian-oriented think tanks -- groups that argue for less government. Yet they have embraced highways and roads, which receive so much government money, as a solution to traffic congestion and a general boon to living. In the same breath, they usually attack mass-transit spending, particularly on trains. They seem to see a highway as an expression of the free market and of American individualism and a rail line as an example of government meddling and creeping socialism.

Among the most active of these groups is the Reason Foundation, a self-described libertarian nonprofit organization with a $7 million budget that has its own transportation wing. Some typical highway-oriented papers on Reason's Web site include "How to Build Our Way Out of Congestion" and "Private Tollways: How States Can Leverage Federal Highway Funds." Rail transit is taken on in papers with titles such as "Myths of Light Rail Transit," and "Rethinking Transit 'Dollars & Sense': Unearthing the True Cost of Public Transit." I didn't see any papers about unearthing the true cost of our public highway network.

Many of the authors of these studies are a rotating cast of writers who pop up again and again, including Randal O'Toole and Wendell Cox. They "extol the autonomy made possible by automobiles" wrote fellow libertarian and New York Times columnist John Tierney in a 2004 article on the subject. Tierney calls them, including himself, "the autonomists." That is, libertarians who have embraced highway spending, although they focus more on the individually-bought car, not the government-built road it requires.

Reason Foundation's founder and former president, Robert Poole, leads the group's Transportation Studies wing, and it's clear he has a special love of the subject. He has authored many studies himself, and he puts out the Surface Transportation Innovations newsletter. In an interview, I ask him to square Reason Foundation's support for roads with its general dislike of government involvement.

"I'd never thought about it that way," he says. This led him to talk about how Reason didn't want to eliminate government from transportation. "We aren't going to have competing companies putting roads in where they like, and letting the chips fall where they may. We aren't anarchists." 

But if he didn't want to eliminate government from transportation, then how does he square that with the group's anti-government rhetoric? He seemed to be aiming for a future where the transportation investment with the least government investment was the best government investment. The organization has a general premise, Poole says, which "is that transportation infrastructure would work better if it were market-driven. Where it's possible, that infrastructure should be run in a business-like manner with users paying full cost."

Such logic misses the foundational nature of transportation investments. Transportation is like education: It works best through heavy general funding that pays off down the road in a community's or nation's overall prosperity. Our national road system, for example, would never have been built if every street were required to pay for itself.

Governments at every level have put in several trillion dollars' worth of roads over the past century. This system, open to all with a car, has created our automobile-based landscape of suburbs, single-family homes, office parks, mega churches and shopping malls. Love it or hate it, it is the product of massive government spending. As others have pointed out, the national road system is one of the most successful examples of pure socialism to be found: a comprehensive public system, well-used, almost entirely paid for with tax dollars. It is a quite moving story, one that includes the development of the now "secondary" road system in the 1920s and 1930s, mostly funded by states but with the management of the federal Bureau of Public Roads, and then moves up to the development of the Interstate Highway System with more federal funding and management.

As transit becomes ever more popular with people, a way to make better decisions about it and all transportation is to start changing how we talk, and thus how we think.