From: bobp@xxxxxxxxxxxx
To: dpolhill@xxxxxxx
Sent: 2/9/2022 12:40:24 PM Pacific Standard Time
Subject: Surface Transportation Newsletter #220
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| Surface Transportation Innovations |
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| By Robert W. Poole, Jr.
Searle Freedom Trust Transportation Fellow and Director of Transportation Policy
February 2022 |
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This issue of Surface Transportation News is also available online here.
In this issue:
- FHWA guidance on highway expansion sparks backlash
- How the new federal bridge program rewards failure
- House committee disappoints on automated vehicle innovation
- Who gets RAISE grants, and why?
- Semantics of mileage-based user fees
- News notes
- Quotable quotes
FHWA Guidance on Highway Expansion Sparks Backlash
Last month’s newsletter article about Federal Highway Administration (FHWA)
Acting Administrator Stephanie Pollack’s guidance memo urging state departments
of transportation (DOTs) to give the lowest priority to highway capacity
expansion (and promising tough environmental reviews if they do select such
projects) has stirred up a hornet’s nest. In recent weeks I’ve heard from state
transportation officials from red and purple states who are outraged by this
attempt to rewrite the formula-funded majority of the bipartisan infrastructure
law. The Wall Street Journal published a hard-hitting editorial on Jan. 30,
“Highway Funding Bait-and-Switch,” which pointed out that such anti-highway
policies were included in the House surface transportation reauthorization bill
last summer, but that bill was replaced by the bipartisan Senate bill, which
became law.
In addition, a group of 16 Republican governors recently released an open
letter to President Joe Biden and the U.S. Department of Transportation,
writing, “Excessive consideration of equity, union memberships, or climate as
lenses to view suitable projects would be counterproductive. Your
administration should not attempt to push a social agenda through hard
infrastructure investments and instead should consider economically sound
principles that align with state priorities.” A clear example would be “an
attempt by the Federal Highway Administration to limit state widening projects,
which would be biased against rural states and states with growing
populations.” Signers of the letter were mostly from rural states, but
Republican governors fast-growing Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Utah
were also among them while other notable fast-growing states with Republican
governors—Arizona, Florida, and Texas—did not sign on to the letter.
During her Senate confirmation hearing as Office of Management and Budget (OMB)
director last week, Shalanda Young told senators that she was not aware of the
FHWA guidance letter and would look into it. Eno Center for Transportation’s
Jeff Davis pointed out that most such policy proposals are supposed to be
submitted to OMB for review prior to being issued. He also noted that dismayed
senators could ask the Government Accountability Office to look into whether
the guidance letter is subject to being overturned via the Congressional Review
Act.
What kinds of projects are on tap in fast-growing states? Here is a sampling.
Replacing Bottleneck Interchanges
Each year, the American Trucking Associations releases a list of the 100 most
congested interchanges for truck travel—mostly where urban Interstates connect
with other major highways. Many of these interchanges handle as much as double
the traffic they were designed for many decades ago. Among those in current
transportation plans are:
- Florida: The huge Golden Glades interchange in Miami, where I-95,
Florida’s Turnpike, the Palmetto Expressway and U.S. 441 all interconnect.
- Georgia: Several major interchanges on the I-285 Perimeter, the ring road
around central Atlanta.
- South Carolina: Malfunction Junction (aka the Carolina Corridor), where
I-20, I-26,and I-126 intersect. The first phases of this $1.7 billion project
are already under way.
These projects would reduce congestion, and hence greenhouse gas emissions, and
benefit cars, trucks, and buses alike.
Widening Expressways Overloaded Due to Growth
These widening projects are needed not only in fast-growing Sunbelt states but
also in blue states like Illinois where suburban growth has overloaded
expressways originally designed for commutes to downtown areas.
- Illinois: The state DOT has large-scale support to rebuild the aging
Eisenhower Expressway (I-290), including the addition of express toll lanes and
replacement of many structurally deficient bridges.
- North Carolina: Work is under way to complete the planned Outer Loop
around I-540 in Raleigh. In this case, the project is being developed using
toll finance.
- South Carolina: SCDOT’s 10-year plan includes widening I-85 in Greenville
and Spartanburg counties, again due to recent and projected growth.
Bridge Replacements
Many major bridges have outlived their original design lives, and some of these
bridges have fewer travel lanes than the highways on either side, meaning the
bridge itself has become a bottleneck. These projects include:
Alabama: Replacing the Mobile River Bridge with a higher span to provide
improved clearance for cargo vessels passing underneath.
Kentucky: Replacing the obsolete Brent Spence Bridge, to be partly funded by
tolls.
Louisiana: Replacing the Calcasieu River Bridge on I-10 with a six-lane toll
bridge.
Oregon: Replacing the obsolete I-5 bridge across the Columbia River between
Portland and Vancouver, WA.
Missing Links
A number of freeway systems have missing links that were not built for a
variety of reasons, including local opposition, but whose absence has led to
congestion and emissions in the non-freeway locations. One example is the
missing link in Ft. Lauderdale, where the Sawgrass Expressway was supposed to
extend several miles further east to connect with I-95. Political support for
it has developed as the region has grown, and this project is now in the design
phase by Florida DOT.
State DOTs with well-defined needs for projects like these are not going to
give up, just because FHWA has implied that it may make their lives difficult.
And although projects like these are mostly in red states, there are enough of
them in other states to make possible 2023 congressional action to rein in FHWA
on its anti-expansion game plan.
» return to top
How the New Federal Bridge Program Rewards Failure
In the new bipartisan infrastructure law, Congress included $27.5 billion over
five years for bridge repair and replacement. According to the federal bridge
inventory, the number of bridges in “poor” condition (structurally deficient)
was 43,578 in 2021, down 3.2% from the year before. That’s because some state
transportation departments, with support from their legislatures, are taking
their bridge conditions seriously. Other states, however, are not. In many
cases, the fault lies largely with state legislatures, not DOTs. In other
words, as I’ve written before, we don’t really have a national bridge problem:
we have a number of state-specific bridge problems.
As Reason Foundation’s Baruch Feigenbaum noted in his incisive analysis of the
recent bridge collapse in Pittsburgh, “Pennsylvania is one of five states that
reported more than 15% of their bridges to be structurally deficient…the
problem isn’t that Pittsburgh lacks the funding to fix bridges. Rather, the
problem is the way the city spends so much of its annual budget on other things
and chooses to spend so little of its money maintaining its roads and bridges.”
A useful overview from the American Road & Transportation Builders Association
(ARTBA) lists the states with the largest fraction of bridges in “poor”
condition (as defined by a widely accepted numerical rating system). Here are
the 10 worst states, by this measure:
| West Virginia | 20% poor condition |
| Iowa | 19% |
| Rhode Island | 17.5% |
| South Dakota | 17.3% |
| Pennsylvania | 13.8% |
| Louisiana | 12.8% |
| Maine | 12.6% |
| Puerto Rico | 12.1% |
| North Dakota | 11.2% |
| Michigan | 11% |
The new Bridge Formula Program (BFP) allocates money to each state via a
formula, which is based 75% on the total cost of replacing every bridge rated
“poor” in a state and 25% on the total cost of replacing every bridge rated
“fair” in that state. In other words, the more that a state has neglected its
bridges, in terms of a huge repair backlog, the more the bridge program rewards
it. In a well-researched piece for National Review, Dominic Pino ranks all 50
states (plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico) on their unit costs of
bridge replacement (cost of replacing bridges rated poor divided by the deck
area of those bridges), finding that a disproportionate share of the BFP
funding will go to high-cost states, such as California, Massachusetts, New
Jersey, and Connecticut. California alone is allocated 16% of the total bridge
funding. Texas, with relatively low bridge replacement costs and bridges in
much better condition, gets far less. Here are the 10 largest allocations of
BFP money for FY 2022:
| California | $849 million |
| New York | $378 million |
| Pennsylvania | $327 million |
| Illinois | $275 million |
| New Jersey | $229 million |
| Massachusetts | $225 million |
| Louisiana | $203 million |
| Washington | $121 million |
| Michigan | $113 million |
| Connecticut | $112 million |
State and local governments own nearly all of America’s bridges. To be sure,
most of them could be investing more in proper stewardship of these important
assets. But this new $27.5 billion federal bridge program serves as bailout, as
Pino notes, that “rewards states that waste more money with more federal aid.”
And perhaps worse, every one of those federal dollars comes with costly strings
attached, in particular Buy America provisions and Davis-Bacon prevailing wage
requirements. Those extra costs do not apply when states use their own highway
funds for bridge repair and replacement.
One-time windfalls like this federal bridge program implicitly encourage state
legislatures to devote the majority of their highway funds to projects with
ribbon-cutting opportunities (generally many small new-capacity projects).
Legislators can then try to excuse their neglect of ongoing maintenance by
reviewing history—every decade or so, in hopes that some kind of federal
bailout comes along that can compensate for their years of neglect.
» return to top
House Committee Disappoints on Automated Vehicle Innovation
By Marc Scribner
On Feb. 2, the House Transportation and Infrastructure (T&I) Committee’s
Subcommittee on Highways and Transit held a hearing on “The Road Ahead for
Automated Vehicles.” Technology has changed since the last T&I hearing on
automated vehicles (AVs) nearly a decade ago, but the members and non-developer
witnesses appearing on the panel generally failed to reflect—or at least
reflect accurately—the changes in the AV landscape. With Congress out to lunch
and an administration at best indifferent to AVs, the near-term prospects for a
comprehensive federal automated vehicles policy framework remain slim.
The hearing’s eight witnesses made for an unwieldy proceeding. Only two of them
represented developers of the technologies that were the subject of the
hearing, with the remaining witnesses representing “stakeholder” interests with
various hobby horses and axes to grind. These included two labor union
representatives, John Samuelsen of the Transport Workers Union, and Doug Bloch
of the Teamsters, who unsurprisingly expressed general opposition to
automation. They urged legislators to prioritize the perpetual employment of
their dues-paying members over all other considerations, including safety, with
Samuelsen bluntly saying, “No level of vehicle automation should ever replace
them.”
Samuelsen also made an historical reference that didn’t seem to register with
any members in attendance, even though it highlighted the main reason why U.S.
transit agencies cannot adopt automation. He mentioned that “the New York City
subway ran a fully automated train across Manhattan from 1962 to 1964.” Train
automation proved very popular with New Yorkers, but was scuttled largely due
to union opposition during a turbulent time for transit in America.
The transit industry was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy in the early
1960s. The federal government sought to finance municipal takeovers of these
private companies to preserve transit service in cities. In exchange for the
support of powerful transit unions, lawmakers added Section 13(c) to the Urban
Mass Transportation Act of 1964. This provided transit unions and their members
with iron-clad job protections that exist to this day (49 U.S.C. § 5333(b)).
The inflexibility of Section 13(c) is why it is very difficult for U.S. transit
agencies to reduce labor costs in general (see the Biden administration’s
rekindling of a dispute over California’s modest 2013 public pension reforms,
for example) and functionally impossible through automation, even if automation
would improve transit safety, reliability, and access. As a practical matter,
unless Section 13(c) is significantly weakened or repealed by Congress, U.S.
transit agencies are unlikely to adopt life- and cost-saving automation.
On the other side, Nat Beuse from Aurora brought the perspective of both an AV
developer and a former motor vehicle safety regulator. Before entering the
automated vehicle industry in 2019, he was a senior official at the National
Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) for nearly 20 years. Beuse
reminded the panel that AVs, like any other motor vehicle, are subject to many
federal, state, and local regulations. He also emphasized that Aurora’s AV
testing protocols allowed any employee to request a halt to automated vehicle
operations, and that the company runs millions of simulations each day before
attempting to validate its software on public roads. He urged Congress to
ensure that laws and regulations for AVs are technology- and business
model-neutral.
The other AV industry representative was Ariel Wolf, who leads the newly
renamed Autonomous Vehicle Industry Association. He was clear in drawing an
important distinction between advanced driver-assistance systems, such as Tesla
Autopilot, and the automated driving systems under development by Wolf’s
members. When Rep. Hank Johnson (D-GA) conflated Tesla’s approach with that of
the entire industry, Wolf responded, “Tesla is not a member of our association
because it’s not an autonomous vehicle. It’s a driver-assistance technology.”
Wolf’s trade association until January was called the Self-Driving Coalition
for Safer Streets. Tesla refers to its most advanced automation features as
“Full Self-Driving Beta.” Tesla’s approach has been criticized as reckless by
those inside and outside the AV industry, and the term “self-driving” has been
tainted in the eyes of many.
In questioning Wolf, Rep. Johnson mentioned a recently deployed feature within
Full Self-Driving Beta that is designed to allow users the option to slowly
roll through all-way-stop intersections under certain low-risk conditions.
Technologist Brad Templeton makes a good case for this feature’s existence, but
the problem is that rolling stops are illegal in every U.S. jurisdiction. So,
Tesla voluntarily agreed in January to disable the rolling stop feature through
an over-the-air update.
Tesla ultimately gained nothing through its rolling stop release other than
needlessly antagonizing Biden administration officials, who have unfortunately
shown much less interest in the large potential safety benefits of AVs than
their predecessors in the Trump, Obama, and Bush administrations. In June 2021,
NHTSA issued a sweeping Standing General Order requiring all AV developers to
report crashes to the agency, which was almost certainly in response to Tesla’s
behavior alone. It is no wonder the rest of the AV industry is seeking to
distance itself from Tesla.
The four-hour hearing offered disappointingly little in terms of policy
substance. For those who have followed federal AV hearings in Congress during
the last decade, the overwhelming feeling was one of déjà vu. Outgoing T&I
Chair Peter DeFazio (D-OR) correctly noted, “It’s going to be an extraordinary
challenge for regulators” if the U.S. is to realize the “whole host of benefits
just waiting out there.” But this sentiment has been expressed for years with
no action to back it up. States and federal regulators are now charting their
own automated vehicle policy paths without any meaningful guidance and
oversight from Congress. This isn’t likely to change in 2022, but maybe there
is hope in a new Congress in 2023.
» return to top
Who Gets RAISE Grants, and Why?
By Baruch Feigenbaum
RAISE is the acronym for a federal grant program, Rebuilding American
Infrastructure with Sustainability and Equity. Since the Federal Aid Highway
Act of 1956 created the Interstate Highway System and provided federal funding
for surface transportation, the majority of funding has been awarded based on
complex formulas. Over the last 30 years, leaders of the funding and
transportation committees have become very skilled at writing formula funding
that benefits their districts and/or states. I was thrilled when the George W.
Bush Administration created the Urban Partnership Agreement (UPA) and
Congestion Reduction Demonstration (CRD) grants that awarded six projects
funding based on quantitative metrics.
Any projects that receive federal transportation discretionary funding should
meet the following four basic criteria:
- The project is evaluated based on a cost-benefit analysis.
- The project funds interstate infrastructure.
- The grant funds a transportation project.
- And, the project is not chosen for political reasons.
Unfortunately, discretionary grant programs from the Obama and Trump
administrations were often designed more for political and policy reasons. How
do the new RAISE grants rate? My intern Mae Baltz and I created a speadsheet
heet that included all 763 grant applications. We examined how the 90 projects
that were awarded funding differed from the 673 projects that did not receive
funding. We categorized each project into national interest or local interest,
transportation-related or not transportation-related, and whether or not the
project is in a congressional district of members serving on a transportation
or funding committee (the House Transportation and Infrastructure, House Ways &
Means, Senate Banking, Senate Commerce, Senate Finance, Senate Environment and
Public Works) or not in one of those districts. We also examined the federal
share of funding and the type of applicant.
As the summary table shows, Reason Foundation fount that of the 90 projects
funded with RAISE grants in 2021, only nine projects (10%) were national in
nature.
Of the 90 projects funded by RAISE grants, only 50 projects (56%) were related
to transportation.
The other projects funded were primarily focused on environmental remediation,
economic development, or other factors. Of the projects not selected for the
grants, 496 (74%) were related to transportation.
Reason’s review of the 90 projects funded found that 41% of RAISE grants
projects were located in congressional districts represented by members of a
transportation or financing committee.
Only 15 of the 90 projects funded (17%) by RAISE grants were projects submitted
by state governments. While state governments don’t have the monopoly on good
transportation ideas and projects, they do own the vast majority of the
nation’s transportation infrastructure, including, most notably, Interstate
highways that are in desperate need of reconstruction.
Breakdown of 2021 RAISE Grants
Source: Calculated by Reason Foundation’s Feigenbaum and Baltz using data from
RAISE grants website
Not only did the projects that were funded with RAISE grants seldom meet the
four basic criteria above, the projects that were not funded were more likely
to meet those four criteria. In other words, the U.S. Department of
Transportation was more likely to fund projects that were local, that were not
related to transportation, and were located in the district of a
politically-connected member of Congress.
What types of projects were funded? I’ve chosen a sampling of questionable
projects based on the original intent of the program:
- $21 million to Little Rock, AR, to build a recreational trail to increase
tourism and create economic stimulus
- $11 million for a multimodal transit center in Yuma, AZ, where less than
0.5% of commuters (or 1 of every 200) use mass transit
- $17 million to make Washington Street in Denver “livable” by adding
streetscaping and energy efficient lighting
- $3 million to Trinidad, CO, to subsidize the La Junta passenger rail line,
a line which received $15 million during the TIGER Grants
- $22 million to build recreational trails along the Atlanta BeltLine
- $10 million for New Jersey to revitalize Atlantic City—something the state
has been spending money on without success for 40 years
- $25 million for Johnstown, PA to, in the words of the application,
“Connect our history to the modern renaissance of art in the Johnstown
community”
There were some good projects funded. South Dakota, for example, received $22
million for a freight rail expansion project and Bangor, ME, received $2
million to improve the I-95/SR 15 interchange. But there were almost as many
projects studying the removal of Interstate highways as projects that improved
highways.
The last three presidential administrations have shown that the executive
branch frequently does not allocate discretionary federal grants to their
highest and best uses. A program originally intended to improve mobility is
getting further and further away from its purpose.
Going forward, the Congressional Budget Office and Congressional Research
Service need to investigate where and how these discretionary grants are being
awarded. And members of Congress need to use oversight power more effectively
to determine why the executive branch is directing this taxpayer funding to
non-transportation projects and why so much of it ends up in the districts of
members on transportation and/or finance committees.
» return to top
Semantics of Mileage-Based User Fees
Last month, the Government Accountability Office published an overview of the
ongoing federal program that assists state transportation departments (and
sometimes coalition of state DOTs) to test and evaluate ways of charging
highway users by the mile instead of by a tax on gallons of motor fuel used.
It’s GAO-22-104299, released last month.
For someone wanting to get up-to-speed on which states and coalitions have
carried out pilot projects, the different methods they have tried out, and what
they have learned, the report is an excellent overview. For example, I learned
that only 11 of the 50 states have not either carried out a pilot project or
been part of a multi-state coalition without directly operating such a program
itself. The also-rans are Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, and West
Virginia in the South plus Illinois, Iowa, Indiana, Michigan, South Dakota, and
Wisconsin in the Midwest.
The report also includes some researchers’ speculations about addressing equity
by having mileage fees that are somewhat proportional to income (which has
never been seen as a need with per-gallon gas taxes) or that differ between
urban and rural drivers, even though the latter have been found in study after
study to be made better off in a shift from gas taxes to MBUFs, since rural
users on average drive older and lower-mpg vehicles.
But my biggest concern is the language used in the section discussing privacy.
At several points in that discussion, the text refers to GPS systems “tracking”
people’s miles driven as the main privacy concern of motorists. Mass media have
carelessly used that word, too. And even the academics at the Mineta
Transportation Institute, in their public opinion surveys about mileage-based
user fees, describe them as a system that would track their miles driven.
That wording reflects the widespread misunderstanding of what GPS is and does.
The GPS in a device plugged into the on-board diagnositics port under your
dashboard tells you where you are at any time. It does not tell this to anyone
else—unless it is connected to a communications device to send that information
elsewhere. In most mileage-based user-fee pilot programs, the mileage total is
recorded by the device. That total can be reported to a designated service
provider if and only if you agree to that being done. And that reporting can be
as infrequent as once a month, reporting the total miles driven, not the
details of when and where. In some situations (e.g., if you often travel across
a state border), it may be necessary to record totals separately for each
state—something that is being worked out between several western states in one
of the multi-state pilots.
Recording and then reporting mileage totals is not “tracking” in the sense
people imagine when they hear the term. They are likely to think something
like, ‘big brother is in my car.’ That term tracking often fuels the privacy
concerns that are probably the single most important obstacle to gaining public
support for the needed shift from per-gallon taxes to per-mile charges.
Everyone involved with efforts to bring about this change should remove the
word “tracking” from their vocabulary when writing and talking about
mileage-based user fees.
» return to top
News Notes
Mississippi River Bridge in Baton Rouge to be P3 Project
Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards has endorsed using a long-term public-private
partnership (P3) to finance, develop, and operate a $900 million new bridge
across the Mississippi in Baton Rouge. It would supplement existing bridges,
including one on I-10, relieving major traffic congestion in that metro area.
The governor proposed using up to $500 million in surplus state funds to cover
half or more of the estimated cost of building the bridge. Louisiana
Transportation Secretary Shawn Wilson is planning to begin the process via a
pre-development agreement that would augment the needed environmental study.
First Kansas Express Toll Lanes Moving Forward
December 2021 saw the release of the environmental assessment of the planned
addition of express toll lanes to 10 miles of U.S. 69 through Overland Park,
Kansas. The study found minor impacts to wetlands plus increased noise
exposure, calling for noise walls along certain stretches. The study was
conducted jointly by the Kansas DOT and FHWA. The comment period closed on Jan.
22. Construction is expected to begin in mid-2022, with the toll lanes opening
by 2025.
Sticker Shock Over Caltrain Electrification Estimate
Caltrain is the commuter rail line that connects Silicon Valley to downtown San
Francisco. The agency announced that its latest cost estimate to electrify this
line (replacing diesel locomotives) has increased to $2.44 billion. That sum
covers 52 miles from San Jose to San Francisco. The increase results from an
agreement with contractor Balfour Beatty to settle increased costs due to
commercial issues and a schedule change. The project is aiming to be completed
by Sept. 2024.
Brightline Hopes to Start Los Angeles to Las Vegas Line by End of Year
The Las Vegas Review-Journal reported that Brightline expects to break ground
on the route between Las Vegas and Rancho Cucamonga by the end of 2022. Over
the past year, Brightline has reached a right of way agreement to run the line
alongside I-15 for most of the way, where it will terminate at a planned new
station in Cucamonga, where passengers can connect to an existing commuter rail
line. The 260-mile Las Vegas to Los Angeles trip is estimated to take 3 hours,
an average speed of 87 mph. The current cost estimate is $8 billion, but no
details of the planned financing have been announced.
TuSimple Expands Autonomous Trucking Operations in Texas
The autonomous trucking company announced an agreement with commercial
developer Hillwood for a million square foot facility in Hillwood’s planned
27,000 acre AllianceTexas development. The facility is intended to be a depot
for Level 4 autonomous trucks. The location is just off I-35, near Ft. Worth’s
Alliance Airport and facilities of TuSimple’s main freight partners, UPS and
DHL.
New I-5 Bridge Between Oregon and Washington Moving Forward
Discussions are under way on both sides of the Columbia River in the latest
attempt to replace the aging and obsolete I-5 bridge. The I-5 Bridge
Replacement Program staff are doing workshops with citizens, reviewing design
alternatives such as two separate bridges (northbound and southbound) or a
single double-deck bridge. Tolling appears to be a given, to cover a portion of
the estimated $4.8 billion price tag. The current plan is to begin tolling as
early as 2025, long before the new bridge is constructed.
Miami Causeway Project May Be Revived as a P3
The Miami-Dade County Commission voted to cancel the current request for
proposals and start over on a potential P3 to modernize and enhance the
Rickenbacker Causeway linking Miami with affluent Key Biscayne. A consultant
value-for-money analysis found that a design-build-finance-operate-maintain
(DBFOM) public-privage partnership would “minimize the county’s financial risks
and financial obligations.” The next step is to seek a consultant for a project
development & environmental (PD&E) study of the project, for which the county
will be seeking partial federal funding. Once the project has been designed,
the county would be prepared to resume a P3 procurement process.
Kansas Turnpike to Go Cashless by 2024
The Kansas Turnpike Authority is moving forward with replacing transponder-only
lanes at toll plazas with full overhead gantries for all-electronic tolling.
Those without transponders (called KTags) will be billed based on their license
plate numbers. CEO Steve Hewitt told KVOE News last month that cashless tolling
will go live up and down the highway at the same time in 2024.
$118 Billion Additional Bailout of the Highway Trust Fund
In a little-noted provision of the bipartisan infrastructure law, Congress
approved borrowing another $118 billion to cover the projected shortfalls in
the federal Highway Trust Fund over the next five years. Thus, users of all
federal-aid highways will be paying an even smaller share than before in
highway user taxes that were originally the sole funding source for the federal
highway program. Users-pay/users benefit continues to morph toward taxpayers
pay, highway and transit users benefit. Prior to this new bailout, since 2008
Congress had bailed out the HTF to the tune of $270 billion.
Walmart and FedEx Go All-in for Electric Delivery Fleets
GM electric truck division BrightDrop had an excellent January. Its first
customer, FedEx, increased its original order for 500 delivery vehicles to
2,500. And Walmart topped that with a first-time commitment to purchase 5,000
electric delivery vans. BrightDrop’s first actual deliveries took place in
December: five electric delivery vans for FedEx. BrightDrop estimates that
these vehicles will save owners $7,000 per year in operating and maintenance
costs, compared with internal combustion engine vans.
Alternative Proposal for LaGuardia Airport Rail Line
AmeriStar Rail (ASR), a startup company, has made an unsolicited proposal to
New York state for an alternative to the currently planned two-link rail
service from Manhattan to LaGuardia. Last Octover, the Port Authority suspended
work on the FAA-approved Airtrain plan, which has local opposition, to give the
new governor, Kathleen Hochul, time to review the plan. Last year ASR made an
unsolicited proposal to take over Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor operations.
Kansas Studying Mileage-Based User Fees
Kansas DOT Secretary Julie Lorenz told the Topeka Capital-Journal that the
expected long-term decline in fuel tax revenues will require eventually
replacing fuel taxes with per-mile charges. Interestingly, she suggested that
it may be best to have drivers on busy, congested highways pay a higher rate
than those on local and rural roads, suggesting that we should be “thinking
about transportation as a utility.”
St. Louis Faces Trolley Problem
What if you accept federal money to build a streetcar and then shut it down as
not worth the money? That’s what St. Louis faces, with its federally-subsidized
streetcar that’s been offline since Dec. 2019. But federal law requires that
transit grant money be repaid if the project is not in operation. See Christian
Britschgi’s report, “St. Louis Taxpayers Paid a Lot to Run a Money-Losing
Streetcar. It Could Cost Them Even More to Shut It Down,” on Reason.com.
Michigan Proceeding with One-Mile of EV-Charging Road
Michigan has awarded a $1.9 million contract to Electreon to design and
test-operate dynamic and stationary electric vehicle charging via a system
embedded in up to one mile of roadway. It is billed as the first “electric road
system” in the United States, according to a news release from Gov. Gretchen
Whitmer’s office.
Pennsylvania Diverted $4.2 Billion from Bridges to State Police
Instead of devoting its highway user taxes to roads and bridges, a 2019 audit
found that $4.2 billion had been diverted to funding the state police.
Reason.com’s Eric Boehm provides more details.
“Better Infrastructure Spending Needs Better Institutions”
A recent op-ed by Emil Frankel, a former state transportation director and
senior official at U.S. DOT, makes a good case for methods and procedures to be
in place at both state and federal levels of government, to ensure that
projects selected for new federal funding are actually sound investments.
Overcoming Opposition to New Tolling
In a new one-pager aimed at public officials, I have suggested ways to address
four main concerns about new tolling often raised by highway user groups.
» return to top
Quotable Quotes
“I was one of those who was part of the bipartisan negotiating team that put
together the infrastructure bill. Our largest single investment was in
highways. You can imagine our surprise when we see the Department of
Transportation indicating that highway money can’t be used for increasing the
capacity of highways. This direction flies in the face of our intent, and our
needs. I recognize that there are some states that aren’t growing and may not
need additional capacity—New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Rhode Island, and so
forth. But there are other states that are growing fast—South Carolina,
Florida, my state of Utah, fastest-growing state in the nation over the last
decade. We need to increase the capacity of our highways or we’re gonna not see
the economic growth which we projected as being part of this bill.”
—Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT), in Jeff Davis’ “OMB Nominee Declines to Endorse New
FHWA Policy Guidance,” Eno Center for Transportation, Feb. 3, 2022
“There are no transit routes now across the American Legion Bridge. This
project will really change that, enabling our transit system to connect
Maryland residents to Tysons or Virginia jobs, and vice versa. . . . This can
be game-changing. In Virginia, there was no incentive to ever take a bus,
because you sat in the same traffic as everybody else. Bus trips and carpooling
in the Virginia express lanes have increased over 105 percent, on average,
across the network since opening. I think the Virginia system has been able to
show some of the naysayers how an express lanes network can fit into the
broader transportation solution. Also we have pledged $300 million in transit
services over the life of the Maryland project, to ensure transit is a core
part of this project.”
—Pierce Coffee, in Katherine Shaver’s “Transurban Leader Calls Maryland’s
Beltway, I-270 Toll Lanes ‘Transformative,’” The Washington Post, Dec. 30, 2021
“Over even a medium-term time frame, the increasing adoption of hybrid,
electric, and autonomous vehicles will almost completely sever the connection
between VMT and greenhouse gases. Those who are attempting to redesign cities,
projects that will take decades or even centuries, merely to reduce the use of
gasoline-powered cars, are thus engaged in a futile exercise that will only
become more futile with time. It would be like trying to redesign cities in
1900 to reduce horse manure. The technology will change faster than the city
will.”
—Judge Glock, “Sprawl Is Good: The Environmental Case for Suburbia,”
Breakthrough Journal, Winter 2022
“Rarely in American history have states been in less need of federal aid. But
they’re going to be getting more as portions of the $1.1 trillion bipartisan
infrastructure law continue to roll out. The Bridge Formula Program is only one
of many programs in the bill that will send money to states to fund the
infrastructure they own and maintain—infrastructure they should be incentivized
to fund on their own. Instead, inefficiency gets you more federal funding,
while efficiency goes unrewarded.
—Dominic Pino, “The Bipartisan Blue-State Bridge Bailout,” National Review,
Jan. 22, 2022
» return to top
The post Surface Transportation News: Backlash to highway guidance, new federal
bridge program, and more appeared first on Reason Foundation.
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This issue of Surface Transportation Innovations is also available online here.
Previous editions of this newsletter are archived here and all of Reason
Foundation's transportation policy research and analysis is here.
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| Contact the author:
Robert Poole
Searle Freedom Trust Transportation Fellow and Director of Transportation Policy
Reason Foundation
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