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of the road.
Officially called the Safe, Accountable, Flexible and Efficient Transportation Equity Act: A Legacy for Users, the six-year
authorization signed by President Bush on Aug. 10 contains something for nearly everyone - precisely the problem, say critics.
Among the $286.5 billion worth of guaranteed obligations for highway, transit and safety initiatives are more than 6,000
"earmarked" projects totaling more than $24 billion.
While the bill allots $239 million for a long-needed new Mississippi River bridge connecting Southwestern Illinois with
downtown St. Louis, more than $200 million will fund what is being referred to as the "bridge to nowhere" in Alaska - home to
House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman Don Young. The remote constituency of Young, a Republican and U.S.
Rep, will benefit from 199 earmarked projects totaling nearly $1 billion - more than California, Illinois and New York.
The bridge, part of the Gravina Island Access Project, will connect Gravina Island, population 50, with the fishing village
of Ketchikan, population of 8,000.
In contrast, IDOT and MoDOT - via consulting firm URS Corp. - are considering scaling back and even eliminating huge
portions of the initial plans for their bridge, including cutting some $80 million from the project by not connecting the new
bridge with Interstate 64. Critics of the latest T bill allocations question its parity because the population of the St.
Louis metropolitan area is 2.5 million and this bridge would be used as a critical freight link to the U.S.
"Everyone has a different perspective, which is why you end up with 6,000 pet projects," said Ana Unruh Cohen, PhD,
associate director for environmental policy at the Center for American Progress. "There are voices in Congress trying to point
out that this is not the wisest way to manage government funding. But because the Transportation Committee puts in something
for every district, the bill itself receives little opposition."
SAFETEA-LU breezed through the House and Senate with a combined total of only 12 "no" votes.
Ronald Utt, PhD, a senior research fellow for the Heritage Foundation, agrees.
"If you have to specify doing something in a federal bill, there's a good chance that it's not a priority for the state DOT
(department of transportation)," Utt said. "What's more, there are hundreds of small projects included that are unrelated to
transportation and do nothing to alleviate the fundamental problem of highway congestion."
Regardless of where the money comes from or what it's to be used for, state transportation departments are happy that the
months of uncertainty have ended. Since SAFETEA-LU's predecessor authorization expired in September 2003, the agencies had to
rely on 11 Congressional-continuing resolutions for the funding necessary to keep their programs going.
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"It's about planning," said Aileen Cho, transportation editor for Engineering News-Record magazine. "Even though work was
still ongoing and many agencies claimed to have no 'megaprojects' solely dependent on the reauthorization, they simply
couldn't plan for the long term without a defined and confirmed amount of money. Playing it by ear from month to month just
isn't good business sense."
DOTs aren't the only ones looking down the road. Transportation lobbyists are already talking 2009, when SAFETEA-LU itself
expires. Given that the bill required nearly two years of negotiations, it's anyone's guess whether the nation is in for a
repeat performance.
"The next few years will be interesting," said Cohen, adding that the nation's energy policy will likely play a key role.
"If gas stays at $3 a gallon, the next bill may have bigger push to direct more money to mass and public transit projects. The
result may produce a shift in our national approach to transportation."
Cho predicts whoever is in office will affect transportation policy decisions.
"It will depend largely on who's in power by then and just what our national budget is like, plus more reaction-causing
events like terrorism, foreign invasions and domestic infrastructure issues," she said. Cho, too, believes that energy will be
an issue, forcing Congress to find new revenue streams to support those coveted earmark projects.
"Some sources predict that the days of funding the federal transportation bill mainly through gas tax revenue are waning,"
she added.
One often-discussed alternative is greater involvement from the private sector, which is helping states such as California,
Texas and Virginia move forward with projects that would have otherwise languished for lack of funds. SAFETEA-LU hopes to
further this trend by providing $15 billion in tax-exempt bonds to entice private investment.
"The only new capacity to our highway system is coming from public-private partnerships," said Utt. "I expect more states
will move in that direction to find new resources, but the federal funding program is not going away. We'll likely see the
same rituals of debate in the name of economic good, and wind up with an authorization that spends a lot of money but does
little real good."
Utt is also skeptical about these partnerships' ability to live up to their lofty expectations.
"Privately funded projects like the proposed expansion of the Capital Beltway are largely upgrades to federally funded
roads, which means the federal and state DOTs have to be involved," Utt said. "There's a danger that the projects will become
bogged down in bureaucracy and saddled with features, regardless of whether or not the traveling public wants them."
In short, transportation funding in the U.S. may be a perfect illustration of the adage that trying to please everyone
usually produces a result that pleases no one. Huge appropriations with dubious destinations have been a fact of life since
the earliest days of Congress. But after more than 200 years, most Americans are not yet convinced that the cost of doing
business this way exceeds the cost of change.
"Nobody is ever 100 percent happy, but then nobody ever would be," said Cho. "Certainly, there are projects in the current
bill that got more money in relation to their perceived worth than others. But that's politics. Better than no project getting
any money."
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