Transportation revenues should be ailablre for transportation related projects such as hiker/ biker trails, lanscaping, transportation museums and the like. In my years as Colorado DOT Secretary, it was my experience that this kind of flexibility often resulted in gaining support of communities and environmentalists who otherwise would have stymied the progress of major transportation improvements.

Bike lanes and pedestrian paths are good things.  But if we want more of them, the question is how to pay for them. If states and localities want to do so with state tax dollars, there is no reason the federal government should prevent their doing so.   But I agree with those who have been making the point that using the nearly-depleted federal Highway Trust Fund for that purpose would convert the gas tax from the "user pays" principle for the financing of roads to an arbitrary financing source for non-highway projects.   That would essentially eliminate the purpose of the Highway Trust Fund, and the federal gas tax revenues might as well go into the General Fund like other taxes, to be spent on the general welfare.   

Perhaps we should be asking a different question:  If 95% of the funds for the federal aid highway programs are just turning over federal gas tax revenues to the states, why should the federal government be the conduit for the taxing and spending?   Why not let states decide their own revenue and spending needs, and focus the federal program for truly national purposes?

Cindy van Empel, AICP, a California-based policy planner specializing in land use, transportation, and environment, offered the following:

Times change, needs change, and knowledge improves.

Before the Highway Trust Fund was established, fuel taxes were paid into the Treasury’s General Fund.  The HTF was initially intended to dedicate fuel taxes to the construction of the Interstate Highway System, but was later expanded to fund transit projects. It is also used to fund the construction and maintenance of roads on what is known as the federal system, which includes more than interstate highways.

Most states’ budgets are severely strained maintaining existing roads and highways, and worse, funding lacks far behind maintenance needs. To further exacerbate the problem, rather than reducing congestion, new lane miles increase congestion through a phenomenon known as “induced travel.” Yet the United States throws billions of dollars every year at roads in a futile effort to ease congestion.

You can argue whether climate change is caused by human activity, but human activity certainly enhances climate change, so we should do everything possible to reduce our emissions of greenhouse gases to ensure that the planet can continue to support life.

There are some who would argue that funding new highways is more cost effective than funding transit, bicycles, and pedestrians or that the public wants more highways.

To those statements, I would first respond that, given our existing built environment, the public is virtually forced to drive. The public should be provided an array of accessibility choices, rather than being required to drive. When the built environment supports transportation choices, more people choose to travel by means other than the automobile. The most well-known American examples are Portland, Oregon, Davis, California. Getting more people out of cars and into buses and trains and onto bicycles will reduce automobile congestion. One bus simply occupies less space than 50 cars.

We should strategically retrofit our cities, beginning in the pre-World War II areas, we can relatively simply intensify development around existing and planned transit routes. These areas would be prime candidates for investments in transit, bicycle, and pedestrian facilities, where they would have the potential to do the most good and be most cost effective. This strategy has the added benefit of reusing our cities’ existing underutilized downtown infrastructure investments—but it is worthless if elected officials continue to allow the outward expansion of cities, bleeding away the economic vitality of downtown.

Intensifying development increases housing and transportation options without undermining existing single family neighborhoods. I recently estimated that my agency can accommodate over 11,000 new dwelling units—about 30,000 people or growth for the next 20 years—on only 380 acres of developed land, an area smaller than our downtown and less than 2 percent of the entire city. Compare this to a recent proposal to house only 6,300 people on 480 acres of prime agricultural land on the edge of the city.

Cost effectiveness should be evaluated in terms of the complete system: system maintenance, underutilized infrastructure, lost property tax revenues due to low-value uses such as parking lots, dependence on food imports, public health costs and increased mortality, and loss of leisure time and social capital top the chart. Continuing to promote the automobile doesn’t measure up well against the public interest when all costs are factored in.

Many traffic “improvements” have deleterious effects on bicycling and walking. For example, dedicated right-turn pockets widen intersections and encourage motorists to turn at higher speeds and make walking and bicycling less safe. Automobile congestion isn’t improved by forcing more people into cars just so they feel safe.

We know more today about the effects of highways and automobiles on our cities than we did in 1956. Yes, times have changed and fuel taxes should pay for alternative transportation and road maintenance. The time for new highway construction is nearing an end.

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AAA members are motorists, cyclists, pedestrians, and transit riders. They are concerned about safety, congestion, the environment, the health of our economy and the nation’s competitiveness. So we support a transportation system that provides the greatest degree of choice, flexibility, sustainability and efficiency possible.

But today the question of whether Highway Trust Fund dollars should be spent on non-highway projects is beside the point. With the fund again moving toward insolvency this year, we face a tremendous challenge figuring out how we are going to make up for the decades of neglect and under-investment in our existing roads, bridges and transit infrastructure. Our transportation system supports the economy, and the American way of life. Yet we are not even adequately maintaining the current system at a level that ensures we can keep people, goods and services moving. 

Even if the Highway Trust Fund weren’t strained, the time has come to streamline the federal program and tie investments to clear national priorities that the public can understand. We cannot hope to gain public support for significant increases in funding if they don’t believe the money will be invested wisely in projects and programs that will make a difference in their lives. Investments that will provide the biggest ‘bang for the buck’ – in terms of safety, mobility and economic growth - must be pursued.

In short, given the dire condition of the nation’s infrastructure and the dwindling balance in the trust fund, federal expenditures should be focused where they will benefit the largest number of Americans and we believe in the near term, that will be predominantly roads, bridges and transit infrastructure.

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 I'd like to slightly amend Lisa's question, to read  -- "should the next surface transportation bill allow states and municipalities to use a greater share of scarce Trust Fund dollars as they see fit?"  And the answer, emphatically, is yes.  I was delighted to see reports earlier this week that Chairman Oberstar's reauthorization proposal will maintain the trust fund but allow states to determine their spending priorities.  The Chairman stated, "they've had these responsibilities.  They've just been straight-jacketed, we're going to give the states broad discretion."  New Jersey, for instance allocates nearly half of its capital funding (both State and Federal) to Transit funding.  With the largest Statewide transit system and the  largest Statewide transit split percentage in the country, it is simply more prudent for New Jersey to prioritize funding for public transportation.  Obviously, more rural States may choose to only dedicate 5% or 10% to public transportation -- which is  likely a sound strategy for those states.  If we allow States and municipalities to make decisions regarding Trust Fund dollars, funding of bike lanes or pedestrian walkways will become a local debate, which is where such a debate should take place.

Speaking of Chairman Oberstar's reauthorization outline, I was very encouraged by his recommendation to reinstitute the position of USDOT Assistant/Under Secretary of Intermodalism, which will coordinate the modal administrations, as well as the Chairman's suggestion to "level the decision-making factors between highway and transit projects" and greatly simplify the project review process -- with the goal of reducing major project implementation from 14 years to 6-8 years.  As the Obama Administration and Congressional leaders continue to flesh out their principles for reauthorization I'd like to offer  two suggestions beyond giving States and municipalities broad discretion:

    1. Allow mature, proven transportation agencies to advance projects with less but more targeted oversight by federal agencies .  Also, we need to take steps to reduce the need to submit ancillary documents  in helping to keep projects on schedule and on budget.  The ideal would be to allow agencies that meet certain thresholds in terms of their maturity, project management and decision making processes to insure quality and consistency  and have the ability  to self-certify their compliance with certain Federal requirements. 

    2. If the Federal Government is a minority funding partner in a major capital project,  the reporting requirements and other review processes should be modified to reflect this lesser funding contribution.  This is even more evident regarding projects where there are specific limits on the amount of Federal funds to be used and where the States and local governments acknowledge they have the responsibility on their shoulders if the project  costs escalate.

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Keith Laughlin, president of the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy, send us the following response:

From a policy standpoint, the question of whether trust fund revenues should be used for bicycle and pedestrian investment is an unqualified “yes.” Since 1956, building the interstate highway system has been the primary focus of federal transportation policy. As a result, we have created a transportation “monoculture,” with driving often the only way to get from Point A to Point B. By designing our communities to ensure the rapid movement of automobiles, we have created places where it is difficult, and even dangerous, to walk or bike. To illustrate the auto-dependence of our transportation system, half of the trips we take are within range of a 20-minute bike ride, and one-fourth are within range of a 20-minute walk. Yet the vast majority of even these short trips are taken by car.

Looking forward, federal surface transportation investment should focus on two priorities. First, we must maintain existing roads and bridges in a state of good repair. Second, we must build-out the neglected half of our transportation system by investing in walking, biking, public transit and high speed rail to create a balanced and diverse system that provides transportation choices for the American people. An important element of this new investment strategy is the need to encourage “active transportation” by creating safe places to walk and bike. By connecting our communities with seamless networks of trails, sidewalks and bike lanes—and linking them to public transportation—we can give people the choice of mobility without an automobile. And for every car trip replaced by a walking/biking/transit trip, we will spend less at the gas pump, easing the strain on household budgets and keeping dollars in America. By reducing traffic congestion, we improve the commutes of those who choose to drive. And by replacing the gasoline in our cars with the energy in our bodies, we will burn calories, not carbon, simultaneously addressing the obesity epidemic and climate change.

These benefits are neither small nor theoretical. In a recent report entitled “Active Transportation for America; The Case for Increased Federal Investment in Walking and Biking,” Rails-to-Trails Conservancy quantified for the first time the billions of dollars in productivity gains that result from increased walking and biking due to reductions in energy use, carbon emissions and health care costs.

From a purely political standpoint, The U.S. Congress decided in 1991 that bicycle and pedestrian projects were worthy of federal investment from the trust fund when the Transportation Enhancements program was created as part of ISTEA. Since then, the program has provided $4.5 billion for bicycle, pedestrian and rail-trail projects. This policy was challenged in 2003 when the House Appropriations Committee narrowly voted to eliminate the Transportation Enhancements program. But that effort was decisively reversed on the floor of the House when funding was restored by an overwhelming bipartisan vote of 327-90. More recently, a 2007 Senate amendment to divert federal investment in bike paths to bridge repair was defeated 80-18. Federal investment in “active transportation” enjoys strong public support because it results in tangible improvements in quality of life in communities across America.

In short, it is both good policy and good politics for America to increase investment in walking and biking from the federal transportation trust fund.

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 This week’s question concerns choosing one mode versus another.  Rather than selecting modal investments based on our personal beliefs or values, I would prefer to select investments based on analysis of their likely economic and social returns.  Historically, transportation investments have had a profoundly positive impact on the nation’s economic productivity and thus on our ability to grow and prosper.  The transcontinental railroads and the Interstate highway system offer good examples.    

Investment choices should be based on the effectiveness of transportation programs.  This can be measured in terms of a rate of return on investment.  Such calculations should be done based on a program, rather than individual projects since the whole is often worth more than the sum of its parts. 

Alternatively, simpler approximations can be useful.  My personal favorite is access to labor and to jobs.  A number of studies shows that this has a strong correlation with growth in economic productivity.  Prud’homme and Lee, for example, find that a ten percent improvement in metropolitan access to labor results in a 2.4 percent improvement in general economic productivity (this is a big number).  Accessibility is a nice metric since it is modally neutral and even allows for shifts in land use.  On the other hand, the correct calculation of accessibility can be a bit complex.  This measure also emphasizes a network or regional approach to transportation.  Thus, investments in new roadway capacity and new mass transit are more likely to have a significant impact than are bike lanes and pedestrian walkways.

The Interstate Highway System was one of the most important national investments in US history, public or private.  The annual rate of return to the economy exceeded 50 percent over a couple of decades and the Interstate network accounted for fully one fourth of the growth in US economic productivity during this time.  The question is, can we develop a 21st Century transportation program that can provide a comparable set of positive impacts?  Recent federal programs have not found this “sweet spot” even though most of their spending is for worthwhile individual projects.  Such a new program will not be a copy of previous investments.  I suspect that technology and telecommunications will need to have a major and perhaps a dominant role. 

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My answer: “None of the above” - that is, instead of focusing on either pedestrian/bike facilities or highways, the federal government's short-term priority should be increasing operating support for public transit.

I begin my analysis with a simple assumption: preserving existing facilities furthers human happiness more than shiny new projects, if only because commuters rely on the status quo.  It is not likely that state and local governments will tear down our highways, nor is it likely that they will bulldoze sidewalks.  But given the collapse of state and local finances, it is quite possible that local governments will eliminate local bus routes (and in extreme cases, even eliminate subway lines, as New York City might do if state government fails to rescue its transit system). 

Moreover, transit is more likely to reduce car commuting and related ills than bicycle/pedestrian facilities, because transit covers longer distances than the human foot (and thus is more likely to affect commuting patterns).  Suppose, for example, that I live two blocks from a bus route that takes me to my job five miles away.  Which is more likely to force me into my car: the absence of bus service over the five miles, or the absence of a sidewalk on the two blocks?

Some commentators argue that highways should take priority over both transit and bike/pedestrian facilities, for a variety of reasons.  One argument is that traffic congestion is really, really important.  But a survey conducted by Inrix Corp. (published in Forbes in Feb. 2009) shows that reduced driving has led to a 30 percent decline in traffic congestion over the past year.  If this trend continues, concerns about congestion may be obsolete- unless, of course, transit cutbacks and sprawl-spreading federal highways force more people back into their cars.

A second argument is that the highway trust fund is for highway users, because it is somehow unfair for drivers for pay for anything that benefits society as a whole.  This argument is meritless for three reasons.  First, drivers benefit from regulations and taxes imposed on society as a whole; for example, municipal minimum parking requirements, by creating a glut of parking, subsidize drivers by helping to ensure that drivers park for free in most of America.  Second, when people are able to get around without driving, drivers too benefit from reduced pollution and traffic congestion.  Third, the “unfairness” argument proves too much.  If it is unfair for drivers in Pennsylvania to support buses in Pennsylvania, why isn’t it even more unfair for drivers in Pennsylvania to support highways in Montana, or for that matter even at the other end of Pennsylvania? 

A third argument is that voters don’t really care about anything besides highways.  But for every survey seeming to support this view, another shows otherwise.  A 2008 survey for the American Association of Retired Persons asked: “Some cities and states across the country are implementing policies to ensure roads will be designed for all users, not only drivers, but also pedestrians bicycle riders, and those using public transportation.  How likely would you be to support such a policy in your community?"  Only 18% replied “not likely”, while 78% replied “extremely”, “very” or “somewhat” likely.

Similarly, a 2008 survey performed for the National Association of Realtors and Smart Growth America asked whether “your state government [should] use more of its transportation budget for improvements in public transportation, such as trains, buses and light rail, even if this means less money to build new highways.”  64% of respondents favored this proposal.

In the long run, bicycle and pedestrian facilities and highway maintenance certainly need federal attention.  But until state and local finances recover, transit should come first.

 

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It is difficult to add to the case made by Cohen, Staley, Graves and O’Sullivan that we should stick to the “user pays” principle on which the Highway Trust Fund was originally based.

I would like to support their position by pointing out that “projects such as bike lanes and pedestrian walkways” are inevitably local, and that it is hard to justify using national funds for local purposes. Why should farmers in Kansas pay for pedestrian facilities in California?

I also agree with Michael Dudley that the “Interstate Highway system may simply be too big to endure” and that “Instead of huge, overly complex single entities, nature prefers multiplicity – numerous smaller forms that can fill niches and adapt to new situations”.

The federal financing system for building the Interstate Highway System has achieved its objective, and now needs to be closed down (together with the taxes that feed it), as originally intended in the 1956 legislation. Highway funding would then revert to the states, which could work out “smaller forms” of highway financing and management more suited to the 21st century.  

Our roads, bridges and mass transit are overcrowded, crumbling and outdated because we have not been investing enough to build and maintain them.  The Highway Trust Fund, a key resource for building America, is already under-resourced and should not be further depleted for projects that are beyond its purpose.   The Fund must be dedicated to our critical transportation needs and Congress should not raid it.  Bikes lanes and pedestrian walkways are positive investments – if Congress determines they are an urgent priority, they should come up with a way of funding them that does not deplete the already strained Highway Trust Fund. 

Alternative transportation undoubtedly plays an important role in our nation’s transportation mix, but the already fragile Highway Trust Fund must remain dedicated solely to its original purpose—funding highway projects.

Currently, 18.4 cents from every dollar spent on gasoline and 24.4 cents from every dollar spent on diesel goes into the trust fund. This tax has not been adjusted for inflation since 1993, yet costs of highway projects continue to escalate with the costs of labor and materials.  This is a very poor formula for maintaining a healthy, let alone robust trust fund. This amount cannot support our current highway needs, let alone additional forms of transportation.

Taking money from the trust fund for "alternative" transportation not only strays from the fund’s original purpose, but violates the "user pays" foundation of the program.  Asking highway users to pay more, which motor carriers are willing to do, is only fair if those revenues go to building and maintaining a first-class highway network to move people and goods.  To do otherwise will greatly hamper our nation’s mobility and productivity. We must focus on infrastructure that provides large-scale, tangible benefits to our economy and environment.

As we’ve discussed before, traffic congestion annually costs the U.S. economy $78 billion in the form of 4.2 billion "lost hours" and 2.9 billion gallons of wasted fuel. If we don’t address this problem, it will only worsen. U.S. freight tonnage is expected to increase more than 25 percent over the next 10 years and the majority of this freight will be transported by trucks on the Federal Highway System. At present, trucks deliver nearly 100 percent of consumer goods and about 70 percent of all freight tonnage in the United States.

Increasing the fuel tax and dedicating that revenue solely to highway projects to improve existing conditions and increase capacity is a critical strategy for reducing carbon emissions and increasing American productivity.

ATA supports an increase in the federal gasoline and diesel fuel taxes to finance highway construction and repairs, until the government devises another way for motorists to pay for public roads. The federal fuel tax is by far the most cost-effective solution available, costing only a few cents on the dollar.

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We must make our communities more livable, which means, in part, having alternatives to the car for people to get to the places that they need and want to go.  Absent any sea change in the way Congress addresses transportation funding, the Highway Trust Fund remains the primary place to turn for money to redesign our community travel networks.  From AARP’s point of view, one key to creating neighborhoods where “successful aging” can take place lies in the rebalancing of transportation choices.  It has to start now.

Every day more and more boomers enter their sixties.  In 2000 about 35 million people had reached their 65th birthday.  By 2030 that number will double to over 71 million and one in four drivers will be over 65.  Although the aging process will affect each of these graying boomers differently, many will see their driving abilities diminish as they age.  Having non-driving options will make it easier to hang up the keys if they should and easy access to alternative transportation will help them both stay engaged in civic life and retain their independence. 

It’s a given that roads will remain an absolutely critical piece of the mobility puzzle; over 90% of the daily trips taken by Americans are as a driver or a passenger in a car.  But to be ready for 2030, road projects will have to address safety as well as capacity.  Easier to read signs and protected left-turn lanes are examples of infrastructure improvements that can promote safety for all drivers.  Well-designed roads improve safety for everyone, regardless of age. When a road is well-designed, all users should be safer.   “Complete Streets” planning considers the needs of all road users regardless of their travel choice, whether they are drivers, transit users, pedestrians or cyclists.  AARP is working together with other members of the National Complete Streets Coalition so that “Complete Streets” is included in the transportation reauthorization, and we have a soon to be released report that documents the benefits of taking a “Complete Streets” approach to planning and design. 

The unprecedented growth in Americans over the age of 65 demands that we act now to develop the infrastructure to accommodate people as they age.  The current low-density suburban residential model that dominates our metropolitan landscapes could become a trap for individuals who lose their ability to drive.  These “loop and lollipop” neighborhoods have few sidewalks and are hard to service with public transportation.  Millions could literally become “stranded in the suburbs.”  (Older people significantly outlive their driving abilities—the average man by seven years and woman by ten.)

Using Highway Trust Fund dollars to design streets with a focus on travel choices just makes sense.  We need a twenty-first century approach to mobility, not the same old road-widening technique that pays no attention to the context of the street and often results in induced demand.  This new approach doesn’t mean we have to “abandon” our cars, but it should mean that we could “choose” not to drive to the baseball game, but take light rail or the bus instead. 

So how do we address this?  Take money from the Highway Trust Fund and allow local governments greater latitude to flex federal funds and develop an even more robust range of travel choices for their constituents.  Some Metropolitan Planning Organizations have been doing this for years—investing in public transportation, paratransit, bicycle paths, and pedestrian facilities.

We need a range of travel choices to accommodate the various abilities and interests of all Americans.  Communities are going to have different approaches and financial resources to providing travel choices for their citizens.  All elected officials should have the choice to direct transportation funds into priority projects.

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To respond directly to the question, yes, more fuel taxes should be spent on alternative transportation than are spent currently. However the bigger issue here isn't re-hashing the tired debate about whether bicyclists and pedestrians deserve some small share of fuel taxes, but looking at the who and the how of surface transportation spending.

The question correctly points out the key actors currently are frequently state transportation departments. With the planned interstate highway system completed, our biggest transportation problems are at the metropolitan scale. The next surface transportation bill should ensure funds are directed to Metropolitan Planning Organizations and local municipalities in our metropolitan areas. This brings us to the "how."

Metropolitan areas themselves should decide the appropriate types of transportation investments for their community. In some places this will mean highway investments, in others transit, and for some investments in bicycle and pedestrian facilities. The appropriate mode depends not on ideology but the community's urban form and policy choices.

The question falsely implies highways and transit are funded in similar ways. This couldn't be farther from the truth: many highway projects get 80-90% matching federal funds. New transit systems under the New Starts program are lucky to get 50-60% and some have applied for as little as 30%, and must navigate with subjective and ever-changing criteria for the small pool of funds that do exist. Precious little operational or maintenance funds exist for mass transit. The highway largesse and transit frugality must change: we must be more strategic (fewer earmarks, to start) with road funds and less stingy with worthy transit systems.

Lastly, I must mention the cause of the "cash crunch," namely the federal gas tax that has not been increased since 1993. Inflation combined with increased fuel economy mean its real value would decline with time. In the short term we should raise the gas tax, and explore other revenue sources such as a VMT tax discussed above. I do agree with Greg's point we follow the advice of some experts and diversify the sources of revenue into a general transportation fund, recognizing that many car owners use transit, bicyclists ride buses, and the one purpose of our transportation policy should be to create transportation systems that provide choice across multiple modes.
 

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The Obama Administration does not currently support an increase in the gas tax or a vehicle miles fee, so it looks like both highways and alternative transportation modes will compete for dwindling revenues in the Highway Trust Fund.

Pedestrian and bicycle facilities have been woefully underfunded compared to highway construction given the dramatic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions that are needed to stabilize global average surface temperature even under the rosiest scenarios.  Of course, if we don’t care about climate change, air quality, public health, obesity, farmland loss and a host of other issues related to car dependence, we can continue along the current trajectory.

Because cars and car-centered road frameworks are the single largest deterrents to pedestrians and cyclists, the ultimate goal really must be to reduce vehicle-miles traveled.   A transportation funding system geared primarily toward moving an ever-increasing number of vehicles, even with higher CAFE standards and cleaner-burning fuels, is not change we can believe in.   Funding for pedestrians and bicyclists (which, frankly, do not mix with roaring arterials and 10-lane intersections) should therefore come at the expense of road funding, in order to reduce car use.  To quote Enrique Peñalosa, former mayor of Bogota, Columbia: “A city can be friendly to people or it can be friendly to cars, but it can't be both”.

One issue that policymakers should grapple with is:  what is a need in terms of highway funding?  Infrastructure repairs to bridges and roads are necessary.  But new roads and highway expansions are questionable, not only environmentally but also in terms of common sense.  There are plenty of “highways to nowhere” in the planning and construction stages. It has become the land of the absurd in so many parts of the country (see for example, Southern California) that one has to wonder just how much precious acreage needs to be sacrificed to car mobility before we start to consider transportation alternatives that reduce demand.

 

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Highway Trust Funds should be spent to improve alternative modes whenever that is the most cost effective investment. This is a basic principle of good planning and is particularly important now.

Several current trends (aging population, rising fuel prices, increasing urbanization, increasing traffic congestion, rising costs to expand roads and parking facilities, shifting consumer preferences, and increasing health and environmental concerns) are increasing the future value of having a more diverse and efficient transportation system. 

Sometime in the future you will probably want to drive less and rely more on alternative modes in response to some combintion of the factors cited above. This requires that we invest now to improve walking and cycling conditions, and public transit service quality. If we fail to create a more diverse transportation system you will be forced to drive more than youd personally consider optimal, and since automobile travel imposes significant external costs, far more than is optimal from society's perspective. It makes no more sense to limit transportation funds to highways than it would have been for IBM to dedicate its Selectric sales revenues to typewriters rather than investing in computer development.

The real problem is not that Trust Fund revenues are being "diverted", it is simply that fuel taxes and tolls have not increased to account for inflation or rising vehicle fuel efficiency during the last three decades so motorists now pay considerably less per vehicle mile than what it costs to maintain roadways, requiring subsidies from general taxes. Automobile travel is significantly underpriced (user fees are much lower than the marginal costs imposed by driving). In such as situation, expanding highways without increasing user fees will simply exacerbate transportation problems by stimulating more vehicle travel and sprawl.

Arguments commonly used to justify dedicating fuel tax revenue to roadways are based on inaccurate assumptions. For example, about a third of roadway costs are funded through general taxes and most parking facility costs are borne indireclty through rents and taxies. If it is unfair for motorists to subsidize pedestrians, cyclists and transit users, then it is even more unfair that people who rely on these alternative modes should subsidize motorists. These subsidies average several cents per vehicle-mile, and since motorists travel far more annual miles than people who rely on alternative modes, the total annual subsidy per motorists is often higher than the total annual subsidy for people who rely on other modes.

Motorists often benefit directly from improvement to alternative modes, including reductions in traffic and parking congestion, accident risk and the need to chauffeur non-drivers. When all impacts are considered, improving alternative modes is often the most cost effective and beneficial way to improve driving conditions.

Much of the need for walking and cycling facilities and public transit subsidies results from automobile traffic externalities. For example, sidewalks and bike paths are needed primarily to separate these modes from automobile traffic risks; in areas with minimal automobile traffic volumes and speeds all users can safety and comfortably share roads, avoiding the need for special facilities. Similarly, automobile-oriented land use patterns reduce public transit efficiency, requiring more subsidy. Where transport and land use patterns are less automobile-dependent, public transit subsidies are much lower, as are rates of traffic accidents, energy consumption, pollution emissions, obesity, and household transportation costs (see for example the transport system performance in Freiberg, Germany described in Sustainable Transport that Works: Lessons from Germany).

Mobility is generally not an end in itself, it is a means to access goods and activities. It makes sense to create a diverse transportation system that allows users to choose the most efficient form of access for each trip. For example, it is often cheapest overall to create communities where children can walk to school, rather than requiring them to be chauffeured every day. Similarly, when all costs are considered (roadway, parking facilities, vehicle costs, etc.) it is often cheaper to accommodate more commute trips by alternative modes than to try to accommodate more urban automobile commuters. Current planning is biased in various ways that favor mobility over accessibility and automobile travel over alternative modes, which leads to transport system inefficiency. It creates a treadmill in which people must continually increase their vehicle travel with no net gain. Allowing transportation funds to be spent on the most cost-effective mode is an important step toward increasing transport system efficiency and benefits.

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Yes, but not via an exclusive set-aside: multi-modal design should just be standard practice. Bike lanes and pedestrian paths shouldn’t compete in a zero-sum game list of priority projects with new freeways, bridge maintenance, or any other vehicle-scaled infrastructure. That’s like comparing cumquats to pumpkins. Every single project that receives public subsidy--or even a quasi-judicial development approval--should be evaluated not just on how many roadway levels of service it improves, or how many air quality issues it alleviates, but also on how it impacts the health of the citizens and the communities around it. Does it accommodate and protect the safety of all users? The model that pedestrian and bicycle advocates should emulate is the Americans with Disabilities Act (or, more specifically, the federal The Architectural Barriers Act (ABA) and its state equivalents): when the ADA was first passed, there was grumbling among property owners, architects, and developers, but a sense of propriety eventually prevailed, and it’s now considered gauche to even inquire about the “extra” expenses involved in making a project accessible to a wide variety of users; It’s just the way it’s done. Make complete streets and street networks a standard practice, and it won’t cost us anything above that to balancing the needs of all users.

We’ve already gotten past the façade of the Trust Fund being an entirely user fee-based entity: the claim that drivers cover their own costs is overly simplistic. By allocating even a meager percentage of the Fund towards transit projects, we have collectively acknowledged that we can’t build our way out of congestion. If we forge ahead, as a nation, with expanding our transit capacity and making infrastructure and investment around that expanded capacity, then we will continue to see a decline in VMTs and then gas taxes, as long as we hold firm to our currently paltry gas tax rates. In the end, car ownership and driving probably need to become more expensive (regardless of gas prices) simply to sustain our existing roadway network.

So if the question is about whether the Trust Fund is flawed as a mechanism for achieving the sustainable outcomes that we collectively hope for, I think the answer is a resounding yes. But setting aside Trust Fund dollars to pay for pedestrian and bicycle facilities would do little to solve that. Without solving this revenue debate, setting aside Trust Fund dollars for pedestrian and bicycle expenditures would make pedestrian and bike advocates appear laughable; they would be scape-goated for every “frivolous” extra lane, marking, or overpass that was won “at the expense of” maintenance on the next piece of essential infrastructure to collapse. The ped/bike set-aside would serve to distract attention for another political cycle from the tough choices that we need to collectively make.

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The question is perhaps best split into two halves.  First is the dilemma regarding competing demands between a legacy fuel tax that has intuitively linked individual use of the public roadway system with a per-gallon contribution towards its maintenance and the contemporary focus on reducing greenhouse gases and oil dependence via a conversion to fossil fuel-efficient hybrids and, eventually, fossil fuel-free vehicles.  This half is perhaps the crux of the pending fiscal challenge and is worthy of the serious discussions currently taking place at all levels.  While a fuel tax offers an inherent leverage to encourage fuel-efficiency, the simple fact is that a tax based on gallons of fuel consumed will continue to generate less and less revenue, even if vehicle-miles traveled (VMT) increases.  We must find a new way to link the use of transportation systems with an individual contribution to their maintenance.  Although VMT has taken center stage as of late, this method does not translate well to transit systems where an single vehicle is capable of efficiently transporting large numbers of people and various systems result in differing per-mile infrastructure maintenance costs.

Since all forms of transport require a proportional amount of energy to move individual users, perhaps a tax on power consumed (Watts, BTU, or Joules) is a better alternative to VMT?  Some activists will argue a relationship between power and carbon; however, whereas a carbon tax is perceived by some as an entirely environmentally-focused fee, a power tax is more intuitively linked to energy efficiency and independence across all modes.  Imagine future gasoline and diesel stations selling fuel by the Watt rather than the gallon; it would only require auto-manufacturers to also rate fuel tank capacities in Watts based on a standard relationship between Watts and gallons of fuel (similar to today's USEPA miles-per-gallon standards).  And since each fuel source contains an intrinsic amount of power, debates over expensive systems to record distances traveled, perceived as intrusive by some, can be entirely avoided.  Moreover, the price-based desire to squeeze out as much power from each unit of fuel (instead of waste heat and byproducts) will naturally encourage competition in efficiencies since consumers are focused on the power/cost relationship.  This concept works across modes just as well to fund heavy rail as it does highways and bridges.

The second half of the question pertains to spending Highway Trust Fund money on “non-highway transportation projects” such as bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure.  To this I suggest considering such spending analogous to replacing incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescent as a way to reduce energy and maintenance costs within a short-term payback period.  In 2008, USDOT demonstrated with its National Household Travel Survey (NHTS) that more than half of all vehicle trips in America are for short distances, or less then 10 miles; this includes a majority of commuter trips.  Since these distances are ideal for non-vehicular transport, it stands to reason that a major portion of our fuel, emissions, congestion, maintenance, and safety concerns can be drastically reduced if we were to embrace walking and bicycling as not only practical modes of travel for a wider range of land uses, but a critical component of the nation's transportation infrastructure.  If through Highway Trust Fund investment, say, 25% of all household trips were to shift from vehicular to non-vehicular modes, consumer demand for foreign-sourced fuel would drop, greenhouse gas emissions would decrease, traffic during peak hours would wane, wear and tear on municipal roadways, primary arterials, and state/interstate highways would diminish, and vehicle-based fatalities and injuries would be reduced.  Domestic precedents abound to support the minimal costs, feasibility, ease even, of such a scenario (many communities across the country are stimulating bicycle ridership via simple lane striping programs and awareness campaigns).  A shift from vehicular travel would also dampen the trend of  increasing VMT, thereby reducing or eliminating the need to build or widen more roads.  Furthermore, such results would have compound effects throughout other sectors, most prominently national security and health care.  Americans would be healthier, safer, and perhaps more in touch with their communities.  Savings from the above effects can be focused more intelligently on necessary highway, bridge, and tunnel infrastructure for auto/truck travel that truly necessary.  If in these times of dwindling revenue and crumbling infrastructure simple ways can be found to reduce wear and tear while simultaneously releasing more funds for critical improvement, then spending High Trust Fund money on such efforts is absolutely justified.

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Humm!

Of course, we should be supporting alternative green modes.  It’s time we get serious about aligning spending with long term …..

No, wait.   Everything isn’t so obvious or straight forward.   The question hints or perhaps implies a number of conditions - at least to the lay reader. 

First, one might presume that federal transportation funds aren’t currently used to build sidewalks or bike lanes.  Be it sidewalks to transit stations, intersections improved as part of CMAQ projects, or overpasses on urban freeway projects, sidewalks already find their way into federally funded transportation projects. 

Second, a reader might imply that the lack of sidewalks is the cause for reduction in walking relative to prior generations.  The reality is far more complex.  There is less walking in urban environments that are exactly the same as they were 50 years ago – including having sidewalks on both sides of streets.  Our grandparents didn’t worry about pedophiles.  They didn’t have the same set of choices or options – auto availability was not nearly as high.  They didn’t have the same labor force participation with its time constraints that deter walking – the far slowest mode of travel.  Activities were neighborhood scale whereas many of today’s activities from shopping, to schools, to places of worship are built at a scale that results in larger market areas with fewer folks living within walking distance.  A huge share of today’s walking is for recreation or walking pets.  Want more walking, get more folks dogs.  While the lack of sidewalks can be a deterrent to walking in some locations, more sidewalks are hardly a panacea to solving mobility problems.  I haven’t seen the estimate of how much more walking there would be if we built more sidewalks. Bike lanes and trails are similarly often used for recreation, not functional transportation.  There are places where sidewalks and bike lanes will make a meaningful contribution to greater use of these modes but determining where, how much, and at what cost is not a simple matter.

Third, the statement implies that fewer roads and more sidewalks will reduce greenhouse gas contributions.  Maybe fewer roads will result in more congestion or more circuitous travel and more vehicle hours of travel and more greenhouse gasses.  Maybe fewer urban roads will result in more folks moving farther from urban centers to take advantage of better levels of service on exurban roads – creating more travel and greenhouse gas emissions.  The idea that we can solve mobility or air quality problems by failing to provide roadway capacity needs more work. 

Fourth, the statement implies that roads are a contributor to climate change.   While transportation is certainly a major contributor to energy and carbon production, the roadway is only the travel path.  It is the vehicles that govern the energy and environmental impact.  The vehicles are changing.  Well within the life of the roads that will be funded by the predecessor to SAFETY-LU there will be significant changes in the vehicles and their energy and environmental impacts.   Hybrid, electric, fuel cell and perhaps other technologies will use the roads with lower greenhouse gas emissions. Transit does and will continue to use the roads. Successful implementation of CAFE standards alone will result in future roadway travel being competitive with all but the most productive alternative modes in terms of emissions of greenhouse gases. 

Fifth, the lack of a plan to steer more federal revenues to sidewalk building is not necessarily the lack of a commitment to better sidewalks or bike lanes.  State and local resources can be used to target sidewalks and bike paths if indeed parties determine that there is a desire to increase these investments.  If there is any desire to preserve any vestige of a trust fund/user fee concept for transportation funding, then one might choose to target fuel taxes or maybe VMT fees to providing roadway capacity with other resources being used to address other needs such as sidewalks. 

One of the criticisms of the federal transportation programs has been the feeling that there is not a compelling national vision for transportation.  Somehow diverting funds from the acknowledged need to maintain and grow our roadway systems to build more sidewalks hardly seems like a compelling national vision for transportation.  We have nationalized banks and auto makers so now let’s nationalize the provision of sidewalks?  We are going to increase fuel taxes and/or add a VMT fee so we can build more sidewalks?  America is preparing to be economically competitive in the 21st century by building more sidewalks? 

Communities should fund sidewalks and bike lanes where sidewalks or bike lanes make sense. We should use federal resources for sidewalks and bike lanes when they are appropriate and eligible expenses.  But sidewalks and bike paths as a major element in new federal transportation legislation – I have yet to see data suggesting that this could be instrumental in reducing greenhouse gases.  If we want to reduce transportation greenhouse gasses efficiently we need to invest in providing a very efficient and productive transportation system and put resources into reducing the greenhouse gas impact of roadway travel. Trying to seduce folks from cars to sidewalks or presuming they can be congested into submission and will walk or bike to work in meaningful numbers is a high risk gambit – one not well supported by travel behavior and personal time use trends. 

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Yes 3, No 3, None of the above 2.

I 'm going to go ahead and balance the debate here by agreeing with Charles Buki and Michael Dudley in that the entire system is broken, and bound to be more so if we don't get our collective act together. So while I won't push my similar views for funding bicycle and pedestrian infrastucture with Highway Trust Funds at this moment, I will reiterate this: America's interstate highway system is-- based on scale--the most impressive public works project every completed. However, it also suffers from an impressive case of gigantism.

Specifically, the fundamental elements of this debate could have largely been avoided if the fundamental mistakes of highway placement was avoided in the first place.  I am of course talking about the construction of highways through existing cities when they were originally intended to simply connect urban areas, not ram through them. Thus, due to the inherent complications with expanding and maintaining highways in these complex areas,  the construction and maintenance costs continue to limit the ability for HTF money from being spent on needed maintenance, or a more balanced approach.

And now I am going to do what I say I would avoid...but investing in alternative forms of transportation would only help reduce demand, therefore alleviating the perceived and actual need to constantly expand and maintain a system that ultimately seems doomed to crumble.

Whether building new lanes or entirely new trajectories, the aforementioned 'insanity' definition is insightful, as highway expansion gives us all less choice in urban areas where we need options.

However, maintaining what has been built with Highway Trust Funding remains important, with one important distinction.  Over time we should allocate HTFs for the deconstruction of the very highways that so ruthlessly ripped apart our once urbane cities so that we may replace them with complete boulevards, avenues and streets, and development that  balances pedestrian, bicycle, transit, and motor vehicle use. The quality of life, emissions reduction, and tax coffers would soar if even half of American cities could slowly repurpose these areas to more productive uses.

And closing this short rant, all of us need to think about land use and highway funding. After all, we could build the most slick bicycle and pedestrian facilities with 100% of the HTF, but if we don't couple that effort with land use regulation that allow for a mixture of uses to proliferate in the right locations, then we will have repeated the mistakes of the past. This, of course, is contextual and applies to our urban areas, and not those places where highways skirt through much of rural America...the only places where highways prove to be overtly important.

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No. Highway Trust Fund money should be used for projects that meaningfully increase mobility in a cost effective way. While some non-road projects might qualify, bikeways and pedestrian walkways probably don’t for three reasons.

 First, the Highway Trust Fund generates revenues for transportation programs that improve mobility on a broad level. The Fund was not intended, nor should revenues be diverted, to fund environmental programs. While the environmental impacts of publicly funded projects should be considered when evaluating these projects, they should be secondary considerations and not primary ones.

 Second, walking and biking represent a very small portion of overall travel and diverting revenues to less cost-effective programs will undermine the entire transportation network. This would increase congestion and increase greenhouse gas emissions. Research at the University of California at Riverside has found that congestion contributes significantly to carbon dioxide emissions because vehicles either idle or operate at speeds below their efficient levels. Thus, as I discuss in Mobility First, improving traffic speeds and reducing congestion by eliminating bottlenecks, redesigning road networks to meet modern travel patterns, or even making small improvements such as adding turn lanes or widening roads, can go a long way toward improving mobility and reducing congestion.

 Third, as much as we might want to believe that cycling and walking will become a meaningful substitute to automobile travel, our urban land-use patterns make this possibility very remote. While walking can become a substitute for some automobile trips, the land-use changes required to enable these substitutions (4 to 5 times more dense than the typical American suburb) are far below the minimum densities necessary to make this a viable alternative in the short or intermediate term.

 Rather, local planning and zoning reforms will be necessary to enable the development of more dense neighborhoods that can support the commercial and residential uses necessary to meet local needs by walking. That’s an outcome decades in the making, and transportation policy is not the best vehicle for encouraging these changes.

 While cycling and walking may be viable alternatives in some places, these decisions are best made at the local level using local funds. They are not broad enough in scale or scope to justify dedicating federal funds as part of a national policy strategy.

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This problem should not be viewed in either-or terms, but rather with a view to the positioning the United States with viable and resilient economies and transportation systems into the future. Note that these are referred to in the plural.

Whatever investments are to be made in long-distance transportation cannot be made under the assumptions that the conditions prevailing for the past half-century (namely cheap gas) will hold throughout the next. We are entering a period of diminishing oil reserves and diminishing financial capacities on the part of governments to sustainably fund these sorts of megaprojects.

We’ve heard a lot about companies being “too big to fail” and it may be tempting to view the Interstate Highways this way. But as Chip Ward recently wrote on TomDispatch, in the natural world, everything big is bound to fail:

“Bigness is a warning signal that tells us to take a second look and consider whether the seemingly solid thing in front of us is far closer to collapse than it looks and, if so, to ask what can be done about it. If we were ecologically savvy, the conventional wisdom would be: If it ain't broke but it sure is big, then fix it. We do that by breaking it up and creating space for new niches and for the more dynamic diversity that naturally flows into such a system.”

Carrying this logic to the Interstates, we would see that the vast Interstate Highway system may simply be too big to endure – too expensive to maintain, and incompatible with the high-cost energy regime that is certain to return, and permanently. Instead of huge, overly complex single entities, nature prefers multiplicity – numerous smaller forms that can fill niches and adapt to new situations.

I concur with Charles Buki (above) that the whole system of allocation needs to be redesigned from the ground up. But it should be done so with a view to resiliency, and that means planning for multiple modes – a heterarchy of regional networks emphasizing rail, short-haul plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, cycling, walking – and at a series of smaller scales.

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 It is a legitimate and long-overdue use of Federal Trust Fund dollars to create safe ways for cyclists and pedestrians to cross busy arterials or highways that receive dollars from the fund. The highways and gigantic arterials that thread modern suburbia make walking and cycling unsafe. More sidewalks and more safe bikeways could reduce traffic to local destinations in today's suburbs -- reducing the need for so many huge feeder streets.  One reason there are so many gigantic commercial arterials around is that people must hop in their cars to ferry kids to school or buy a quart of milk. (100 miles of errand-running a day is not unusual.)

The larger question is how to raise money for the Trust Fund. It should properly be thought a mobility fee and not a tax, at least as long as the $ are dedicated to transportation purposes. And the fee must be raised to cover legitimate costs to build and maintain the infrastructure. America desperately needs to diversity its modes of mobility and I strongly support using the mobility fee to do this, since every person who bikes, walks, or uses public transportation is freeing costly space for people who must drive. 

The Future of the Highway Trust Fund

HTF money should not be used for implementation of non-highway transportation projects at this time. Instead, we should a portion of the Fund to identify and purchase right-of-way corridors for future transit projects that can be developed over the next twenty years. This thinking was employed during the planning of the Century Freeway (I-105), an important part of the 1960’s master plan prepared by Caltrans for the Southern California freeway system, which didn’t open until 1993. Today, the median serves at the mail rail corridor for the Metro Green Line that links the airport and downtown Los Angeles. It took time, but it was done once and it was done right.

Therefore, until we know what non-highway transportation projects have the most impact, make the most fiscal sense and can be replicated nationally, we should be prepared for the following:

1.               Diminished fuel tax revenues due to decreased driving that continue to hamper the HTF budget in the short term.

2.               The HTF allocations should be used to maintain existing highways and bridges while mandating results on efficient roadway construction methods and materials that reduce the effects of vehicle weight and weather.

3.               Alternative fuels eventually become readily available that reduce emissions by at least 30% and give the public confidence that driving is affordable and environmentally ‘under control’.

4.               All fuels become taxed at the same rate to stabilize the HTF budget.

5.               By 2025, the majority of the Boomer Generation is too old to drive and demand alternative non-highway transportation projects to be implimented.

6.               Right-of-way corridors that were purchased twenty years earlier using the HTF finally become 'necessary' and reduce the impact on the traditional highway system.

7.               Younger generations, who made the shift away from driving years before, already live within relative walking distances to fit their lifestyles as telecommuting increases throughout the nation.

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My answer to the heading (should highway trust funds be used to pay for alternative transportation) is yes.  My answer to the more detailed question, which focuses on increased federal funding for sidewalks and bike paths, is probably no.

Our national infrastructure is not in good shape.  Essential maintenance on our highway system must continue to be a top priority, with a particular emphasis on the need for bridge inspections, maintenance and repairs.

Most of our national highway funding, however, goes to build new urban freeways.  Those budget allocations appear to be made on the assumption that we can somehow pave our way out of congestion.  Benjamin Franklin defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.  After forty years of expanding and widening the Interstate highway system in urban areas and seeing steady increases in congestion and commuting times, we ought to begin to understand that it does not work.

There is significant evidence from studies in both the U.S. and the U.K. that new and expanded highways generate trips.  In fact, some estimates indicate that more than half of the capacity of any new urban freeway will be consumed by new trips.  Of course, those new trips are rarely limited to the new section of highway -- the trip ends add to congestion on frontage roads, urban streets, and sections of the interstate highway that are farther from the urban area and not yet congested.    Larger cities around the nation are using "transportation demand management" to address issues of congestion - yet too few acknowledge the fact that congestion in itself is one of the best forms of demand management. 

Much of the effect of investments in urban and suburban freeways has been seen in significant expansion of our metropolitan areas.  That suburban expansion has led to demand for expensive expansions to sewer and water systems and to the closure of urban schools while taxpayers support the construction of new schools to serve these new highway-oriented towns.  State and local budgets around the country make it clear that current patterns of growth are not fiscally sustainable.  They are also not environmentally sustainable, but that is a different topic for a different day.  Demographic and housing trends suggest that there will be substantial additional demand for housing over the next 30 or 40 years -- but that much of that demand will be for smaller houses on smaller lots and/or for in-town condos and townhouses.  It appears that the 2008 spike in gas prices has actually had an effect on consumer choices -- and that seems likely to affect commuting choices.  Further, it is clear that banks have become considerably more conservative in their lending, and it may be far more difficult for the young family with two (perhaps temporary) jobs to get a loan for a cornfield castle.

But, again, I think the detailed question changed the subject.  I am a big fan of the transportation enhancement funding found in the federal allocations for the last 17 years.  There are clear benefits to the many trails and other amenities that have been built.  I am not sure that devoting more federal money to such facilities, however, is necessary or even desirable.  Local governments need to expand their commitment to building sidewalks and trails.  If they have to spend their own money to do so -- rather than federal money -- they may be more willing to require that developers include pedestrian and bicycle circulation plans for new developments.  The federal money can continue, appropriately, to be used for inter-community links and other major infrastructure.

Where we really need to spend more money on alternative transportation systems is on light-rail systems in smaller cities and metropolitan areas.  Light-rail systems like those in Charlotte, Denver and Portland, actually help to relieve highway congestion, and they support patterns of development that are fiscally sustainable and more consistent with the needs of an aging society with smaller households and smaller borrowing capacity for mortgages.

We also need to recognize that sometimes the "no build" alternative is a good one.  We must continue to invest in important safety improvements and in the significant connections that the Intestate Highway System is supposed to provide between metropolitan areas.  We need to use these difficult fiscal times, however, to reevaluate our continued expenditures on expansions of urban freeways. 

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Remember your old college professor who was more than a bit eccentric, who seemed obviously brilliant but also a little touched? For me, that professor was in a class on cities, and he would ask wildly open-ended questions for which he was seeking very specific answers. Apropos of nothing, he would say things like, “So, what was the most important piece of legislation of the last 100 years?”

The response he was looking for was, naturally, the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956.

While the answer is debatable (women’s suffrage, the Federal Reserve Act, the Civil Rights Act … those were all pretty clutch), his point is tough to argue against: that the Federal-Aid Highway Act—funded by the Highway Trust Fund in that same year’s Highway Revenue Act—was the single greatest city-killer of the century. The creation of an interstate highway network allowed first goods, then jobs, then people to move out of manufacturing cities, leaving urban carcasses to rot in a postindustrial wasteland.

Which just about brings us up to today.

Cities, realizing they can’t survive unless they figure out how to break their oil dependency, are learning to become more sustainable. While “sustainability” is a term that gets bandied about so much as to become almost meaningless, its implications are important: that we use up as few of our natural resources as possible when we’re consuming now, and that we set the stage for the next generation to do the same, only better. They’re not going to do that in a car.

There’s no question that cities would be better, more livable places with fully funded public transit systems, bike-friendly streets and enhanced walkability. Where should the money for that come from? Given its urbicidal history, the Highway Trust Fund seems the perfect candidate.

Call it affirmative action for cities. See also: You broke it, you bought it. If the Highway Trust Fund is responsible for the exodus of jobs and people from our urban centers, it should help pay to bring them back.

Like affirmative action for people, doing so would be an investment on lower spending in the future. As urban transportation projects grow more functional and draw people back into cities, there would be fewer automobiles on the road, fewer vehicle miles traveled, and less wear and tear on your precious, fragile highways. Fund larger-scale transportation initiatives (like high-speed rail) and you’ll see even fewer cars traveling the highways. In other words, spending money on urban transit makes keeping up the highways easier and cheaper. And with fewer cars on the road, everyone benefits, not just city dwellers.

It’s a way to make the old Federal-Aid Highway Act even more important, but this time for the right reasons.

 

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If this problem is addressed conventionally, it seems this is really two questions.

First, should money designed for one purpose be spent on another?  

Second, what is the degree to which two different but related uses of funds need to be considered in the same light?  

At a meta level, we have become too accustomed to robbing Peter to pay Paul; so however much I personally think bikes and walkers if poorly suported should receive a slice of the well-funded car pie since the former adds to health and the latter to death, I am not generally supportive of using HTF dollars to pay for bike paths and pedestrian walkways.  At least not as a permanent funding solution to the problems of our auto-oriented built environment.  Though doing so siphons car dollars (unhealthy) to non-car transit (healthy), doing so keeps the current system (and its underlying governing variable) fundamentally unchanged.

Instead, the question is much better evaluated if seen differently:  not as an either-or proposition, but rather as a problem indicative of a whole system needing to be reconsidered.  

The mere existence of the Highway Trust Fund is a reminder that we obscenely subsidize an industry that facilitates commerce by cost shifting.  This is the underlying problem to solve.  Left intact, such a system perpetuates several fairly serious problems.

One, a cost shifting auto-subsidy slush fund never holds accountable the car (and the infrastructure on which it depends) responsible for the environmental costs it imposes on society.  Just as coal gives us cheap energy on the front end with disastrous costs on the back end, so too does the HTF.  This won't change until the tax at the pump is prohibitive (and we all remember the BTU tax proposals in the early Clinton years and the straw men used in that debate to kill what was a very good idea).  Without accountability, nothing changes.  So the system needs to be redesigned (ie shelve the HTF altogether) in ways that allocate costs at the front end, transparently, and then trigger adjustments in costs for cars and fuel accordingly.  If the real cost of fresh out of season blueberries from Chile is $8.00 a pint in a DC grocery store, and purchases decline when these costs are not subsidized, it probably means that the true benefits and true costs don't justify the purchase.

Two, the HTF and the system of "subsidy expectation" embedded within it by the auto industry and first (construction) and second order (sprawl) consequences, sends the disturbing signal that alternative forms of transit (which also need subsidy) somehow can't pay their way.  This is the old saw that continually undermines funding for Amtrak and rail in general, and itself fuels the errant belief in America that the belchfire system we have is somehow not subsidized.  Furthermore, the HTF serves to validate a kind of transportation amnesia in America where we are led to forget that all transit requires subsidy.

The right way to approach this is to create several parallel trust funds each designed similarly. When you buy a bike, you pay into a bike trust fund.  When you purchase a car or fuel for it, you pay into a car infrastructure trust fund.  When you purchase a home, you pay (in the form of property tax) into a local healthy infrastructure trust fund.  There needs to be a "pay as you go" expectation baked into every facet of American life.  Because each "fund" will have greater and lesser deficits, there will need to be a period of time where robbing Peter to pay Paul is needed.  But this should be temporary until the various funds can be level set and consumers become accustomed to seeing out-of-season blueberries routinely priced at their true and total cost.

By actually charging drivers for the damage they do, there will be a re-calibration about the cost effectiveness of having that third car, and we can then begin to migrate from a country of entitlements to one more oriented towards the true costs of our lifestyles.  Commerce will be compelled to adapt.  Suburban expectations will need to be modified.  And so on.  Only then will being on a bike come into focus as sensible.  Only then will more housing get developed where the jobs are.  Only then will the size of the car start to get smaller.  Only then will rail stop being attacked by the dimwits in Detroit.  Only then will sidewalks matter.  

We've gotten fat.

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Voters do not share Congress’ enthusiasm for federal funding of bike paths and walkways. A national Fabrizio, McLaughlin & Associates survey found that 72% of voters believe the federal government should lead in funding major highway and bridge projects. Only 4% of voters felt the federal government should take the lead in funding bicycle paths (5% for pedestrian paths).

But the question for this week’s blog seems to presume that state and municipalities funded under SAFETEA-LU do not currently receive enough federal funding for new bicycle lanes and pedestrian walkways and want more money for these purposes. In fact, 100% of the Transportation Enhancement program as well as the entire Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality (CMAQ) program could be used for hiker/biker paths and we could have hundreds of new ones. Surprising to many outside-the-Beltway, these programs (CMAQ & enhancements) are funded out of the “Highway Account” of the Highway Trust Fund, are paid for by highway users, and cannot be used for typical highway projects. So there is no need to “allow” states and municipalities to use more of their highway money for bike paths – they certainly have that ability. Of course, I would not support a federal mandate that forces bicycle and pedestrian path priorities above more critical needs that benefit more people. States and municipalities need the flexibility to put limited funding where it is needed most.

It is critical for recipients of federal funds to look quantitatively at benefits and costs, consider the interests of those particular taxpayers (highway users) who supply the revenue, determine how these federally-funded projects fit in with national needs, and weigh alternative projects that also need federal money. When these considerations are taken into account, bicycle paths and walkways do not often rise to the top of state and municipal concerns – particularly when trust fund dollars are scarce and aging infrastructure, congestion and safety problems present enormous problems for the hundreds of millions of people who drive each day.

Concerns about greenhouse gas emissions do not dramatically alter these considerations. If the goal is to reduce as much greenhouse gas as possible, it is absolutely essential to select programs and projects on a cost-per-ton savings. Experts at McKenzie and Company suggest keeping costs below $50 per ton of carbon removed. The enormous costs associated with aggressive, government sponsored behavioral change programs aimed at convincing a tiny percentage of automobile drivers to walk and bike would be prohibitively expensive. But investments in traffic light synchronization, bottleneck removal, and especially research and development of more efficient fuels and engines show great promise. Real environmental benefits cannot be achieved by ideology or utopian planning dogma; they must come from determined engineering efforts that do as much as possible to solve the problem at the lowest possible cost.

93% of voters support the position that fuel taxes and other highway user fees should be dedicated only for highway and bridge improvements. Many States recognize the value of the “user fee” system and provide highway user fees with special protection against diversion.  .

At the federal level, the need for protecting highway user fees is even more evident than at the State level. After all, a federal program should be national in focus. And it is obvious to those outside the beltway that federal taxes on highway users should be used to improve the efficiency of our National Highway System so we can move people and goods and combat the national pandemic of fatal traffic crashes.

Yet here in Washington, the concept of the user fee is consistently weakened by special interest groups clamoring for more diversion. The result is an “obese tent” of project categories that continue to wither the Highway Trust Fund's focus. “Transportation” projects that are inherently local in nature reduce the amount of funding available for congestion relief, safety, aging bridges, and freight corridors. Over time, this trend has created what is now a surface transportation program without focus and priorities – a federal program that has no defined mission that taxpayers can understandor support. Even the definition of “transportation” seems to lose meaning in the federal contextwhen Highway Trust Fundrevenue is spent on museums andoff-highwaybeautification projects.

An ever-growing line of special interest lobbyists appear in the halls of Congress each time a highway bill is due to be authorized. Each lobbyist presents a compelling case that they deserve a slice of the pie. After all, they reason, it’s just a small piece and no one will notice. Plus, the recipients of the funds really like their programs! Meanwhile motorists, truckers, private bus operators, RVers, and motorcyclists dutifully pay their user fees (and offer to pay even more to help the Highway Trust Fund) as the nation's highways and bridges grow more congested and less safe.

Now we have a Highway Trust Fund that teeters on the brink of insolvency. All of the interest groups who receive funding from highway users are united in their call for a user fee increase. It is not a tax, they insist. It is a user fee! And yet who among the bicycle advocates would pitch-in and support a federal bicycle sales or tire tax? Who among the public transit community would agree with the National Surface Transportation Policy Commission’s recommendation for a transit ticket tax to deposit into the Trust Fund? The silence is deafening.

Yet, even as we demand reform and a return to basics for the Highway Trust Fund, highway users are stepping up to the table and offering our support for a user fee increase that serves the enormous backlog of needs highway users see everyday intheir travels. Motorists are used to paying their way and proud to be the only mode that historically receives negative net subsidies from the federal government. Currently, highway users supply about $40 billion each year to the Highway Trust Fund, just about the same amount obligated for FHWA programs in FY 2009. But billions more are spent for non-highway projects, and this is bankrupting the Highway Trust Fund. We acknowledge that the surface transportation bill will continue to fund more than just highway projects. But as we find more revenue to address pressing needs, it is time to hold the line on the diversion. Congress can do the right thing by focusing on putting the trust back into the Highway Trust Fund and developing national priorities for congestion relief, safety, aging bridges & pavements, and freight corridors. These will win over voters and skeptics and lead to a more robust, more transparent, and better-funded surface transportation program.

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