Reason did us all a real service by rolling out its analysis of the state of repair of the road system this week. It's good news indeed that in spite of all the rhetoric about infrastructure falling apart, road conditions have been improving so a small percentage of them are in "poor" condition. On the other hand, a substantial percentage of bridges are still "structurally deficient" and there is tremendous variation between states vis-a-vis deferred maintenance.

The upshot, I think, is that "fix-it-first" is a challenge that a fiscally constrained nation can tackle successfully. We're already headed that way. Road and bridge repair jobs get a lot of bang for the buck, and as reporter Michael Grunwald pointed out they are fiscally responsible since they take care of a backlog but don't generate more future repair costs.

The interstate highway network in this nation is extensive at about 50,000 miles, and along with fixing it (and other infrastructure such as public transportation) something else we should do is develop serious goals regarding its expansion. A distinctly unserious goal -- not least because the analytical methodology justifying it isn't clear, leading me to think that it's simply state highway bureaucracy wish lists stapled together -- is AASTHO's "let's upgrade 20,000 miles of that and add another 30,000 miles on top of that." In other words, in the post-Interstate-HIghway-System era, state highway agencies propose - surprise! - building a second one as if the next fifty years of transportation needs will simply be a carbon copy of the last fifty years.

As a friend remarked to me yesterday, our age is a bit reminiscent of 'post-modernism." That name stuck because no one really knew what was next. We are in the "post-Interstate-Highway era" but no one really knows what's next. What we need, in addition to targeting the remaining repair backlog as the President proposes, is some smart, sophisticated scenario-building.

What should the next system look like? And here's where I agree with Emil and the BPC - it should be based on performance targets and measurement, not mode-siloed pork-barrel spending. Transportation is a system. It's a set of means, not ends. What ends do we want it to achieve? What are some scenario options for achieving them?What are the barriers and opportunities on the pathways? What are the tradeoffs? I'd love to see some serious, thoughtful scenarios. And I'll bet the policymakers and the public would like to see that from the transportation community too.

While “Fix It First” is a start, it is an approach that’s too simple to truly meet our country’s transportation needs. We have to understand that not all roads are created equal. Where the focus should be is a) prioritizing the maintenance of highways, bridges and public transportation systems that are critical for the nation’s economy, and b) expanding the network to support the growth of economic opportunity in the future. In the long term, expanding systems to meet future needs will be more beneficial than patching aging systems that were intended to meet the needs of years gone by.

Former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, co-founder of the bipartisan Building America’s Future Educational Fund, recently said “we need to get real” about the nation’s infrastructure needs.

The leadership must come from the president. It will take President Obama stepping forward with revenue proposals, not just spending proposals, if anything is going to happen at the federal level.

While it may be painful to admit, there are some “no brainers” that are critically important to keep in mind:

First, it’s unrealistic to expect us to divert $20 billion to $30 billion out of the general fund every time the Highway Trust Fund gets into trouble. Talk about a fiscal cliff; this just wreaks havoc with the nation’s efforts to reduce the deficit.

Second, we know how to get the vast majority of users to pay for surface transportation. We’ve been doing it at the federal level for the last 80 years, and the states have been doing it even longer. Raising the gas tax is the most frequently discussed solution that can be implemented quickly enough to address the problem in the short term.

Third, we need to remove the remaining prohibitions on tolling interstates. That will ensure our country's economic arteries have the funding they need – from their users – to add capacity and remain in a state of good repair. It also will encourage alternative revenue sources -- such as private investment -- to leverage limited public funds for necessary projects that otherwise can’t be funded fast enough to meet the public’s needs.

Now that his second term is underway, I hope our president will show the leadership we need to get our nation’s transportation system – and how we pay for it – moving in the right direction so it’s a blessing for generations to come.

Readers of this blog will be interested to learn of a new Reason Foundation study released today (February 21). The study has found that the condition of America's public roads has improved in seven key areas including deficient bridges and pavement condition. The report is based on a variety of sources, primarily from the states themselves as reported to the federal government from 1989 through 2008. ("Are Highways Crumbling? State and U.S. Highway Performance Trends, 1989-2008", Policy Study 407). reason.org/files/us_highway_performance_20_year_trends_full_study.pdf

"There are still plenty of problems to fix, but our roads and bridges aren't crumbling," said David Hartgen, lead author of the study. "The overall condition of the public road system is getting better and you can actually make the case that it has never been in better shape."

It will be interesting to compare this report with the 2013 "Report Card for America's Infrastructure" of the American Society of Civil Engineers, which is to be published on March 19 as announced above by Mr. Natale. Hopefully the public will be spared having to reconcile two widely conflicting sets of findings and conclusions.

America needs to invest in its economic future now, and one of the best and most effective ways of doing that is to invest in our own infrastructure. There is broad agreement on the need to create jobs and improve the economy. For the U.S. economy to be the most competitive in the world, we need a first class infrastructure system. Yet today, our infrastructure systems are failing to keep pace with the current and expanding needs, and investment is faltering.

Without question, America’s infrastructure is in need of an upgrade. ASCE’s 2009 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure awarded America’s infrastructure a “D.” But what does a “D” mean? In our recent series of economic studies, titled Failure to Act, we found that if America continues down its current path on infrastructure investment, America will lose $3.1 trillion in GDP, $1.1 trillion in trade value, and 3.5 million jobs—all by 2020. American businesses must be positioned to compete in the ever-emerging global economy, and currently, our nation is not keeping pace.

The President’s mention of infrastructure in his State of the Union address was encouraging though it was clearly short on details. President Obama’s “Fix-It-First ” plan is a similar strategy being implemented by Republican governors across the country, including Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin’s Bridge Improvement and Turnpike Modernization Plan and former Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels’s Major Moves initiative. New chairman of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, Rep. Bill Shuster (R-PA), has said he “will focus on strengthening America’s national transportation network to make us more efficient, more competitive and more prosperous. This is an important responsibility of government — especially the Federal government.” The presumption that Congressional division is a foregone conclusion is far too cynical, when both parties routinely advocate for infrastructure investment as a solution to building better communities and fostering business growth.

On March 19th, the America Society of Civil Engineers will release the 2013 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, a comprehensive assessment on the state of our nation’s core infrastructure. The Report Card will offer political leaders, businesses, and American families a clearer picture of our current needs and where we must improve. Infrastructure investment is an investment in our nation’s economic present and future, and we look forward to working with both parties on building a better America, and delving into the details.

As any accountant or financial executive knows, there is a difference between investing and spending. However, given the nation's fiscal challenges, persistent budget deficits, and high unemployment, voters and members of Congress seem resistant, to say the least, to an expanded national program of funding transportation projects, however described. Resources for investment are limited, and there is a need for those investments to be targeted on those elements of transportation infrastructure that are most essential to economic growth and to other national benefits. Indeed, the case can be made that such "wise" transportation investments are more, not less, urgent in the current economic and fiscal environment.

Despite ASCE's failing grades for the nation's infrastructure and its quantification of a funding gap of over $2 trillion to bring America's infrastructure to a state of good repair, as Ken Orski and others have noted, the American public does not generally perceive a national crisis or a transportation system that is unsafe and at physical risk. Instead, transportation consumers experience selective conditions of aging, outmoded, and severely congested facilities at the state and local levels. In these circumstances we have often witnessed the successful passage of legislation or public initiatives to reconstruct or expand specifically identified transportation facilities and to put in place the dedicated revenue streams to support such programs, even in the face of opposition to increases in federal funding for these purposes.

At the national level we have not, however, experienced such broad interest in greatly expanded investment in the nation's transportation infrastructure and for the sustainable revenues to support it. While the President is to be commended for noting the role and importance of investment in the nation's transportation infrastructure, he has consistently failed to make specific proposals for establishing sustainable revenue streams to provide adequate investment resources or to be precise about the programmatic reforms that will insure that limited resources will be invested in those projects and programs that promise the greatest economic and fiscal benefits.

If we have been unsucessful, in making the case for transportation infrastructure investment, based on need, perhaps we will be more effective, in making an argument, based on benefits and the economic promise of well-targeted and strategic funding. Such investments depend upon the programmatic reforms advocated by the Bipartisan Policy Center's National Transportation Policy Project (NTPP) and others over the last several years, and toward which last year's reauthorization act, MAP-21, made important, if only initial, steps, that is, transportation policies and programs based on clearly articulated national goals and on principles of performance, outcomes, and accountability.

But the sustainable funding, on which these investments must rest, will come, if at all, only in the context of a broader and more comprehensive resolution of the nation's fiscal, tax, and budget deficit issues. Increasingly, over the last few years, we have been moving away from a user-based funding system to one more broadly dependent on general revenues (at the federal, as well as the state and regional, levels). Perhaps, that is our future.

The key is that the sources of sustainable funding for transportation infrastructure investment should be openly discussed, and federal policy should promote innovation and experimentation by states and localities on this subject. If the federal government's own support for transportation investment is to remain stagnant (if not to be declining), then it is incumbent on the federal government to remove barriers to state and local funding innovations and to provide incentives to states and localities to undertake new and effective ways to establish sustainable revenue streams to support their own transportation investments.

Perhaps, a convincing program to direct scarce capital resources to those transportation investments that promise economic returns and broad social and environmental benefits will be more successful, in building support for sustainable funding. As we have not found a successful alternative to such an approach at the national level for over two decades, it seems worth a continuing effort.

We should all applaud the President's call for additional infrastructure investment. No, we should not tire of his constant plea to improve our roads, bridges and rail systems. What should turn us off is the mindless objection of the Republicans for critical national investments, whether they be for infrastructure, education, or scientific advances. Investments are not the same as spending and investments are critical to the nation' future well being.

If the President's insistence on coming up with the same proposals over and over again and expecting different results is not exactly insanity (reputedly Einstein's definition) it suggests a certain frivolity. In fact, as reported by POLITICO, a White House official said the proposal will "not necessarily" take the form of a legislative proposal. In other words, it is not to be treated seriously.

No one disputes the President's ---and infrastructure advocates'--- claim that some of America's bridges and other transportation facilities are reaching the limit of their useful life and need replacing. Nor does any one disagree about the need to expand infrastructure to meet the needs of a growing population and economy. But this does not rise to the level of a national crisis requiring a new federally funded $50 billion crash program. The condition of transportation infrastructure varies widely from state to state as numerous studies by the transportation research group TRIP have shown. Most states maintain their transportation assets in a state of good repair and only a few require extensive transportation modernization. This argues for a project-by-project approach to upgrading aging infrastructure that is targeted and well documented, rather than a massive new national program of public works.

The nation simply cannot afford blindly to throw money at the problem. The near absence of support for the President's infrastructure initiative in Congress as well as in the transportation community, suggests that the proposal, like its predecessors, is "dead on arrival."

For a fuller discusssion, see my "Infrastructure Advocacy and Public Credibility" at www.infrastructureUSA.org/category/blog

As George Will noted, in laying waste to the annual State of the Union address in this past Sunday’s Washington Post (“the most embarrassing ceremony in the nation’s civic liturgy, were the nation still capable of being embarrassed by its puerile faith in presidential magic,” http://tinyurl.com/b8fk6q5), President Obama said that nothing in his proposed list of expenditures “should increase our deficit by a single dime.” Since the Highway Trust Fund will not generate a $50 billion surplus over the course of the President’s second term, and since what it does generate has already been spoken for, you don’t need to be a logician to deduce that “Fix It First” requires either an immediate increase in the gas tax or the immediate adoption of some alternative to the gas tax that produces increased revenues. Raise your hand if you think the Congress is capable of doing either.

Wait, you say, what about the President’s plan to fund infrastructure out of the savings attributable to “reductions in spending due to ending the wars”? Last time I checked, those savings – whatever they may be -- can be diverted in that way only if Congress decides to spurn the deficit reduction they would represent and appropriate an equivalent amount of money for surface transportation improvements out of the General Fund – in other words, an appropriation that will be seen not only as yet another Highway Trust Fund bailout, but a bailout that dwarfs all previous bailouts. It is not going to happen.

It took climate change diplomats at United Nations conferences to invent the term that best fits the wish list that appears in every SOTU address. They are “aspirational goals.” When you adopt an aspirational goal, you haven't committed to do anything -- other than possibly to aspire to a goal. Obama’s SOTU address wasn’t the first to include a list of aspirational goals and it won’t be the last. At least he articulated some goals that it would be nice to accomplish, and “Fix It First” may well be high on that list.

That’s why the President's nomination of the next Secretary of Transportation is so vitally important to the nation, and it’s why the Senate Commerce Committee should make clear during its vetting of the nomination that it expects nothing less than transformational leadership from DOT during the President’s second term. The government’s coffers are dry, and think tank bookshelves are groaning under the weight of reports recommending fresh and contemporary ways of financing transportation infrastructure. The next Secretary will take over a Department whose senior political staff are more than capable of serving up the big ideas that Congress and the country want, or at least need, to hear. But only the Secretary of Transportation, actively and visibly supported by a President who cares, can sell those ideas successfully. Because the President’s speeches over the past four years leave no doubt that he does care, the stars could be lined up more propitiously than at any time in the recent past.

To repeat yet again that shopworn cliché, a fiscal crisis is a terrible thing to waste. This is DOT’s moment and it is President Obama’s moment. Let’s hope they don’t squander it.