Phineas Baxandall

The data on driving don’t tell a story about people who “suddenly hate driving.” They show a long-term decline in vehicle miles that should raise concern about whether governments are building the wrong stuff.

After six decades of almost uninterrupted increases in driving, we’ve now seen eight years in a row in which Americans on average have reduced their driving miles. Our largest generation, the Millennials are rising into adulthood and leading the trend toward less driving. Millennials will be the chief users of whatever new projects get approved today, and they will chiefly foot the bill. The huge, unprecedented changes in travel behavior should deeply inform discussion of our transportation priorities.

Unfortunately, official forecasts of future vehicle travel continue to assume steady increases in driving, despite the changing trends seen over the past decade. Those federal forecasts are used to justify spending vast sums on new and expanded highways, even as repairs to exis

Turning TIFIA into a first-come-first-served funding pool means it will no longer prioritize projects that provide the most public benefits.

TIFIA has been vastly oversubscribed in past years, mostly with applications from private toll roads. Many of these applications, previously rejected because they couldn’t compete based on broader performance criteria, can now be quickly resubmitted. Newly eligible transit systems like LA’s, by contrast, must navigate new rules for public revenue sources and grouped project applications, and may wind up being too late to receive a penny. When next year’s project list is announced, TIFIA may come to stand for “Tolling Is Faster In Applications.”

There are downsides to converting TIFIA into a financing pool for the first applications that show they can generate a profit. Transportation systems are interconnected and create externalities that aren’t reflected in the bottom line of each individual project. The benefits of the FasTracks light rail system in Denver, for instance, include encoura

The Senate bill is uncontroversial because it emerged out of many months of compromise and bipartisan consensus building. It makes do under an austerity budget without taking on big issues such as reducing oil consumption or shifting investment to reflect the unprecedented national shift since 2004 toward less driving (confirmed by recent data revisions). The Senate bill’s signature programs stretch dollars by ensuring that repair and maintenance of existing assets isn’t neglected and that performance is finally tracked.

Three other relatively small provisions stand out as ways to deliver more bang for the buck or find revenue in common-sense places.

The first would remove privatized toll road miles from consideration when allocating federal highway funds. When a state sells off responsibility for maintaining a stretch of highway to a private company, it could no longer also ask taxpay

The notion that America's transportation system is funded by "user fees" has always been something of a myth. Highways do not – and, except for brief periods in our nation’s history, never have – paid for themselves through the taxes that highway advocates label “user fees.” The House drill-to-drive proposal isn't serious as a way to finance future needs, but it creates more political mischief that will distract Congress and the public from serious debate.

To have a meaningful national debate over transportation policy – particularly at a time of tight public budgets – it is important to get past the myths and address the real, difficult choices America must make for the 21st century.

As our 2011 report, Do Roads Pay for Themselves? Setting the Record Straight on Transportation Funding documents, federal fees are only tenuously con

It’s pretty basic arithmetic. If states didn't divert 57 percent of highway money to build new lane miles, they could double spending on repair and maintenance without raising an additional dime of new taxes, tolls or federal bailouts.

America’s roads are in disrepair largely because of the wrong priorities.

A recent example is Wisconsin, where Governor Walker ran TV commercials touting how he would invest in repairing the states roads and bridges. But his transportation budget last month instead cuts funds for local road repair while committing the state to four new highway expansions that could cost more than $2 billion. This month’s report by WISPIRG found these projects are unjustified and appear unnecessary. For example:

The official data cited for the I-90 widening is both nearly 10 years old and does not support widening lanes as a measure to mitigate congestion. Additionally, th

Perhaps there are no responses the first day because there isn’t really a debate. Every president since Richard Nixon has proclaimed the need to free ourselves from dependence on oil, and 70 percent of oil is used for transportation. Public transportation solutions have likewise been shown time and time again to be far more energy-efficient than cars. This much is clear.

The real debate instead is: how much America will continue to subsidize auto travel compared to investing to encourage ridership on more efficient public transportation.

The issue is not whether our highways systems require investment but whether we can afford to neglect maintenance and repair of existing roads and bridges while diverting such large federal sums to new and wider highways. Like the U.S. Conference of Mayors, U.S. PIRG agrees that, especially in this time of scarce resources, federal highway expansion should not be a priority.

The majority of major roadways in urban areas – where 80 percent of Americans live and work – are determined by engineers to be in less than good shape. An unacceptable 11.5 percent of America’s highway bridges are structurally deficient.

The poor state of our roads and bridges is no accident. Political forces often undermine a strong commitment to maintenance: Members of Congress, state legislators and local politicians thrive on ribbon-cuttings while they can often defer repairs that won’t garner political recognition. Outside contractors exert additional pressure by lobbying for new construction projects rather t