Stimulus Buying A Lot Of New Highways, Not Much New Transit

Transportation funds from the stimulus bill are being spent stupidly, it seems. The $35 billion dedicated to roads, bridges and transit could be creating many more jobs and doing a lot more to improve the country’s infrastructure.

Smart Growth America came to this conclusion in a new report looking at the first 120 days of stimulus spending. The document highlights the fact that *repairing* roads and bridges is substantially more effective at creating jobs than *building* roads and bridges. Plus a lot of our roads are in crappy shape anyway (about a third might fall into this informal category), so more than just the jobs angle, it’s like mama taught you: take care of the things you got before you start buying new ones. Yet $6.6 billion, or about a third of the stimulus roads money allocated so far, is going toward new highways.

Another transportation priority should be building out a more serviceable transit network. But SGA finds that only a tiny percentage of stimulus funds–$185 million–has been allocated to public transportation. This in a country where 50 percent of people have no access to it at all and many of those who do find the existing service next to useless.

Now, we are not against building roads as a matter of principle. In some places and in some cases it makes good sense. But at this point in our history, as a sprawly and overly auto-dependent nation, it’s not something that should be happening on a large scale.

One thing to keep in mind: these decisions are made by the states. Clearly Wyoming is going to have different ideas of how to spend the money than Delaware. But there aren’t really any federal requirements that would push states to establish appropriate goals and distinguish good projects and from the porky bad ones that will clog our national arteries. Also, a lot of spending decisions are revealed to the public only after they’ve been made, limiting the ability of interested citizens to set state and local officials on the right track.

This is not just hippie talk. As the report points out: “global consultant McKinsey & Co. found and reported to the Georgia Governor and Legislature that a portfolio of transportation investments projects in greater Atlanta containing no new [road] lane miles would produce more than 100 times the economic return of a lane‐mile expansion portfolio.” In other words, investing in infrastructure for transit, bikes, and pedestrians pays off big. Building more connector highways, not at all. Even big corporate consulting firms agree on this point.

Kentucky, Kansas, Arkansas and Florida are the goats here — each spending 77 percent or more of their highway funds building new roads. Predictably, many small east coast states are not spending a dime of stimulus money on new roads — but that’s also true of North Dakota, Alaska, and (almost) Nevada.