Today, the Reason Foundation, a libertarian think tank, released its 19th Annual Highway Report. It takes an unusually sunny view on U.S. infrastructure as a whole, relying on data such as traffic fatalities in 2008 fell to their lowest levels since the 1960s (a decrease that is mostly explained by decreases in driving due to the recession), the percentage of congested urban Interstates fell below 50% for the first time since 2000 (also the recession), and 23.7% of U.S. bridges — the lowest percentage since 1984 — were structurally deficient or functionally obsolete (though this doesn’t mean much either — fewer obsolete bridges doesn’t mean more safe bridges).
Overall, the data appears to be sound — it’s the interpretation of it where things go awry. The report makes the sweeping statement that its results indicate that state highway conditions are the best they’ve been in 19 years. Which simply doesn’t follow, when you look at where these conclusions are coming from:
“We’re seeing several factors combine to produce significant improvement in highway conditions,” said David T. Hartgen, author of the report and emeritus professor of transportation studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. “Over the last several years, states invested a lot more money to improve pavement and bridges. Spending increased 8 percent from 2007 to 2008, and per-mile spending on state roads has almost tripled since 1984, so you’d hope and expect to see improved performance.”
Ok, except that the report then goes on to essentially null this statement by highlighting the skewed relationship between spending and actual results. In the rankings of most cost-effective state roads, the bottom 15 states basically make up around 90% of the U.S. driving public. New Jersey, which came in at a miserable 45th in the cost-effectiveness rankings, spends dramatically more than every other state on its roads — $1.1 million per mile, to be exact. Florida, ranked 39th, was the second biggest spender, spending $671,000 per mile, while California, ranked 48th, came in at third with $545,000 per mile. In other words, higher spending in no way automatically equals better roads.
There’s also this bit of info, which comes as less than no surprise:
California also squanders a massive amount of transportation money that never makes it onto roads, spending $93,464 in administrative costs for every mile of state road. New York ($89,194 per mile), Massachusetts ($71,982), and New Jersey ($62,748) also compare poorly to states like Texas ($6,529) and Virginia ($6,370) that spend dramatically less on administrative costs.
Then there’s the simply irony of the report as a whole: The largest libertarian group in the country is arguing that an increase in state government spending on infrastructure has led to safer, less crowded roads, despite the fact that many of these states have proved themselves totally incapable of spending their money wisely. So is the implication here that the federal government doesn’t need to step in?
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Pavement conditions on roads in the NY-NJ-CT area are better than they have been in years. You should have seen this place in 1990s. This does not mean that they are not awful, just that they’re better in a relative sense to what they were. So there’s some anecdotal validation. The biggest problem in this area is capacity and connectivity, as opposed to maintenance backlog. The real basket cases of the area, such as the Pulaski Skyway, Outerbridge, Goethals, and the rest, should just be junked anyway whether they can be made structurally sound and smooth or not.
You know what would have been a good entry today? I’ll tell you. With a Cat 4 hurricane bounding its way up the eastern seaboard, how about a piece on how various proposed but never built crossings and roads might have helped with mass evacuations and post-storm resupply, in case they were needed. The cross Long Island Sound crossings that were never built, the relief roads for I-95 in CT (CT 34, Super 7, for a couple of examples), US 9 freeway in NJ, NJ 55 Freeway, you can research many others. The question would be whether the effective opposition to these connectivity and capacity projects places lives at risk. That might have been a good entry. Although another hit piece on Reason is pretty cool too.
Eric, in mass evacuation, you’d want people to use a mode of transportation that’s available to everyone and that has high capacity. Otherwise, you get into the same situation as New Orleans; Louisiana did not lack road capacity, but had no alternatives for people who didn’t own cars, as the evacuation order was issued only after Amtrak and Greyhound pulled out.
Alon, a very large factor in the failure to evacuate New Orleans before Katrina was due the people of New Orleans, and the U.S. generally, having not been through a Katrina previously, not taking it all too seriously. I understand that eastern North Carolina is being evacuated right now. Is this being accomplished via an Outerbabnks trolley system that I wasn’t aware of? By bicycles pedaled by NPR listeners hopped up on organic shade grown coffee?
If you want to evacuate Nassau and Suffolk, for example, via mass transit (to Manhattan I suppose?), well I just don’t know what to call that idea. It’s beyond obvious that Long Island needs crossings off the island that don’t run through NYC for disaster preparedness as well as for economic reasons. The capacity of the road network in NYC is such that a Cat 4 hitting Staten Island would be horrific both for those owning cars and those who can’t get rides from those people.
“Alon, a very large factor in the failure to evacuate New Orleans before Katrina was due the people of New Orleans, and the U.S. generally, having not been through a Katrina previously, not taking it all too seriously. I understand that eastern North Carolina is being evacuated right now. Is this being accomplished via an Outerbabnks trolley system that I wasn’t aware of? By bicycles pedaled by NPR listeners hopped up on organic shade grown coffee?”
There were many people in New Orleans who were without vehicles of any kind. With no public transit system evacuating them, all they could do was work up some bravado and prepare in place. That does not mean they did not take the threat seriously.
I will remind you that the next time NOLA evacuated after Katrina, it took exactly one Amtrak train line to cover that need. Here in Boston, the MBTA can, and will, take part in coastal evacuations if need me, and will more than cover the need.
If you can evacuate all the carless of a major city using one train line that means that there are tons of auto routes out for the 90% plus with access to cars. I understand that you need to evacuate the indigent, but designing a transport system solely with the indigent in mind would be a pretty bizarre tack to take. You’d have no toll roads, no “commuter” rail, seeing as how the indigent are presumably not commuting to work, etc. In any event, you are not going to see fixed rail routes from every conceivable shore point to safe inland locations. Commuting patterns would not support that. In the NYC area, most routes run to and from Manhattan, which is pretty much the lats place you’d want as an evacuation destination. Plus, you can’t effectively bring in freight via a passenger rail system, so how do you plan to resupply, say, Suffolk county. These notions just aren’t thought out.
If you can evacuate all the carless of a major city using one train line that means that there are tons of auto routes out for the 90% plus with access to cars. I understand that you need to evacuate the indigent, but designing a transport system solely with the indigent in mind would be a pretty bizarre tack to take.
It’s also efficient, considering the expenses to be taken. Train tracks are cheaper to lay down, cheaper to maintain, quicker, they carry far more people (and evacuation should be for PEOPLE, not their things), and they don’t jam. There are parts of the US that are utter death traps because the only evacuation routes are roads sure to jam. Recall the evacuation of Galveston, the one that barely happened because of the traffic jams? All those people could have been whisked away without that risk, if only there had been a train line. Cape Cod? Same deal. The roads will jam no matter what. Pity the trains don’t run on the cape anymore.
The Reason report you list has methodology so poor that it can only be the result of a deliberate attempt to be deceptive. Take the computation of administrative costs per mile of road as an example. It counts centerline miles of road instead of lane miles, which means that a mile of 10 lane freeway counts the same as a mile of one lane gravel road. This might be OK if the mix of roads were the same from state to state, but they aren’t. In California, the state only controls the difficult to build roads – either major through routes or roads through remote rural areas where in Virginia, every inch of road in the state is maintained by the state. This difference in the kind of road makes the comparison pretty much meaningless. The comparison is made even less meaningful because Caltrans funds the construction and maintenance of numerous roads that it does not control – both directly and through grants to cities who then perform maintenance on their own. Virginia may be more efficient at administering their roads than California, but from this report, it is impossible to tell.
Interesting. Making the argument that crashes are down and other factors are better is still missing the point that the only reason this is the case is because of the massive amount of funds put into infrastructure and transportation through ARRA (federal stimulus). Bridge safety got a much needed renewed focus after the Minn bridge collapse, so naturally those structures numbers improved. The fact is, fatalities on roadways, safety conditions of roadways and bridges will continue to improve with more funding put toward it. This is what was supposed to happen. The fact is there is much, much more that needs to be done. To me the summary of the report simply says let’s keep doing what we have been doing.
Despite terrible road capacity around New York, it would still be relatively easy to evacuate the masses should the need arise. Commuter rail lines radiate out in all directions, and away from the immediate coast the land elevation rises enough to null the storm surge problem. And don’t forget there is plenty of freight rail infrastructure that could be pressed into service for evacuation purposes. And the Hudson River itself could be a way to evacuate people up into the Hudson Valley.
The author states that “Then there’s the simply irony of the report as a whole: The largest libertarian group in the country is arguing that an increase in state government spending on infrastructure has led to safer, less crowded roads”. I afraid I don’t see the irony. I don’t believe that libertarians are against all government–they aren’t anarchists–but they want a very limited government. From what I can tell of their philosophy, they believe that governments should spend money only on core concerns, like infrastructure, defense, law enforcement, etc. And they are praising state spending, not federal spending. I think they also like states to have more control than the federal government.
To Mr. Cole: I don’t see how one can credit the ARRA for this improvement when it was signed into law in the Spring of 2009 and the report seems to cover 2008.
“Despite terrible road capacity around New York, it would still be relatively easy to evacuate the masses should the need arise. ”
You ever try to get out of NYC on a Friday afternoon in the summer? By any method of transport?
Done that on Amtrak, Eric, without much more problems than the usual crowded foot traffic around Penn. Station.
New Orleans didn’t lack the capacity to move the car-less out of harm’s way, they lacked the brainpower. There were acres of school buses and city transit vehicles parked in flooded lots that could have been used to get everyone out of town. Incompetent municipal and state leadership was to blame.
I’ve also noticed the author’s tendency to equate libertarians with anarchists. Limited gov’t doesn’t mean no government at all, and there has always been a state vs. feds tangle over spending and control.
Putting aside the debate over mode of escape, the fact is, Long Island and Cape Cod do not need to evacuate entirely during a hurricane, regardless of the magnitude. They are large enough pieces of real estate that storm surge is only an issue on the extreme periphery and if you’re smart about it, and stay indoors away from windows, the wind is tolerable.
Physically, the outer banks of North Carolina or Galveston are completely different places from Long Island or Cape Cod. Long Island and Cape Cod are land masses that have barrier islands around them, Galveston and the outer banks are barrier islands.
After Edouard in 1996 created 8-hour back-ups on the Mid-Cape Highway, it was determined that emergency management would urge visitors to leave early, but the general plan is to provide shelters on the Cape away from the coast.
Today, as Earl approaches there is no general evacuation order for Cape Cod, but the largest high schools on the Cape are open as shelters for people in low-lying areas near the coast.
Like W.D. Heiser, I don’t see any irony in a libertarian group’s view that differences in road quality are no cause for federal intervention. The whole point of the states’ rights / libertarian philosophy is that as a Texan, the quality of roads in New Jersey are not my problem, and my taxes should not be used to support their excessive incompetence. Personally, I take the “promote the general welfare” promise of the Constitution seriously, and I don’t mind giving some of my taxes to NJ for roads as long as they give some of their taxes to me, possibly in different areas where Texas is deficient.
Texas isn’t subsidizing New Jersey. It gets 94 cents in federal spending per dollar it contributes in federal taxes, making it a slight net tax donor. New Jersey gets 57. If you want to complain about tax money going to other states, complain to money hogs like Alaska, North Dakota, Virginia, and New Mexico. Leave the Northeast out of it.
I don’t believe that libertarians are against all government
Some libertarians support cops and courts. Some don’t. That’s pretty much it for government they support.
It is strange how most libertarians (and conservatives) are so pro-road and against public transit, when both typically involve similar levels of government intervention and subsidy.
The point that Dean is making is that if the states spent money on roads and etc. that came via federal stimulus, then all of the states are subsidizing each other.
Just a wild guess – they don’t want government to spend tax money on projects that are too big for private enterprise.
Winston commented about the apparent deliberate effort to distort the road mileage, and when I look at the reference highway mileage table HM-10 for 2008, I can’t see any resemblance to the tables in the Reason report. If they are using straight centerline miles instead of lane miles, that would make the entire report crap, I think. Can anyone help me with this? I have this same experience most of these report references, they never match the statements they make. Someone show me how this works, how you get the Reason report numbers out of their own reference. Thanks, B
The “Reason” Foundation should be described as a LIE-bertarian group. They have no ideology except to serve their corporate paymasters, they make up whatever they like to reach the conclusions they have predetermined in advance, and they most certainly don’t believe in libertarianism (which is a branch of anarchism).
The presence of a few genuine, honest researchers like Radley Balko at groups like Cato and Reason does not make them legit.