Refocusing Political Transit Agendas

With the new agenda of President-elect Barack Obama, Time magazine has issued their Top 5 Agenda Items for the new administration. The article can be found here.

I found it interesting that the #1 agenda item was a New New Deal, stressing new government funding for energy-efficient and mass transit means of transportation, highlighting DC's defunct methods of funding America's infrastructure.

Here's the most important of the article that correlates with our Urban Policy discussions:

America's infrastructure is broken, with more than 150,000 structurally deficient bridges, 3,500 unsafe dams and antiquated sewer systems that need an estimated $400 billion worth of improvements. That's a big long-term problem for America's economic competitiveness. But the Federal Government's two basic approaches to infrastructure are broken too. The most notorious is known as "earmarking," the stashing of pet projects into larger bills by members of Congress, and while Obama was correct to remind John McCain that earmarks are only 1% of the budget, they're a lousy way to decide what gets built. An example: the $23 billion water-resources bill crammed with 900 projects for the already overloaded Army Corps of Engineers. These projects won't be funded according to need, cost-effectiveness or relation to national priorities; they'll be funded according to congressional clout. The same goes for the 6,300 earmarks — including Alaska's "bridge to nowhere" — stuffed into the $286 billion transportation bill.

Profligate as that sounds, earmarks made up less than 10% of the bill's cost. The rest of the cash went to state transportation agencies to spend as they pleased — often on their own roads to nowhere, which is why the bill is usually called the "highway bill" in Washington. Most states consistently favor roads over mass transit, building new roads over repairing old ones and building those new roads in rural rather than metropolitan areas. That means more sprawl, more traffic, more smog, more foreign oil and more carbon emissions, but the feds don't seem to care. In fact, the current archaic federal rules encourage all these biases; strict cost-benefit analyses are required for transit projects, but for highway projects, you can pretty much just roll out the asphalt.

It will be very interesting to see if that by refocusing government funding and earmarks, if the refocus will eventually find the problems of urban sprawl and urban blight.