Sometimes the title doesn’t really go with the subtitle, and this one is one of the all-time greats. From a USDOT press release:
American Driving Reaches Eighth Month of Steady Decline
Trend Signals Urgent Need for New Highway Financing, Officials Say
I know, of course, that a reduction in driving reduces the gas tax receipts that fund roads, but if highway use was skyrocketing, I have no doubt that these same “officials” would be pointing to the need for more road construction. We’re often accused of being rail dead-enders (and I suppose we are), but when more driving is an argument for roads, and less driving is an argument for more roads, I have trouble imagining a scenario where you don’t call for more roads.
Snark aside, we have finite resources to subsidize the various transportation modes. We can spend it on a mode that’s increasingly expensive for working people to use, or we can fund one that’s better for poor people, the environment, and public health. As a bonus for the latter, we send less money to Venezuela, Russia, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. Why this is a difficult decision (for anyone who isn’t a major stockholder in an oil company) simply escapes me.
Photo from http://www.undiscoveredscotland.co.uk
Why? People are really used to their cars.
They need to continue the sprawl subsidy. If that dries up, a whole building formula gets wrecked.
Our highway maintenance has been neglected long enough. It’s an unfortunate reality that we actually need to increase our highway spending to keep our infrastructure usable. Tolls should be considered as should a halt on development of new roads in many cases.
However, we also need to greatly expand our investment in the transit infrastructure that has been frequently ignored in this country.
When I first heard about it, I thought the Trans-Texas Corridor project sounded crazy. But now I think it’s probably the only non-subsidized answer for the aging US highway infrastructure. For those that have not heard of it, it’s basically a privately funded toll super-interstate. The state gets revenue not only from tolls, but also from the utility corridor and leasing the land for service stops. I’m certainly not advocating building any of these in the Pacific Northwest, but some of the ideas could certainly be incorporated.
Most important part of the TTC? The Texas T-Bone. HSR for Texas, yay!
Don’t worry the Trans-Texas Corridor is still crazy. Making it easy for China to deliver goods to Mexico and then truck them up the US (not paying as much in fee’s) is not good for us at all.
Everytime I-605 gets floated up around here, they look to this road as an example. The last incarnation of it was the “Northwest Commerce Corridor” or something along those lines and was going to go from Lewis County to Bellingham, looping Seattle and the eastside. Basically it would be a broad swath of land through the snoqualmie valley and other foothill adjacent valleys with a 6 lane highway, utility corridor, and high speed rail transit. Even when gas was 1.10 a gallon the idea didn’t go very far; the time savings between driving traffic free 30 miles east of Seattle vs driving through Seattle at rush hour was about 20 minutes if I recall; hardly worth the expense of a several billion dollar corridor and its likely the tolls wouldnt cover the costs of even maintenance.
Of course this has already been tried, and proven a dismal failure – it’s called I-405, which was built in the (then) boonies to bypass downtown Seattle.
Not only that, but the highway system-as you point out-would butt up against where the Cascade foothills really do start in earnest, which means development would be limited and sparse.
So then why would we spend billions of dollars on a highway system that only serves the area immediate to its west flank, with little activity coming from the east flank?
A bulk of the problems can be solved with simple repaving. When I-35 into central San Antonio was re-paved, slow downs decreased. As paving wore away, they increased.
Just perfect paving materials and stop giving the asphalt companies so much sway.
I make no apologies for being a strong believer in the primacy of rail. It has far greater capacity than a bus system, is much more scalable than highways, rail cars have much longer life cycles than a bus, rail drives investment into targeted areas, and pro-actively manages growth and traffic flow, whereas a highway or bus system will always be reactive to changing traffic patterns.
Increasing capacity on existing rail is also far better of a customer experience than increasing capacity on a highway. Take 405 for example.
In Scenario 1, 405 is originally built as a multi-lane highway, and some years later congestion drives expansion, i.e. additional lanes. Funding and land appropriation issues aside, once work begins, as I driver I have to experience years of construction slow-downs and re-routes as existing lanes are blocked off, shoulders are widened into new lanes, regrading, repaving, and restriping take place, etc. And since highways don’t work as well with zoning changes (traffic flow is not channeled into certain areas to the degree that rail can), then congestion is not really reduced, as additional capacity to the highway merely moves congestion from the highway to the on/off ramps, then to boulevards and their intersections, and finally to store parking lots and neighborhood roads. To sum, as a driver experiencing Scenario 1, I am in for years of construction headaches, and when relief comes, it will be brief and ephemeral. My tax dollars at work.
Under Scenario 2, let’s say that 405 was not originally a highway, but a high capacity rail system. Again, growth creates congestion, and with funding (no land appropriation issues) aside, my driver/rider experience goes something like this: I show up at the station one morning, and I notice an extra car on the 7:30 train. Or, I show up one morning, and notice that instead of trains being 10 minutes apart, they are now 5 minutes apart. If I miss the 7:30, I only have to wait for the 7:35. Incredibly, the system not only expanded capacity, but raised the quality of service at the same time.
That’s it. No construction headaches, no re-routing, no slow-downs, no year after year of wondering when the project will finally be completed, no experience of finally having a nice new highway lane, only to hit massive congestion once I exit…and the new highway lane itself is congested after six months.
I will take Scenario 2 over Scenario 1 any day…
Of course I also like rails better than highways, but have you ever ridden the New York Subway at rush hour?
Train systems become uncomfortably congested as well as road systems. In fact, if you look at the minimum headways of link light rail coupled with the maximum number of cars, and fill them with a “crush load”, you still have less capacity than I-5 does.
Yes, trains are scalable, but they reach their limit, and the way we are planning ours, Link might reach its limit a lot sooner than we think.
This especially becomes an issues when you funnel all train traffic down one 60 mile long line.
if we reach I-5 capacity in 1/5th the space then I still think it’s a win.