Talking Headways Podcast: Giving Away TIGER and Transit Money to Wall Street

This week Beth Osborne of T4America and Kevin DeGood of The Center for American Progress join us to discuss infrastructure and the new administration. We talk about the budget process — “skinny” or “thick”? — the possible benefits and drawbacks of public-private partnerships, and the difference between funding and financing.

It's Not Devolution, It's Spite

There's been a lot of discussion about devolution over the last few years.  We even had Bruce Katz from Brookings on the podcast to talk about the phenomenon in England where up until 2000, London didn't have a mayor or much say over local matters. 



But even before the new administration made the idea more real with threats to the New Starts and TIGER capital transit funding programs, there's been a push to discuss the idea even more.

On this blog, the idea was passed over briefly when talking about Caltrain funding getting pulled out right at the last second after over a half decade of planning for electrification, and I even think that devolution of some kinds might be a good idea.  But it shouldn't be punishment for political opposition.

But this weekend in Forbes another economics professor, this time libertarian leaning Jeffrey Dorfman at the University of Georgia, has come out in favor of what he calls de-federalization.  What we all know as devolution. 

While many city, state, and federal politicians are decrying the very idea of such transit funding cuts based on the harm that will befall their transit systems without access to such federal funding, what is missing from their argument is any explanation of why the federal government should have been giving them money in the first place.

He then goes on with the tired arguments of "transit doesn't pay for itself" and an interesting new wrinkle for me that sounds a bit too "let them eat transportation cake" for my taste "let's give poor people a tax credit".

Of course roads don't pay for themselves either but driving is such a virtuous activity it shouldn't be hindered in any way right?  Texas even calculated how much tax people would have to pay to break even.  But those analysis were taken down perhaps because they were too true.  Good thing we captured them.

Applying this methodology, revealed that no road pays for itself in gas taxes and fees. For example, in Houston, the 15 miles of SH 99 from I-10 to US 290 will cost $1 billion to build and maintain over its lifetime, while only generating $162 million in gas taxes.

That's a 16% farebox recovery just for the tracks. The Center for American Progress also did an analysis looking at major roads and whether they paid for themselves.  The maps are great if you get a chance to look.

But then Professor Dorfman gets to some points I kind of agree with, but for different reasons.

For the most part, transit systems are local matters. Using federal taxes to collect money from the whole country and then send it back to each local transit system is a terribly inefficient way to raise money for transit and is also inherently unfair as different locales receive back either more or less than they paid in.

I would make the same arguments for red states taking blue state hand outs for freeways to fuel sprawl.  But here comes the cognitive dissonance... 

This common practice of using federal funds for local projects in order to hide the true cost should be stopped. The federal government should pay for the things that are truly national in scope (like the interstate highway system).

Stop. 

The only thing that is truly national in scope are the parts of the highway system that are outside of major cities where trucks conduct interstate commerce.  The majority of traffic in cities are not trucks just passing through. It's traffic for regional trips.  Houston's I-10 is now 26 lanes west of the 610 loop, those were created for the Louisiana to New Mexico traffic right?

But aren't most transit trips commute trips as well? And isn't interstate commerce done by train on tracks freight rail companies own and pay property taxes on? Should trucking companies be paying for the roads the operate on or do we see them as a public good? 

We can flip this back and forth and argue what is "national in scope" all day I'm sure.  The point is that it's often based on ideology and what is virtuous in the eye of the person doing the analysis.  In a true libertarian world they'd have a user fee on everything.  But I'm not sure how that works on local streets or things we want to incentivize like say, using more compact transportation modes for traveling into a dense city center because that's where economic activity happens due to agglomeration effects.

But this gets to another point about local decision making as well.  Urban areas are set up to be ruled by the forests.  MPOs are often stacked with suburban representatives and regional transit is hard to create with so many fiefdoms.  In a discussion about the recent highway collapse in Atlanta, New York Magazine goes through all the reasons why having 29 counties in a single metropolitan area makes it impossible to build useful transit. Our extremely racist urban pasts.

Metro Atlanta is scattered across 29 counties, which has made it easy to confine public transit narrowly to the heavily African-American Fulton and Dekalb counties.

Atlanta's history on this is well documented.  But what about other states who have libertarians who hate transit to begin with.  Like say...Texas.

Burton’s bill, which has passed through committee and is awaiting attention from the full Senate, would require that every city through which a commuter line passes hold an election before federal funds are accepted for the projects.

There's a lot to unpack in a bill like this.  Such as why does a city have veto power over a regional project.  Why are rail projects singled out?  I've asked this before, but why does a city need to vote for every single transit project but not a single highway project.  They are both regional projects.  They are both subsidized.  Some might argue we should have that power, I'm not so sure.

But it leaves a place for the federal involvement in large infrastructure projects. So let's not kid ourselves that there's something economic about devolution of transit and not roads to the local level.  And what does local mean anyway?  Because if we go to the state level we all know where the money will be re-purposed.

If we were going to be real about a devolution conversation, we wouldn't just start with the dirty hippy transit.  It's just sad that we know it's all for political show to "punish dirty cities"

Podcast: APTA's Darnell Grisby

This week’s guest is Darnell Grisby, director of policy development and research at the American Public Transportation Association. We discuss the national drop in transit ridership, who rides transit in the United States, and federal policy going forward. Darnell also talks about new technologies that might be coming to transit agencies, including autonomous buses, better payment systems, and more.

Podcast: More Scenes for the Shared Use Mobility Summit

This week we’re time-warping back to a different era — last October, and the Shared Use Mobility Summit in Chicago. Laura Washington of the Chicago Sun Times hosted this panel featuring the Metropolitan Planning Council’s MarySue Barrett, the Shared Use Mobility Center’s Sharon Feigon, and Transportation for America’s James Corless.

They discuss what they think federal policy will be like with a new administration and what to expect from a Republican Congress. A lot has happened since then, but it’s still an enlightening discussion with valuable information about the nation’s current infrastructure policy situation.