Pirate's Cove

The people pushing to pass the bill want all the states to focus on building trains and getting people to ride the bus rather than fossil fueled vehicles. You know, those buses and trains Democrats won’t use themselves

Democrats look to crush states’ highway habit

House Democrats are trying to use a massive climate and infrastructure bill to change how Americans get around — by breaking states’ decades-old fondness for building highways.

Legislation the House passed this month is the biggest advance yet in Democrats’ efforts to bake climate policies into transportation, addressing the largest single contributor to the United States’ greenhouse gas output. It would also represent an historic shift away from the roads-first approach to federal transportation spending that has reigned since Dwight Eisenhower created the Interstate Highway System.

But the bill is riling up opposition from two potential allies of the Democrats’ big-spending infrastructure initiatives: state transportation departments and the road-building lobby. That creates an awkward dynamic for supporters of the House bill, which faces a perilous path through the evenly divided Senate.

Critics say the five-year, $549 billion bill would represent one-size-fits-all Washington meddling at its worst.

“There are 50 different states with 50 different sets of transportation challenges. What is right for one may not be right for another,” said Dave Bauer, CEO of the American Road & Transportation Builders Association, which supports many of the bill’s provisions and principles. “It’s really hard to determine that five years at a time from Washington, D.C.” (snip)

The bill, H.R. 3684 (117), would erect new bureaucratic hurdles for states seeking to spend federal money on laying asphalt, while steering them to more climate-friendly options like transit. It also would give cities more power over selecting and funding transportation projects — boosting the leverage of Democratic-led enclaves in red states such as Texas, where Houston is engaged in a high-profile fight with the state’s DOT over a highway expansion local pols don’t want.

Well, hey, state Democrats, perhaps it wasn’t the best of ideas to enable the federal government to have so much power in building highways in those state, and, more importantly funding them. In depending on Los Federales to provide the money, rather than keeping that money in the States themselves, who know better what’s going on. And maybe the cities should consider that the state should have less power and input on the use of buses, as the cities know better. Though, really, in most cities that use buses they do not really need more, and won’t expand their routes except when the cities expand. Most middle class and upper class folks aren’t going to suddenly start using them from the suburbs.

See, it’s not in simply building more highway, like we’re getting with the expansion of I-540 in the southern part of Raleigh and through Garner, creating one big sorta circle. No. It is upkeep of highways. Expanding existing roads to carry more traffic as areas grow. All that federal power isn’t sounding so great now, eh?

House Transportation Chair and bill sponsor Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.) said state DOTs have reflexively built highways instead of looking at other alternatives — a habit that needs to change. As a rare exception, he pointed to Virginia’s efforts to expand passenger rail service to combat perennially snarled traffic on Interstate 95.

Now, that might be a good idea, because that traffic stinks, going from just north of Richmond all the way to DC, and sometimes up to Baltimore. It turns my drive from NC to NJ from 7.5 hours to 9. The question is, will people take it?

The Democrats’ bill won’t be able to undo decades of feverish highway building overnight, but its backers say it represents a huge shift in mindset.

The bill, called the INVEST in America Act, would set limits on how states use money from one of the biggest pots of federal highway cash, the National Highway Performance Program, by requiring them to consider whether an “operational improvement or transit project” would be more cost-effective than expanding capacity for single-occupancy vehicles.

Why is it the business of the federal government to change the mindset? They’ve tried to implement a light rail scheme in the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area for 20 years, and it keeps going down. The studies show almost no one will ride it. It would be beyond inconvenient for riders. Perhaps states should be making their own decisions. And start keeping more of the money sent to the federal treasury (OK, lots of it is borrowed by Los Federales). It will, though, give cities more power over the use of that money over the states themselves.

“I think the federal government has every right to say look, it’s our money, and we are now in the process of redirecting and transitioning from a 1950s approach to something that more clearly reflects not just the moment, but the future,” Aloisi said.

I do believe it’s the money of the citizens. It’s pretty much long past time to shift taxation to more of that percentage going to the cities and states than the federal government, reduce the power of the Central Government.

Read: States Learning Democrats “Infrastructure” Bill Seriously Restricts Ability To Build Roads »