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The word hostage may be a little dramatic but, there is real drama in shutting down most of the transportation construction in the United States. Confused, well I am too. I can not understand why absolutist wingnut lawmakers would want to eliminate six million jobs when unemployment hovers around ten percent. Don’t get me wrong. As you are probably aware, I feel healthcare reform is and should be one of our highest priorities. It is also of paramount importance to get healthcare reform which actually reforms healthcare. Lawmakers however, have been at this for nine months. It is time to quit deliberating and start legislating.
A few legislators will tell you they have passed a continuing resolution (CR) to fund transportation projects until the complete transportation reauthorization can be passed. What they don’t tell you is the current CR funds transportation for one month at a time. So, in my state, the resulting funding is one-twelfth our normal funding. Our budget which normally approaches one billion dollars is reduced to around 83 million. This is in a world where most construction projects end up around 30 million a piece. Our state department of transportation is faced with funding three projects statewide or a handful of really small projects. No state DOT will take the risk of having to use local monies to fund large projects until Congress fully funds transportation programs.
The effect of a one month CR on states and cities is to stop bidding and constructing projects until they are assured funding in a multi-year transportation bill.
As the left wing insists on a public option and the right wing tries to eliminate it, construction companies everywhere are handing out pink slips. As the right holds out for liability caps for doctors, engineering firms who design transportation projects are going under. As the left tries to eliminate the Medicare Advantage Program and the right continues to tell seniors they are losing their Medicare coverage, materials producers are idling their facilities. Steel, concrete, asphalt and stone producers are sending employees home. Finally, because little federal gas taxes are making their way back to the states, states are considering furloughs and other methods to reduce state staff.
That’s right, we have already paid for road maintenance and improvement projects at the pump. Our money is being held hostage in Washington. We are paying to watch our transportation industries and our bridges crumble.
So as the politicians revel in political one-upmanship, you should be worried about the bridge you travel over every day. Sadly however, that’s not the only thing you could be worried about. Investment banks on Wall Street are busily over extending themselves again. The financial industry and transportation are just the tip of the iceberg. The business of the people grinds to a halt while the wingnuts stymie the debate. It’s become a funny joke to use the Otto von Bismarck quote, “laws are like sausages, it is better not the see them being made.” It is not so funny when people are starving to death waiting on that sausage.
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The American Silent Majority should be proud of our representation in Washington. We have eleven members of the House of Representatives and seventeen Senators who actually subscribe to the campaign pledge of “country first”, even if the author of the pledge, Senator John McCain (R-AZ), no longer believes it himself.
Republican Senators including McCain have taken a “party first” attitude in a sort of weird childish temper tantrum. With many items which Republicans support being in the legislation, Republicans seem to have a theory anything written by a Democrat has to be partisan and wrong. Many, like my Senator, Jeff Sessions (R-AL) have stood on the floor of the Senate and made arguments with half-truths to support this theory. Sessions announced the only way we could pay for the stimulus was to print money. Printing money, he said, “causes inflation.” If Sessions had been in my high school government class, he would have gotten an F on current events this week. He is either being disingenuous or is ignorant in light of recent Federal Reserve statements. One of the primary worries of the Federal Reserve as this economy dangerously spirals into uncharted territory is deflation. The economy is SO bad right now; one could argue we actually need a little inflation.
Scare words like inflation undermine the stimulus’ potential to positively affect consumer and market psychology. Part of the problem is no one is spending money. Part of the partisan Republican indifference may have something to do with today’s ABC program This Week. George Stephanopoulos pointed out today, the Republican leadership believes the economy won’t be any better by the next election cycle. That being the case, a bad American economic attitude is actually a partisan Republican ally. In what may be the most partisan of ironies, they would rather the economy go farther down the tube if the stimulus passes. Cynically, a good start down this path is the infomercial the partisan Republicans are producing. It will help insure Americans believe the stimulus will not work.
Discrediting the stimulus in the minds of Americans seems to also be on the aim of Michael Steele, the new Chairman of the Republican National Committee. He tells Republican Governors like Charlie Crist of Florida they don’t understand the stimulus bill. He says those governors do not understand the distinction between stimulus created road building contracts and some other kind of private road building contract which goes on forever. In my 15 years of being a transportation engineer I haven’t seen many roads built without a government entity contracting with a private construction firm and have seen no contract last forever.
Finally, we get to the issue which gave the Republicans political cover to begin this nonsensical political war.
Apparently, in a sort of “thumb in you eye-we won” gesture, the House stimulus bill included items like money for family planning. I am pretty sure the Democratic House leadership understood how incendiary a provision like this could be. Why not leave it out of this critical legislation? Was it hubris, ineffectiveness or stupidity which drove the leadership to allow this kind of explosive provision? President Obama trusted this leadership with one of the most important bills of his political career and he was let down. With an American now losing a job every four seconds, I can think of at least three people who need to join those Americans. Those people are Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Majority Leader, Steny Hoyer (D-MD) and Democratic Caucus Chair, John Larson (D-CN). At the end of the day these people represent the American Silent Majority about as well as those partisan Republicans.
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Stimulus infrastructure will not take 18 months to begin. Apparently, the right wing talking points on the Sunday talk shows included telling the American people that infrastructure improvement was bad economic stimulus because public works projects take so long to create jobs. David Brooks of the New York Times says any investment in Infrastructure will take 13 years. I am a transportation engineer and I can assure you any infrastructure monies provided to the states could be used yesterday. My state has approximately 600 million dollars worth of projects effectively ready to go to bid and 200 million to do it with. If half of that money was labor (the other half being materials) the shortfall would represent 100,000 man hours at $20.00 per hour. Beyond a general “philosophical” resistance to public works projects, the wingers are out of touch with the state of the infrastructure and it’s funding in the United States.
Infrastructure funding at the state level is a train wreck or bridge collapse going somewhere to happen. Many states have seen level funding since the mid-ninties. What this means to the traveling public is roads in disrepair and bridges that need round the clock attention. It’s all because your local department of transportation has dealt with the same price increases everyone else has. When oil prices triple, so do most of the materials used to build roads and bridges. Many state departments of transportation have about 37 percent of the buying power they had twenty years ago.
Twenty years ago, a state could fix the roads, bridges and build new capacity to alleviate traffic with what was left. Those days are long gone. In order to match federal funds owed the states (this money was sent from the state in the form of an 18 cent gas tax) states have embarked on construction of new facilities. What this means is Road and bridge inspection and maintenance are on shoestring budgets. What happens is much like getting preventive care versus going to the hospital with an acute disease. A few cheap maintenance items left undone today fester into projects to rebuild a road or bridge later. The efficiencies demanded by the public in maintenance issues are becoming a bigger and bigger risk. With budgets so tight, one slip up can result in a tragedy like the Interstate 35 Bridge in Minnesota.
To prevent a tragedy, I hope the incoming Obama Administration will consult the chief engineers of the state departments of transportation directly. If the President-Elect does this, his infrastructure stimulus monies will immediately go to work. If he listens to the WONKS on the Sunday shows, the earmark prone congress or a dysfunctional Federal Highways Administration upper management, his money might begin to work sometime in 2015.
The author apologizes about the sabbatical. The 27 month old HP laptop responsible for this blog had a hard drive attack. As usual the computer had a 24 month warranty. The drive has been replaced by mail order and, Incidentally, I highly recommend this method. I have replaced the drive and am back in business.
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One of the things missing from most conversations regarding energy (independence) and environmental policy is transportation policy. There are no real solutions to the problems of foreign oil and global warming without including the who, what, when, where and how of transportation. The first real foray into combining transportation with energy and environmental policy may have come from Mr. T. Boone Pickens. The Pickens Plan includes compressed natural gas for automobiles and wind turbines for power production. He takes the natural gas used for power generation and replaces it with wind. He uses the natural gas from power generation in a compressed form to power automobiles. His plan is a good start. However, if we also closely examine trucking, rail and other modal approaches, we might be able to actually end our dependence on foreign oil while decreasing our national carbon footprint.
Since the national interstate system was begun in the 1950’s by President Eisenhower, trucking has been on the rise. Tractor trailer vehicles opened a new option to commerce. For the first time, a tomato could be picked in California and be on a shelf in Alabama the next day. At the time, rail was not efficient enough to compete with the tempo of truck delivery. Today, rail carriers can compete on speed utilizing multi-modal systems. A multi-modal or piggyback system consists of a container that can have wheels like a truck or mounted with no wheels on a rail car. These containers are also stacked on ships. This system allows rail carriers to go from ship to rail to highway without missing a beat. For example, containers may be off loaded from a ship in San Diego, mounted on a railcar to Memphis, clearing customs in Memphis and finally mounted on wheels and delivered to a market in Collierville. Collierville is a suburb of Memphis, Tennessee. The problem arises when the container is destined from Memphis to Mobile, Alabama.
See, Mobile is served by several rail yards much closer than Memphis. To be sure, some of those rail yards do not offer customs clearance. However, customs clearance could either be established or completed at the port of entry. The real question becomes why a truck is used when rail is less expensive per mile and has a smaller carbon footprint. Actually, rail is considerably less expensive. This is so because the trucking industry is subsidized. Yup, you pay for most of the cost of those bananas you bought at the market in your gas tax. See, a tractor trailer does 16,000 times more damage than your Ford Expedition to a road. But, trucking only pays a pittance toward the cost of the repair of roads in gas tax. Said another way, with a gasoline tax of 37 cents per gallon, a truck would have to pay about four million dollars per year in taxes to be taxed equally*. We might decide the local apples are a better deal than the bananas if we had better price signals.
Since the price signals are so skewed toward trucking in the United States, we have made bad decisions regarding spending on infrastructure. Citizens have rebelled against higher gas taxes. Some of this is due to the extraordinary price of gas. But, due to those inaccurate price signals, people have determined congestion relief is not affordable. Depending on where you live, you might spend three or more hours per day in traffic. This time represents lost productivity, more carbon and most of all zero miles per gallon. Better and less congested roads can not be reconciled by the public in the face of trucking subsidies and high gas prices.
Energy policy is more complicated than only high gas prices. Due to extraordinary gas prices, it looks like we will be having the conversation quite soon. As the oil lobby is marginalized in this debate, perhaps we can discuss ideas which will actually reduce the amount of oil we consume. Moving freight from the road to the rail road might be a great start. It is a win win. We win the battle against congestion. We have fewer catastrophic accidents between trucks and cars. We reduce our carbon footprint. But, most of all, we use less gas and diesel. Using less oil reduces demand and lowers the price. If we mix in a few other ideas like the T. Boone Pickens Plan, sustainable biofuels and electric vehicles, we could finally stop empowering the petro-dictators who seem so bent on seeing America fail.
*This is based on the conservative estimate of 680 gallons per year. Trucks will use much more.