Transportation For America » Getting Results on Transportation

Getting Results on Transportation

November 21, 2008
By Andrew Bielak

With the ripple effects of our economic downturn putting state departments of transportation and local transit agencies in serious financial trouble, our federal government needs to make a firm commitment to investing in our crumbling infrastructure and providing Americans with affordable, efficient transportation options.

In an excellent article in this week’s New York Times, writer David Leonhardt reminds us that we can’t simply face these challenges by throwing billions of dollars at new highway construction projects without a coherent set of goals or a system for measuring gains. We need to look at what we’re getting with the money we already spend — and then ask ourselves why the results aren’t better.

A lack of adequate financing is part of the problem, without doubt. But the bigger problem has been an utter lack of seriousness in deciding how that money gets spent. And as long as we’re going to stimulate the economy by spending money on roads, bridges and the like, we may as well do it right.

It’s hard to exaggerate how scattershot the current system is. Government agencies usually don’t even have to do a rigorous analysis of a project or how it would affect traffic and the environment, relative to its cost and to the alternatives — before deciding whether to proceed. In one recent survey of local officials, almost 80 percent said they had based their decisions largely on politics, while fewer than 20 percent cited a project’s potential benefits.

Without accountability at the state, local, or federal level, rigorous data collection to prove results, or coherent national goals that articulate the purpose of our investments, it comes as little surprise that Americans are faced with endless traffic jams, overburdened mass transit systems, and rising costs of transportation.

As Rob Puentes, a transportation expert at Washington D.C. think tank The Brookings Institution, makes clear, the system is broken in part because we don’t think about what benefits our transportation program brings; we just “send a blank check and kind of hope for the best.”