maintenance week Archives - Transportation For America

Three things we learned from talking about maintenance this week

Last week was “maintenance week” at T4America, a week spent focusing on our first new principle for transportation investment to prioritize repair and commit to reducing the repair backlog by half. After a Twitter chat on Wednesday, on Thursday we joined a briefing on Capitol Hill for congressional staffers focused on the issue.

The new Future of Transportation Caucus chaired by Representatives Ayanna Pressley, Jesús “Chuy” García, and Mark Takano held a briefing on Capitol Hill yesterday to hear firsthand from three state transportation officials about the importance of shifting the federal transportation program to focus on maintenance first. Here are three quick things we learned.

It’s hard to get people to focus on maintenance—much less get excited about it

Although there was a strong turnout of staffers, there were far fewer than our recent briefing on climate and transportation, reminding us yet again that maintenance is never sexy and it’s hard to get people excited about it—much less make it a fundamental organizing principle of the federal transportation program.

Even if you do get people together to talk about maintenance, it’s a struggle to keep the spotlight on the issue. Even in this setting, ostensibly focused 100 percent on discussing the importance and mechanics of prioritizing maintenance, when the floor was opened up to questions, many immediately turned to funding. “Do you think that a vehicle miles traveled tax would be easier to implement than raising the gas tax?” one staffer asked.

Unfortunately, this was not the last question about money. T4America director Beth Osborne tried to remind everyone that this is precisely backwards from how we should be doing business with the federal transportation program.

“Federal transportation policy is unlike anything else because we start things off by talking about money, not what we’ll do with it. States don’t do this. No one wants to talk about outcomes. It’s time to tell voters what we’ll do with their money before we talk about needing more of it,” she said.

Absent useful data, politics will always determine spending, and politicians want to cut ribbons more than anything else

Ed Sniffen with the Hawaii DOT shared a story about how they transformed the agency to focus on maintenance and started a new asset management program, which is just a fancy way to say that they started tracking the conditions of their assets and using data to prioritize funding.

As they started this shift, Sniffen said that the long-time promised projects that had been on the books for years were some of the biggest obstacles to a new approach focused on preserving and stewarding the things they had spent billions over decades investing their state’s wealth into. “We didn’t have an asset management program, so those who complained the most got their roads fixed,” he said. “But we changed that so data controls everything. Costs and benefits now matter.”

Current Mississippi DOT Commissioner Dick Hall shared that when he was once on the legislative side years ago, he also had a hard time fully grasping why the state couldn’t afford to both radically expand and also prioritize maintenance. To this day, when it comes to grasping why maintenance needs to be the top priority, “for some reason I can’t seem to explain it to members of our legislature. But the members of the rotary club get it.” When he explains why the lion’s share of state transportation money is now going to repair, the public gets it. But the elected leaders still want their ribbon cuttings.

Better data and clear priorities can help ensure that funds are better spent.

States won’t do it on their own — the federal government needs to be the one to make repair a priority

The conventional wisdom about state DOTs is that they have two priorities when it comes to transportation funding. More funding, and limitless flexibility to spend it however they want. And that was largely the deal struck by Congress with the influential state DOT lobbyists in MAP-21 in 2012 and the FAST Act in 2015: in exchange for a weak system of performance measures, states got even more flexibility for spending slightly more money however they wish.

So it was striking to hear state transportation officials practically begging the staffers in the room to make maintenance and repair a concrete, binding federal priority. When asked about the difficulty of selling a maintenance-first approach to elected leaders in his state, Commissioner Hall explained how internal political pressure so often leads to states spending money they urgently need for repair on new capacity projects. They’ve finally made some progress in Mississippi on making repair their number one priority, but he had a crystal-clear answer for the attendees at the briefing:

“If you want us to prioritize maintenance, then you’re going to have to tell us ‘you gotta do it!'”

The question remains: will Congress heed this request and render this debate moot in state transportation agencies across the country? Or will they allow states to continue buying things they can’t afford to maintain and then just return to Congress and beg for more money down the road?

That choice is in Congress’ hands.

Stay tuned next week for our “safety over speed” week, starting on Monday, November 4th. We’ll be diving deep into our second principle on why safety has to be the overriding consideration when it comes to street and road design.

Our three policy recommendations for cutting the maintenance backlog in half

Yesterday we discussed our first of three new principles and outcomes for transportation investment: “Prioritize repair.” But how? Today we’re taking a quick look at three policy recommendations Congress should consider implementing to help reduce the maintenance backlog by half.

It’s Maintenance Week! This week we’ll be exploring our first principle for transportation investment, prioritize maintenance, in-depth. On Wednesday at 2:00 p.m. EST, we’re hosting a tweet chat using the hashtag #FixItFirst. We’re also holding a briefing on Capitol Hill with the Future of Transportation Caucus and an evening salon for journalists And stay tuned for more blog posts!

For decades, presidents, governors, and members of Congress from both parties have decried our crumbling roadyway infrastructure, sounding increasingly dire warnings. Yet Congress has repeatedly failed to require states to actually repair that infrastructure before creating new financial liabilities in the form of new roads and bridges. As a result, the percentage of our roads in poor condition nationwide has increased from 14 percent in 2009 to 20 percent in 2018.

Expanding the system while ignoring basic maintenance is a recipe for disaster. With the Highway Trust Fund approaching insolvency (or already there, technically) and our maintenance needs continuing to grow, it is time to direct federal investment toward preserving the system we have before adding to it. (Not only is this smart, but it’s incredibly doable: we already spend over $40 billion every year on roadways, much of which is spent on expansion.

Transportation for America believes that Congress needs to set a concrete goal of cutting the maintenance backlog in half. We can do this by prioritizing highway formula dollars for maintenance, and creating new programs and accountability measures for expansion. Let’s get a little wonky:

Prioritize highway formula dollars for maintenance

Every year, states receive over $40 billion through highway formulas. Federal law gives the states flexibility in how they spend these dollars, with maintenance being an “eligible” expense. There’s a big difference between maintenance being an “eligible” use of federal dollars, and actually prioritizing maintenance with those dollars. As we’ve outlined in the past, states are rewarded with more money for building new capacity at the expense of their repair needs. Congress should give power to the existing asset management requirements by requiring that maintenance be prioritized within the National Highway Performance Program (NHPP) and the Surface Transportation Block Grant Program (STBG). Parallel language should be put in place for bridges.

Check out our suggestive legislative language for achieving this.

Create a competitive program for new highway capacity

Here’s a big idea. Rather than letting states choose whether or not to prioritize repair with their formula dollars (i.e, dollars awarded based on lane-miles, population, amount of driving), Congress should consider dedicating today’s formula funding to maintenance, and then provide a new, special pot of funds for new projects or major replacement projects that have regional or national significance—more like the way we have set up the transit program.

In the transit capital program, transit projects have to apply for funding and demonstrate that they advance national and local goals, including environmental benefits and economic development. On top of that, project sponsors also have to prove that they have the resources to operate and maintain their new transit line or system without shortchanging the rest of their system. We don’t have any such standard for new highway projects—we don’t even ask states if they’ll be able to afford what they’re building, we just let them come back to Congress in a few years and ask for more money.

Creating a competitive program for new highway capacity would ensure that new roads advance national and local goals and, similar to the transit program, Congress should require a plan for covering maintenance costs. It’s borderline astonishing that we allow states to build assets that cost tens or hundreds of millions of dollars without having to provide any plan for covering long-term maintenance costs.

This new program should cover up to 50 percent of the capital cost for the project with federal funds, just as the federal government does for new transit projects.

Improve highway performance measures

In MAP-21, the surface transportation authorization that passed in 2012 and expired in 2014, Congress made a deal with the states: They gave states far more discretion over spending in exchange for a weak, opaque system of accountability in which states are required to set targets for transportation safety, state of repair, and traffic movement. However, after seven years, those targets are very hard for the public to find. (They’re hard for US to find sometimes!) The public can’t hold their state accountable for meeting their targets if they don’t even know what they are.

States can also set these targets however they want. It is within their discretion to spend all of their money on expansion and set a target for roadway and bridge conditions to get much, much worse. If states miss their self-set targets, there are only minor penalties imposed.

Congress should require real accountability in the next reauthorization bill:

Make performance measure targets user friendly and connect them to funding decisions. Congress should require that the Secretary make all targets public, easily searchable, and comparable across states. Currently the only targets available on FHWA’s webpage are safety targets and to find them, you have to download and decipher 55 separate, 60-page long, complicated documents. Further, USDOT should require that states and metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) make clear how projects prioritized for funding address national priorities and how their performance management program informed their project selection process.
Prioritize formula funding for repair (see #1 above).
Create rewards for the states which set ambitious targets and meet them. As Repair Priorities showed, some states are doing a good job with maintaining their system, and they should be rewarded. Funding for new capacity projects should first go to states with a track record for good asset management. Competitive grant programs, except those for safety, should prioritize project sponsors with a good record for asset management.

It’s time for Congress to actually set a goal for repairing our infrastructure

We shouldn’t build new roads before fixing the ones we have. But that’s not how the federal transportation program is designed. Despite funding boosts, our backlog of maintenance needs have only increased because there is no requirement that federal funds be spent on repair.

The concept of fixing what you have before buying something new—when it comes to really expensive things—is pretty intuitive for most people. You should probably repair your leaky roof before building a new addition. You’d likely buff out that dent in the car you already own instead of buying a brand new one.

But what’s obvious to everyone is not obvious to lawmakers. Under our current federal transportation law, states are allowed to spend federal funding on building new (and often unnecessary) roads before fixing decaying ones, all without providing a plan for how they will maintain these new roads in the future.

This leads to massive and unsustainable fiscal problems.

According to our report Repair Priorities that we co-authored with Taxpayers for Common Sense, states spent $21.4 billion on average on road repair annually and $21.3 billion annually on road expansion between 2009-2014. These investments in expansion don’t just redirect funds away from much needed investments in repair; they continually grow our annual spending need, widening the gap. Every new lane-mile of road costs approximately $24,000 per year just to preserve in a state of good repair—to say nothing of the long-term lifecycle costs and required eventual major rehabilitation projects in the future. By expanding roads—and neglecting the ones we have—we are borrowing against the future while letting our existing assets wither.

Yet lawmakers insist that the reason why our transportation infrastructure is crumbling is not how we (poorly) spend our money, but the amount of it. “We need more money,” they say. “It doesn’t matter how it’s spent!”

These cries for more money echo throughout Capitol Hill every five to six years when surface transportation funding needs to be reauthorized. I described this Groundhog Day-esque phenomenon in our blog post announcing our three new principles for transportation investment:

Every interest group, every legislator, every witness before a congressional committee talks about the need to “repair our crumbling roads and bridges.” On cue, congressional leaders call for more money for the federal transportation program. And then no one makes any changes to policy to guarantee that this increased funding will actually be prioritized toward reaching a state of good repair. In fact, as we found in Repair Priorities, Congress has gone aggressively in the opposite direction by allowing states to do whatever they wish with the increase in funding. Many times, states use this money to build new infrastructure while letting their existing assets crumble. And then the same actors are back before Congress, talking about the need for more money to repair their “crumbling” infrastructure. Rinse and repeat.

As the current transportation law, the FAST Act, expires next year, it’s time to do something different. We simply can’t afford to waste billions of dollars every single year.

That is why we urge Congress to make a hard and fast commitment to cutting our maintenance backlog in half. We don’t want Congress to create some new federal program to achieve a state of good repair, or authorize more transportation funding. Simply setting a goal for our current dollars would be a sea change.

Congress can organize the program in any number of ways to cut the backlog in half. And if cutting the backlog in half over six years is the wrong target, Congress can tell us what the right target should be.

But they should have to tell us precisely where we will be in addressing our state of repair when this bill expires in five or so years, not just how much money will have been spent. Until then, we believe cutting the maintenance backlog in half is an achievable goal and we expect Congress to finally tie federal funding to their rhetoric.

Read our three policy recommendations for cutting the maintenance backlog in half.