The case for privatizing America's highways.

AuthorSamuel, Peter

Backups on U.S. highways are a daily source of frustration to tens of millions of Americans. Cars and highways are engineered to transport riders at 50 to 70 miles per hour (mph), yet, during rush hours, average speeds are 15 to 20 mph and declining each year. Superhighways are set up for vehicles to cruise along safely at 50 to 70 mph, yet are becoming parking lots full of stop-and-go traffic for hours each day. Drivers find it hard to relax in jammed traffic because they keep wondering how late they are going to be, whether they should try another route, and whether the congestion ahead suddenly win clear.

Generally, highways are built and managed by state agencies and offered "free" to the public. Instead of paying for road use directly, motorists provide highway funds through license and registration fees, gas and diesel taxes, truck charges, special transportation sales taxes, and development district levies. After that money has gotten through the various bureaucracies, tax agencies, treasuries, and transportation administrations at different levels of government and some has been diverted to transit systems and even general government revenues, what is left for roads is political "pork" - allocated by deal-making between various government actors in Washington, state capitals, and county seats.

Meanwhile, there is no price on rush-hour travel. There is no revenue stream directly from road users to managers to provide incentives either to utilize existing capacity to maximum consumer advantage or to adjust capacity to demand. According to the Transportation Research Board, "In the absence of efficient pricing, motorists who drive on congested facilities are not required to pay for the delays they cause each other, and these delays are substantial. The wasted time and fuel are estimated to cost [at least] $40,000,000,000 annually."

Congestion long has been recognized as an inner-city problem, but, as the Texas Transportation Institute (TTI) notes, it has gotten "into the suburbs, with street systems designed for service to residential areas [now] overburdened with traffic headed to large shopping malls and business parks." Because many internal combustion engines operate most efficiently at a steady 40 to 50 mph, stop-and-go traffic adds considerably to air pollution - emissions of carbon monoxide and volatile organic compounds are worst at low engine speeds.

The congestion is getting steadily worse. In its traffic congestion index (TCI), the TTI expresses congestion as the ratio of daily vehicle-miles traveled to roadway design capacity (i.e., a ratio of 1.0 means that the roadways are carrying the amount of traffic for which they were built). The average TCI for 47 of the 50 cities surveyed has gotten worse every year since 1982; in only three - Phoenix, Houston, and Detroit - did it lessen. In some places, it got spectacularly worse: in San Diego, the index went from 0.78 to 1.22 a 56% increase. The other cities with radically worsening congestion were Salt Lake City, up 3.7%; San Francisco-Oakland, up 33%; Sacramento, up 30%; and Washington, D.C., up 30%. In Los Angeles, congestion worsened by 28%; in Chicago, 25%; and New York, 13%.

The trend to gridlock is not confined to the largest municipalities. Medium-sized cities also are in trouble. Atlanta showed a 28% rise; Seattle-Everett, 27%; Dallas, 26%; San Jose, Calif., 26%; and Portland, Ore., 24% worse. Twenty-five of the 50 largest cities had expressway and arterial traffic at saturated levels (TCI 1.0 and above), compared with 11 of the 50 in 1982.

Mass transit does not seem to help to avert congestion. In the 1970s and 1980s, the Washington and San Francisco-Oakland areas developed and continued to expand passenger rail systems at a cost of billions of dollars, yet those cities are among the gridlock leaders both in absolute terms and congestion growth. New rail systems tend to gain their patrons from other transit systems - buses and vans - not cars, and those systems approximately double trip costs. New York and Chicago have major subway and elevated commuter rail systems as well as huge bus fleets, but suffer serious highway congestion.

The basic pattern with mass transit is that it serves mainly hub-and-spoke journeys between suburbs and downtown. The downtowns, however, generally are declining, as work and shopping move to emerging new urban centers such as Tysons Corner (Washington area), Las Colinas (Dallas), Burlington Mall (Boston, at Route 128), and the 287 corridor (White Plains, N.Y.). In each metropolitan area, there are suburban downtowns of office parks, malls, and concentrated commercial districts five to 20 miles away from the old downtown. The new downtowns are the sites of about 70-75% of current office construction and almost all new stores.

Quite a number of these suburban downtowns are in trouble. Some of the earliest - such as White Plains, Stamford, Conn., Southfield-Detroit; Greenpoint-Houston; Sherman Oaks-Los Angeles, and Tysons Corner - are struggling and may decline or collapse...

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