Mega-Projects: the Changing Politics of Urban Public Investment.

• Author: Gordon, Peter
• Position: Book Review

Mega-Projects: The Changing Politics of Urban Public Investment By Alan Altshuler and David Luberoff Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press; Cambridge, Mass.: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2003.

Pp. ix, 339. $54.95 cloth, $22.95 paperback.

As I write this review, the six-year highway-transit reauthorization bill is bogged down in Congress. The bill pertains to only part of U.S. infrastructure, but at nearly $300 billion (including approximately 2,800 earmarks) for six years, it illustrates the size and scope of the federal role in infrastructure provision: so large that the objective everywhere is to get the rest of the country to help pay for local projects.

Perhaps all that one has to know is revealed by some of the data presented in Mega-Projects: The Changing Politics of Urban Public Investment that focus on major urban highway, transit, and airport projects built in the United States since the 1950s. The authors' tables 4-1 and 4-2 show that the federal share of spending on highways rose from 12 percent in 1932 to 25 percent in 1999; the federal share of capital spending on highways rose from 18 percent in 1932 to 44 percent in 1999. Their table 6-3 shows a zero percent federal role in U.S. transit provision through the early 1960s, rising to more than 40 percent in 1980 and settling at 15 percent by the end of the 1990s. Their table 5-4 shows a moderate decline of the state and local share of airport spending since 1956. It has become child's play for Washington, D.C., politicians to explain that local public goods have some national role and that therefore the national government ought to be involved in providing those goods.

In all areas, the megaprojects that survived are the ones for which winning political coalitions could be formed, those that worked when Congress divided the spoils. Cost-effectiveness and consumer sovereignty play essentially no role. In this milieu, what gets built matters less than that something gets built--with nonlocal taxpayers' money. Representatives sent to Washington, D.C., are under pressure to bring home the bacon and to "create local jobs." The merits of what gets funded in the process are of secondary importance.

Mega-Projects bears witness to the unfolding of these contemporary facts of life, presenting detailed case studies that recount the full stories behind several well-known megaprojects--highways, airports, and transit systems--built in large U.S. cities in the final four decades...