Transportation Infrastructure in the Stimulus

David Sirota is very displeased to see “only” $85 billion in infrastructure spending in the proposed stimulus package. I take a different view. It’s important to recall that infrastructure spending in the stimulus package is limited—and appropriately so—by the quantity of genuinely useful projects that it’s possible to move forward with. You don’t want to build misguided projects, or just promise things that can’t actually be delivered. Dave Alpert notes that the volume of transportation funding appears to fall short of some categories of identified backlogs. But even here there’s a need to exercise caution. Many items of backlog lists would, in fact, need to go through years worth of environmental review and so forth before you could actually build them. And the incentive structure that exists when compiling these lists militates in the direction of governors and others overestimated the volume of projects in need of funding.

What’s more, there’s a difference between saying (to use some hypothetical numbers) “here are 1,000 different projects, each costing $1 billion, and each of which is ready to go” and saying “we’re ready to go with $1 trillion worth of spending on a 1,000 projects.” The reason is that there’s only so much equipment, qualified manpower, logistical capabilities, etc. It could be that all 1,000 of those projects are ready to go when taken on their own terms, but that you can’t actually move forward with all of them.

Last but by no means least, it’s important not to let stimulus-mania crowd out all other considerations. It was true that America’s infrastructure policy needed a serious overhaul before this economic crisis hit. And it will continue to be true that the way infrastructure spending works in the United States is screwed up and in need of reform. Barack Obama had proposals for addressing these issues before the interest in a stimulus bill came around. As it happens, I think he had some pretty good ideas. And ultimately this is where the real action is going to be—not in terms of what is and isn’t in the stimulus package, but what kinds of enduring reforms does his administration bring about. For example, the stimulus proposal currently offers $30 billion for roads and $10 billion for rail and transit. That’s not the ratio of my dreams, but it’s a much better ratio than is reflected in current spending priorities. And those current priorities are entrenched in the Safe, Accountable, Flexible, Efficient Transportation Equity Act: A Legacy for Users (SAFETEA-LU) a.k.a. “the highway bill” in a manner that reflects its disproportionate emphasis on highways. It’s a law that’s set for renewal and rewriting in 2009.

In the short-run—i.e., in the stimulus time frame—there’s only so much change of priorities that it’s feasible to do. But in the longer run, priorities can be shifted much more dramatically. This is a very big deal and in some ways where the real action will be in terms of whether or not we see a national shift in priorities.