Yonah Freemark

DOTs given too much influence

Writer, The Transport Politic, Mar 17, 10.

Tagged with transportation, government, transit

When it comes to transportation in America, it’s all about the states. State departments of transportation determine how federal highway dollars are distributed. State legislatures choose whether to allow cities and counties to tax themselves for the purposes of improved transportation. And state approval is necessary when regions want to create transit districts. The result: Cities and their suburbs are stuck when they want to plan and finance alternative transportation.

Today’s Washington is not doing enough to stem that state power. Our national leaders are beholden to the interests of state departments of transportation, and that’s a terrible thing.

Indeed, the strength of state governments in making transportation decisions is one of the primary culprits for the highway-dependent state of the American landscape, in addition to the federal urban renewal policies and Interstate Highway legislation that are more typically singled out for blame. This fact comes to the serious detriment of metropolitan areas, which lack the fiscal ability and legal right to make full decisions about their transportation futures.

The most obvious example of the negative consequences of state control over transportation spending is the fact that even though most highway transportation appropriations (called “flex dollars”) can be used for any type of transportation, including transit, virtually all of it is spent on roads construction.

That’s because the politics of almost every state are dominated by rural and suburban constituents, or, in other words: car drivers. The urban transit users, pedestrians, and bike riders are typically at the back of the pack when it comes to representation.
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[C]ongressional representatives and especially senators must at least appear to be interested in the opinions of state-level interests. This means that any hope of reforming the transportation system so that it provides more funds for alternatives seems unlikely. The goal of transferring more funds to metropolitan areas so they can make their own decisions about what to build is, simply put, politically infeasible.

There’s no reason for advocates of alternative transportation to take this badly: they still have the ability to make a difference in how government funds are spent. It’s just that much of the fight they’re currently advancing on Capital Hill would be more productive if pursued at the state house.

Full story: The federal government cares too much about state DOTs, and that’s a problem
Source: Next American City, March 11, 2010

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