Streetsblog Los Angeles

When Minneapolis’ I-35 bridge collapsed in 2007, lawmakers from both parties vowed to focus
on shoring up the nation’s aging infrastructure. But when the public
spotlight faded from the issue of infrastructure repair, Congress
showed little appetite for setting aside maintenance aid that did not hold the promise of ribbon-cutting ceremonies or campaign donations.

The
state of repair for America’s urban roads, according to federal
maintenance data. In rural areas, 61% are rated "good." (Chart: U.S.
PIRG)

Meanwhile, existing federal transportation formulas
dole out bridge repair money based on the size of each state’s
maintenance backlog. But up to half of that repair funding can be
redirected to other purposes, such as building new roads, with the
assurance of continued largess — as long as local bridges remain
unfixed.

That little-known provision is one of many "perverse incentives"
highlighted in a report on road and bridge maintenance released today
by the U.S. Public Interest Research Groups’ (PIRG) education fund.

The
rules governing federal aid for interstate maintenance, according to
the U.S. PIRG, are equally skewed to ensure older roads keep crumbling.
Take the cases of New York, where 567 miles of road were rated in less
than "good" condition by the U.S. DOT (see categories in the above pie
chart), and Florida, where 13 miles were in the same aging state.

One might think that New York would receive more maintenance money from Washington. But as today’s report points out:

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Closed indefinitely.

Tom Petty's days of "gliding down over Mulholland" are at an end, at least for the foreseeable future.

The LA_Now blog covers the sad reality of what happens when a government chooses endless expansion of road capacity for automobiles over a "Fix-It-First" strategy of maintaining and improving the roads that you have.  On February 8th, the Los Angeles Department of Transportation had to close a stretch of Mulholland Drive just east of Coldwater Canyon because the rain had, in the words of the' LA Now blog "after heavy rains began washing away silt from under the road surface producing a depression 35 feet wide and 10 feet deep."  Over the weekend, they announced that the nearly one mile stretch of Mulholland, between Bowmont Drive and Skyline Drive, will be closed indefinitely because the city currently doesn't have the money set aside to repair the road.

We've noted before that the poor state of California's roads is something known across the country.  We've detailed in the past how over the course of the last decade a trucking magazine, the Sierra Club, and the highway lobby have all complained that California has a problem with building more roads than it's willing to maintain.  A little preventative maintenance goes a long way in making certain that municipalities can avoid costly, both in terms of fiscal and congestion, road closures.

Of course, there's a chance that this is just a negotiating ploy by the LADOT.  Last July, when Mayor Villaraigosa was ordering departments to find ways to cut back, the LADOT leaked a memo showing a plan to dissolve bikeways and other divisions that are paid for by grants outside the city budget.  Lacking the local connection that departments such as the LAFD and LAPD already have; maybe this is their way of showing how indispensable their budget is.

In today’s New York Times, Bob Herbert celebrates the cause of
infrastructure maintenance — a less exciting proposition for
politicians than cutting the ribbon at new transportation projects, but
in many ways more vital to economic growth.

A crumbling bridge support in Colorado. (Photo: Pure Thinking)

After talking to Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell (D), an avowed booster of the National Infrastructure Bank concept, Herbert asks, "What’s wrong with us?" and continues:

We’re so far behind in some
areas that … Rendell has said that getting our infrastructure
act together can feel like “sledding uphill.”

“When I took over
as governor,” he said, “I was told that Pennsylvania led the nation in
the number of structurally deficient or functionally obsolete bridges.
We had more than 5,600 of them. So I put a ton of money into bridge
repair. We more than tripled the amount in the capital budget, from
$200 million a year to $700 million a year. And I got a special
appropriation from the Legislature to do $200 million a year extra for
the next four years.”

One might be tempted to respond that what’s wrong with American
infrastructure policy has much to do with pundits such as Randal
O’Toole of the Cato Institute, who converts new acolytes in Washington
by arguing that the biggest defect in national infrastructure policy is
insufficient road spending. To O’Toole, the fact that one in four of
U.S. bridges is rated obsolete or deficient is no big deal:

“Functionally obsolete” bridges are not in any danger of falling down;
they merely have narrow lanes, inadequate overhead clearances, overly
sharp on- and off-ramps, or other outdated design features. These
bridges pose no risk to auto drivers unless the drivers themselves
drive recklessly.

… "[S]tructurally deficient” bridges have
suffered enough deterioration or damage that their load-carrying
abilities are lower than when they were built. But that still doesn’t
mean they are about to fall down; though they may be closed to heavy
loads, the most serious problem is that they cost more to maintain than
other bridges.

When the debate stumbles on the mere question of whether deficiency is worth fixing — incidentally, the National Bridge Inventory states that
deficient and obsolete bridges often contribute to congestion — it’s
difficult to see a broad consensus emerging in favor of government
spending to bring our built environment into good order. What Herbert
didn’t address in his column, unfortunately, was how to carve out that
consensus by talking in new and different ways about the importance of
infrastructure investment.

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In an economic recovery report released
today by New York Gov. David Paterson (D), the state broke down its
plans for the estimated $31 billion it received as part of the Obama
administration’s first stimulus law.

New York spent more than half of its transport stimulus money on transit. (Photo: PlanetWare)

A chart of
New York’s stimulus spending shows that, out of a total of $2.4 billion
in expected transportation aid, the state plans to direct $1.12 billion
to highways and bridges and $1.22 to transit.

With the federal government still dividing
its transport funding along an 80-20 split that favors roads, New
York’s decision to spend $100 million more stimulus aid on transit
represents a welcome break from tradition. In California,
where San Francisco and Los Angeles maintain large transit networks,
roads received slightly more than double the amount of stimulus aid
going to rail and buses.

Directly comparing New York and
California’s transportation funding choices would be the epitome of the
old idiom about apples and oranges. But as the congressional jobs
debate sharpens its focus on infrastructure projects, it’s worth noting that the roads-transit split is only one chapter in a bigger story.

A federal "fix-it-first" mandate, which environmental groups and transportation reformers are urging
Congress to include in the new jobs bill, would help break down the
cultural divide between different transport modes by ensuring that
repairs of existing infrastructure come first. After all, crumbling and
pothole-ridden roads affect pedestrians, cyclists, and drivers alike.

California, incidentally, lacks a "fix-it-first" requirement despite ranking 49th out of 50 states in recent rankings of nationwide road quality.

Photo: Metblogs

How many people would be surprised to discover that California's roads were ranked as the third worst in the nation?  According to a recent survey of truckers by Overdrive Magazine who make cross-country trips, only two states have worse roads, and none have worse drivers.  Locally, the I-5 and I-10 were listed as "unspeakably bad" roads. 

The Daily News reports that these truckers, hardly a group known for environmental thinking, have called on Caltrans to embrace a "Fix-It-First" philosophy where they direct a dedicate a portion of the budget every year to maintaining highways.

Oh, wait.  That story was from 1999.

More recently, the Sierra Club released a report ranking the nation's highways, surface streets, and bridges according to the percent of which have been rated "structurally deficient" or "functionally obsolete."  California's freeways ranked last in the country, with 45% earning one of these "distinctions."  The Sierra Club recommends a "Fix-It-First" approach to planning to reverse this trend of failing roads.

That story is from 2005.

Yesterday, AASHTO, which is basically the highway builders lobby, released their own report on the state of our highways.  According to National Public Radio, California didn't fare too well.

California is known for its car culture. But it turns out those wheels are rolling over some of the worst roads in the nation. A recent study ranked California 49th out of the 50 states for the quality of its pavement. New Jersey came in last. But California has the distinction of having the nation's worst roads in urban areas.

And yet, in a time of limited transportation funding, our priority remains to build more and more highways while the ones we have continue to fall into a state of neglect.  The poor condition of our roads has led to more expensive commutes for car commuters.  Nationally, the poor condition of our roads costs drivers $335 a year.  In Los Angeles, that number is $746.

In the ten years since Overdrive Magazine ranked our roads the third worst in the country, California has responded by doing nothing to make our roads more safe.  Instead, the roads actually got worse as compared to the rest of the country.

In the wake of the 2007 collapse of Minnesota’s I-35 bridge, Washington policymakers vowed
a renewed focus on repairing the nation’s aging infrastructure. But
weeks after the fatal collapse, Congress approved a transportation
spending bill with 704 earmarked projects, at a total cost topping $570
million — and just 11 percent of those earmarks went towards bridge
repair, according to a new report released today.

The I-35 bridge collapse, above, killed 13 drivers. (Photo: America 2050)

Today’s
report, produced by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group (PIRG),
contrasts the low amounts lawmakers set aside for bridge repair with
the flood of campaign contributions sent their way by highway,
development, automobile, and construction groups.

During
the election cycle that reached its peak in 2008, the year that bridge
repairs accounted for 74 of Congress’ 704 transportation earmarks, U.S.
PIRG found that road-building interests steered $80.3 million to
federal campaigns.

The same highway-centric groups also
lavished $53.5 million in campaign cash on state elections, in which
the costs of securing a victory are often much lower, according to the
report. Road-building interests split their federal donations more
evenly, steering 47 percent to Democrats and 53 percent to Republicans,
compared with a 61-39 split in favor of the GOP in state elections.

The report (available here)
separates donations from "transportation" versus "construction" groups
but does not name which lobbying entities U.S. PIRG singled out for
analysis, making it difficult to directly connect specific donations to
specific earmarks.

But the authors’ conclusion "that
elected officials often overlook preventative maintenance projects,
especially when new capacity projects are encouraged by campaign
contributions" was bolstered by an Associated Press investigation
one year after the Minnesota collapse. That AP probe found that just 12
percent of the deficient bridges getting the most state-level traffic
had received any attention other than regular maintenance.

"The greatest need, for
almost every place, is investing in existing infrastructure," said Mark
Stout, who spent 25 years working on policy at the New Jersey DOT
before helping put together U.S. PIRG’s report.

"Each
earmark and each project has its own
story," he added, "but by and large, I think it’s safe to say that a
structurally deficient bridge is not going to rally around it a lot of
local elected officials and business interests that are
lobbying to make [repairs] happen. They sort of think that’s someone
else’s job or that
someone else is going to take care of it."

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A new report on the costs of aging roads has gotten a lot of attention over the past week, with both Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood and the Washington Post touting its conclusion on the danger of "deficient roadways."

On
its face, the report sounds like an argument for prioritizing road
repair and modernization over new construction, which is certain to be
a flashpoint as Congress works on a new federal transportation bill.
But some of the upgrades that the authors suggest rely on outmoded
assumptions about driver safety — not to mention pedestrian safety, a
concept never mentioned in the report.

Here’s an excerpt:

Numerous
solutions — some simple, some complex — could help make the roadway
environment safer for users. These improvements include structural
changes such as adding or widening shoulders, improving roadway
alignment, replacing or widening narrow bridges, reducing pavement
edges or drop-offs, and providing more clear space in the area adjacent
to roadways.

Adding or widening shoulders for
bike lanes or pedestrian paths is one thing, but the notion that
driving can be made safer by widening and straightening roads (or
"improving roadway alignment," as the report puts it) has been debunked by Traffic author Tom Vanderbilt, transportation planner Eric Dumbaugh,
and others. In fact, making roads more compex and curvy can often serve
as a deterrent to unsafe driving practices, particularly on urban
streets.

But the new report, commissioned by the
Transportation Construction Coalition (TCC), seems to have concluded
that urban areas don’t need to be considered separately from
interstates.

"Although this study did not break out costs
by class of roads, interstate highways are built to higher safety
standards than other roads," the authors state — as if a new four-lane
freeway through Chicago or Brooklyn would be a reasonable
safety-enhancement move.

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