Aim gun at foot.
Pull trigger.
Raise taxes to buy another bullet.
by James A. Bacon
Out in Brainerd, Minn., Chuck Marohn is still thinking outrageous thoughts about transportation. Indeed, some of his ideas are so beyond the pale that even I haven’t thought of them — and I pride myself for spitting on the conventional wisdom. While virtually everyone else in the world is worrying about how to expand their state road and highway networks, Marohn is wondering how we can shrink them.
Core to Marohn’s way of thinking is that Minnesota (like every other state) has overbuilt its road and highway network to the point where routine maintenance eats up the entire budget. But we have reached the point where taxpayers won’t tolerate higher taxes. If Americans want to maintain a world-class transportation system, he asks in a recent blog post on Strong Towns, where will the money come from?
The assumption built into our current approach is that we’ve never made a mistake in choosing to build a piece of transportation infrastructure. NEVER. Every lane is necessary. No shoulder too wide. No interchange was ever unjustified and simply built because a politician got the funding. We have no redundant bridges, no unnecessary signals, no accesses that could ever be closed.
Minnesota, he suggests, needs the transportation equivalent of the Base Realignment and Closure Commission. “We need to do the same thing with transportation. Let’s have a commission that looks at the entire system, prioritizes transportation segments and comes up with a list of what we walk away from. … We won’t get the economic results we want from our transportation investments unless we start asking a different set of questions. The toughest, and perhaps most critical, among them will be deciding what parts of our current system are no longer worth maintaining.”
Bacon’s bottom line: Think about the network of roads and highways as a portfolio of transportation assets. Businesses continually reallocate their capital from under-performing assets to what they hope will be superior-performing assets. But once a state builds a road, it never gets rid of it, no matter how traffic patterns might have changed. Thus, the Commonwealth gets stuck maintaining thousands of road-miles yielding very little economic return while it is starved for capital to build and maintain capacity in locations where it would yield a high rate of return.
In Virginia, the situation is actually worse than that. We are building new transportation capacity in areas that we know will offer a low rate of return. The Charlottesville Bypass. The Coalfield Expressway. The Bi-County Parkway. The U.S.460 Connector. Once we’ve leveraged ourselves with debt to build those facilities, we’ll then take on the enduring obligation to maintain them. A Road Realignment and Closure Commission is a great idea.
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