by James A. Bacon
Beneath the surface, the Washington Post informs us, the Capital Beltway is crumbling. Writes Ashley Halsey III:
Under the surface of all but some recently restored segments, fissures are spreading, cracks are widening and the once-solid road bed that carries about a quarter-million cars a day is turning to mush. …
“With the older base layers under the asphalt, the surface is not able to absorb the pounding the way it used to,” said Doug Simmons, deputy highway administrator in Maryland, home to almost two-thirds of the 64-mile Beltway and to the more serious of the highway’s problems. “It is at that 50-year age point, which is too close to [the end of its life]. It’s a good example of the challenges we’re going to be facing not only in Maryland but other places in the country.”
Virginia, it seems, is not as badly off as Maryland. First, it has significantly fewer miles of Beltway to maintain. And secondly, large swaths of highway have been redone as part of the Woodrow Wilson Bridge project, the I-95/Beltway “mixing bowl” interchange and the Beltway express lanes. But Simmons’ warning does apply to the rest of Virginia’s Interstate system, very little of which has received such makeovers.
Bacon’s bottom line: Yes, it’s going to cost a lot of money to fix Virginia’s interstate highways as they approach the end of their useful lives. But there’s another point to me made here: The fiscal predicament posed by the decaying Beltway is a perfect illustration of Charles Marohn’s thesis of what has gone so disastrously wrong with infrastructure policy in this country: The federal government built the Beltway but Virginia and Maryland inherited the responsibility for maintaining it. That wasn’t so bad early on, but the problem mounts as the Beltway reaches the end of its design life some six decades later. Now the states are stuck with the tab.
Depreciation is the way businesses account for the fact that stuff wears out and must be replaced eventually. Businesses pay attention because depreciation is deducted from their earnings. But governments don’t have earnings — they operate on a cash-in, cash-out basis — and elected officials don’t pay no heed to depreciation at all. As a consequence, neither Virginia nor Maryland, nor any other state to my knowledge, has set aside funds to pay for massive structural repairs that their interstates will require. Aggravating the problem, as the Post points out, it’s one thing to build an interstate highway when there’s no traffic on it, and quite another to rebuild it is when it traversed by thousands of drivers per hour.
Governor Bob McDonnell’s transportation-financing plan will raise some $800 million a year for new construction. Virginia’s politicians will spend as much of it as they can on new projects that yield highly visible, short-term gains, caring little about the life-cycle costs. The flaw in thinking applies to mass transit just as much as it does to the interstates — just look at the condition of the Washington Metro!
Virginia needs to do at least two things:
First, state agencies need to conduct life-cycle analysis for all new infrastructure projects. It’s not enough to know how much a project will cost up-front. We need to know how much it will cost to maintain the assets and to replace them. Then we need to set aside funds, a little bit each year, to carry the project through its full life cycle.
Second, state agencies need to get a handle on what kind of liabilities we face for old infrastructure projects. When will critical assets wear out, and how much money will we need to replace them? If the money isn’t there — trust me, it isn’t — then we need to ask where it will come from. Before the McDonnell administration runs off with its new-found tax revenue to indulge its transportation wish list, let’s make sure we have the money to repair what we have when the bill comes due.