By Randal O’Toole
Randal O’Toole
The United States does not face an infrastructure crisis, at least with regard to transportation. That’s just a story told by people who want to raise your taxes so they can get rich.
Instead, the United States faces an incentives crisis, in which some people have incentives to build new infrastructure we don’t need (making them rich) while neglecting the infrastructure we have. The solution is not to raise taxes, but to change the incentives.
Supporters of tax increases talk about crumbling highways and collapsing bridges. In fact, our highways and bridges are better than ever. The number of bridges considered “structurally deficient” has fallen by more than 50 percent since 1990. By actual measurement, our roads are smoother than ever.
“The real crisis is not bridges collapsing due to poor maintenance but perverse incentives that result in money being spent in the wrong places.”
What about the bridges that fell in Minnesota and Washington? The National Transportation Safety Board found that the Minnesota bridge had a construction flaw that no amount of maintenance could have detected or prevented. The Washington bridge fell when it was struck by an oversized truck that should not have been on the bridge; it would have fallen if that truck had tried to cross it the day it opened.
The real crisis is not bridges collapsing due to poor maintenance but perverse incentives that result in money being spent in the wrong places. The best incentives are created by user fees, as those fees tell users what it costs to provide them with a good or service and they tell producers where users are willing to pay for more services.
Before the mid-1960s, most of the nation’s transportation network was paid for out of user fees. Gas taxes and tolls paid for roads; fares paid for airplanes, intercity trains, and urban transit; ticket fees paid for airports. The nation’s infrastructure was in pretty good shape.
Then, in 1964, Congress decided that federal taxpayers should subsidize transit. In 1982, Congress specifically decided that motorists should subsidize transit out of a share of the gas taxes that previously had been dedicated to highways. Many states also began subsidizing transit, often out of gas taxes.
These decisions weakened the incentives that had given America the greatest transportation system in the world. Highway congestion grew rapidly because money paid by highway users was diverted to transit instead. Desperate for funds, highway agencies …read more
Source: OP-EDS
Recent Comments