Editorial: Rebuilding U.S. Infrastructure

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here’s no doubt that the nation is facing a crisis in its transportation infrastructure, as more vehicles are moving ever-more slowly along an aging network of highways, many of them designed for bygone eras.

And while it seems clear that the Bush administration is moving to implement a massive remodeling of transport infrastructure, it’s far from clear how those projects will be financed.

The members of the new National Surface Transportation Policy and Revenue Study Commission held their first meeting in Washington last week. They quickly came up against a fundamental conundrum, along the lines of whether the chicken or the egg came first: whether to determine initially what the nation’s ailing infrastructure system needs, or to start out deciding how to pay for any needed projects.

Another major issue, commission members said, was to determine whether the current system of funding infrastructure improvements — fuel tax revenue directed into the Highway Trust Fund — is up to the task of underwriting future projects.

In the end, it may not matter which road is traveled first. What matters more is that the commission does a thorough job of identifying what we need to keep our transportation system the best in the world.

The trucking industry’s representative on the panel, Pat Quinn, president and co-chairman of U.S. Xpress and chairman of American Trucking Associations, told the group that truckers “think the fuel tax funding is probably the best answer, but it might not be the complete answer for large-scale projects.”

Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta is leading an administration charge to embrace more public-private partnerships, which basically enable private companies to build or operate public toll roads. Examples of partnerships are the leasing of Chicago’s Skyway and the Indiana Toll Road.

Mineta, in an exclusive interview earlier this month, told Transport Topics that there would be more such partnerships in the future and that they would inevitably involve tolls, but that use of the new toll roads would be voluntary for trucks.

Quinn told the panel, “Before we dismiss the fuel tax as a funding mechanism, we probably need to explore why it is being viewed as no longer working. Is it just a lack of political will or have we not raised it high enough to cover the needs?”

We would like to think that Quinn’s questions will be answered before the commission makes recommendations on how to finance the needed changes to the nation’s transport infrastructure.

This editorial appears in the May 29 print edition of Transport Topics. Subscribe today.