Infrastructure Projects Would Yield Benefits to Economy, Job Market, Whittington Says

This story appears in the Dec. 14 print edition of Transport Topics.

Charles “Shorty” Whittington, immediate past chairman of American Trucking Associations, was among the officials who stressed to the Obama administration the importance of investing in the nation’s roads and bridges during the president’s recent Washington jobs summit.

“For every dollar that we invest in highways in the United States, it has a $5.40 return for things like reduced delays, improved safety and lower vehicle operating costs,” Whittington said during the Dec. 3 meeting at the White House that was broadcast via the Internet. “If we could just do away with the bottlenecks and keep the trucks moving, we can save $19 billion a year. A truck out here stopped in traffic, stopped in a delay anywhere, [costs] $1.50 a minute.”

“It was very evident that the frustration level is high,” Whittington told Transport Topics after the summit, which included 130 business executives, labor leaders and state officials.

During a related session on infrastructure spending, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said DOT officials “think our portion of [the stimulus] is working.”

“All over, where there are orange cones and orange barrels, there are lots of people working,” LaHood said.

Paula Hammond, secretary of the Washington state Department of Transportation, said that infrastructure spending from the stimulus plan approved in February has produced “29 million hours of work on highway projects alone worth $850 million in payroll dollars for workers across the nation.”

The American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials and the American Public Transit Association recently said that nearly $70 billion in projects could be under construction within 120 days (click here for previous story).

However, Peter Orszag, Obama’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, cautioned that a large number of shovel-ready projects often appears on paper, but “for whatever reason . . . the money does not go out the door as one would have hoped.”

During the summit, Obama said a list of shovel-ready projects does not “always live up to its billing,” but he still offered his backing for more transportation spending.

“Everybody in this administration acknowledges the need for infrastructure investment,” he said. “There’s nothing I would rather do in terms of our long-term sustained economic growth than to be able to get us back on the track where not only are we making an investment that is immediately creating jobs and profits for business, but is also laying foundation for economic expansion.”

Last week, Obama proposed directing a significant portion of unused bank bailout funds to infrastructure as a way to boost job creation (click here for related story).

Also at the summit, Wick Moorman, CEO of freight railroad Norfolk Southern Corp., said the United States should look at what other countries, including China, have done to improve their economies.

“What the Chinese have done is allocated an enormous amount of money to infrastructure creation,” he said. “As a result, we’re seeing an enormous amount of steel being produced in China. We’re seeing a lot of effect on our company in terms of shipping goods overseas.”

Moorman also suggested future stimulus funding should be modeled on the grant process DOT has in place for $1.5 billion in discretionary spending to be released early next year.

“We have an infrastructure crisis looming in this country, and what better way to fix it than plow money out there to work on all these worthwhile projects?” he said.

In response, Obama said that using China as an example on infrastructure spending could be problematic because “the Chinese don’t have this thing called democracy . . .  so shoveling out a whole lot of money, tearing down whatever’s there and conscripting folks to do the work is not as tough.”