Excerpted From the Heritage Foundation’s 2016 Solutions report:
Transportation is vital to the nation’s economic health. Ease of movement in the air and on highways, roads, rails, bridges, and waterways contributes to the productivity of workers, manufacturers, and other businesses. Yet the current Washington-centric approach hampers transportation investment with bureaucracy, mismanagement, and resource misallocation. The inefficacy of federal management undermines the goals that should be the basis of federal transportation policy: relieving congestion, improving mobility, and increasing safety in cost-effective ways. Instead, workers have received longer commutes, growing congestion, and lackluster benefits for the federal gas taxes they pay.
Politicians often justify increased transportation spending with hollow promises of job creation, economic growth, and idyllic dreams of achieving “livability.” The country’s allegedly “crumbling” infrastructure is invoked to justify stimulus and special-interest spending. As a result, spending out of the Highway Trust Fund (HTF) is diverted to low-value programs unrelated to highways, diluting the fundamental “users pay, users benefit” concept by shortchanging the motorists and truckers who pay gas taxes.
The question is not whether we should be investing in infrastructure, but how we can do so most effectively. In order to achieve maximum efficiency and accountability, vital infrastructure decisions should be made at the local and state level, free from federal mandates. Local and state governments are more accountable to those who rely on their infrastructure and know their transportation needs better than Washington. Thus, they are in a better position to address these needs and, indeed, already independently enact policies to generate their own transportation funding.
- Mass Transit. Nearly one-fifth of trust fund spending is diverted to inherently local transit projects that are rarely cost-effective, do not live up to congestion reduction or environmental promises, and serve a small subset of the population.
Reform the Federal Role in Transit Funding. Transit systems across the country are plagued by unnecessarily high operating costs, paid for in part by subsidies that remove incentives for transit agencies to cut costs and operate efficiently. Without these costly federal subsidies, local and state governments, not Washington, would better gauge the funding and operating feasibility of transit systems.
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