How
transportation became the latest victim of
America’s culture wars
In
the past few years, the bitterly polarized
“culture wars” have managed to blow apart the
traditionally dull and parochial issue of
infrastructure policy. As counterintuitive as this
reality may be, it explains why Congress cannot
agree on how to reauthorize — let alone modernize
— federal surface transportation legislation,
a.k.a. the
highway bill.
How
did this happen?
Since
the 1990s, there has been a growing political
divide between the cultural left and right, with
one side favoring monocultural individualism, free
markets and devolution to state and local
government, and the other favoring multicultural
communitarianism, government intervention and a
strong federal hand. Issues that are intuitively
cultural, such as abortion, guns and immigration,
have long been front and center whenever these two
worldviews collide. But now, in federal
infrastructure policy, we are seeing what happens
when self-segregated communities of common
interest clash over how to manage our physical
spaces.
As
recently as the mid-2000s, there was general
consensus over infrastructure issues, as reflected
in the typically strong bipartisan support for
reauthorizations of federal transportation
legislation. The big differences were mostly
sectional (“donor” and “recipient” states fighting
over funding) or interest-based (trucking vs.
transit vs. automobiles). But those humdrum days
are gone. Longtime infrastructure supporters now
find themselves befuddled over how a game of
technocratic “inside baseball,” traditionally
characterized by bipartisan consensus with a good
measure of logrolling and earmarking, got so
sidetracked.
The
answer is that the partisans have gotten much more
ideologically strident, and their differences have
become much greater than their areas of agreement.
One side — call it the
“congestion caucus” — claims to be
infrastructure supporters, but it supports only
what it deems the right kinds of infrastructure.
Overwhelmingly urban and liberal, this group’s
goal is not mobility or even infrastructure.
It’s social engineering: getting people out of
their soulless single-family suburban homes and
into vibrant multiethnic communities; having
them ditch their environment-destroying SUVs in
favor of sustainable light rail; and supporting
the urban disadvantaged instead of a privileged
suburban class.
For the congestion
caucus, expanding highways to reduce traffic
jams is wrong, because it means more
single-family homes, more SUVs and more
suburbanization. This neatly summarizes why they
oppose increased infrastructure funding for road
expansion. As one presidential appointee to the
Transportation Department told me when I asked
why the Obama administration does not support a
gas tax increase, too much of the Highway Trust
Fund goes to, well, roads.
The
other side — call it the “liberty caucus” — also
claims to support infrastructure, but only insofar
as it’s for roads, and only as long as the federal
government’s role shrinks. Generally suburban or
rural — and decidedly conservative — this group’s
view is that infrastructure spending is
politicized and wasteful. And unlike Ronald
Reagan, who rightly saw the gas tax as a user fee,
those on this side see it as just one more tax,
deserving to be cut in the name of damn-it-all
small-government purity.
The
congestion caucus has been hammering home its
message at every turn: Federal support for
expanding roads actually makes congestion worse.
Nonsensical though this notion is, it is
nonetheless now widely believed. To be sure,
better urban planning and an increased role for
non-auto alternatives will have to be a part of
the future transportation landscape. But if this
comes at the expense of road expansion, the 85
percent of Americans who commute to work by car,
and who waste nearly 7 billion hours yearly stuck
in traffic, will suffer.
Meanwhile,
from the liberty caucus, we hear the constant
refrain that federal infrastructure spending is
wasteful. How many more times do we have to hear
about former Alaska senator Ted Stevens’s “bridge
to nowhere”? Clearly this was an expensive
“earmarked” project that defied reasonable
cost-benefit calculations. But the liberty caucus
fails to mention that, even at their peak,
earmarks were a tiny share of transportation
funding, and the majority of earmarks were for
good projects. That’s because the liberty caucus’s
goal is not to better manage federal funding — if
it were, it would support proposals such as a
national infrastructure bank and increased
performance-based accountability for governments
receiving federal transportation funding. Instead,
its goal is devolving funding to the states —
which would, let us be clear, inevitably lead to a
significant reduction of overall funding for
infrastructure.
So
we are stuck. Both sides, each for its own
ideological reasons, demonize infrastructure
spending.
If
we are to have any hope of shifting infrastructure
policy away from these culture wars and back toward solution-oriented
pragmatism, it is incumbent on true
infrastructure supporters to call out both sides’
arguments — the social engineering congestion
caucus and the devolutionary liberty caucus — as
flawed and damaging to the national interest. And
both sides will need to get back to compromising
in Congress. For example, lawmakers could increase
the gas tax, but use some
of the revenue to incentivize tolling;
they could appropriate more
money for “smart growth” policies, but only if
there is results-based accountability.
Only then will a greater share of Americans get
the mobility we all want and deserve.
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