New U.S. Public Interest Research Group Reportby Tanya Snyder <http://dc.streetsblog.org/author/tanya-snyder/> on January 4, 2011
You’ve heard it a thousand times from the highway lobby: Roads pay for themselves through “user fees” — a.k.a. gas taxes and tolls — whereas transit is a drain on the taxpayer. They use this argument to push for new roads, instead of transit, as fiscally prudent investments.
The myth of the self-financed road meets its match today in the form of a new report from the U.S. Public Interest Research Group: “Do Roads Pay For Themselves?” <http://www.uspirg.org/do-roads-pay> The answer is a resounding “no.” All told, the authors calculate that road construction has sucked $600 billion out of America’s public purse since the dawn of the interstate system.
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As someone who used to make this argument all the time, the thing I like about the Austin Strategic Mobility Plan is that it shifts the argument to a better place, e.g., what outcomes are we striving for and what is the return on investment toward those outcomes.
ReplyDeleteEverything is a subsidy these days (some more than others), but the stronger point is that in the past we have simply been spending (with vague and untracked claims of economic benefit). ASMP, and indeed the new HUD Regional Sustainability Grant too, will began to challenge these old modus operandi and make a substantive challenge for investment instead.
Let us rejoice,
Glenn