RALEIGH – With the incoming Obama administration talking about hundreds of billions of new spending on infrastructure, and North Carolina’s 21st Century Transportation Committee scheduled to issue its final recommendations to the General Assembly this week, now would be an excellent time to study up on the emerging issues in transportation finance.
Naturally, I have a reading list all prepared for you.
• Carolina Journal’s Mitch Kokai profiles some of the major recommendations of the 21st Century committee in the December cover story. An earlier version of the article ran on this site a couple of weeks ago.
• The Cato Institute’s indispensable man on transportation, Randal O’Toole, devastates the case for high-speed rail lines in a new policy report. “In short,” he concludes,” high-speed rail proposals are high-cost, high-risk megaprojects that promise little or no congestion relief, energy savings, or other environmental benefits. Taxpayers and politicians should be wary of any transportation projects that cannot be paid for out of user fees.” Agreed.
• The Reason Foundation, the outgoing U.S. Secretary of Transportation, and many other free-markeeters agree that the current funding system for highways and other transportation infrastructure is outmoded, unfair, and inadequate. But rather than simply layer new taxes or charges on top of the existing, broken structure, they favor radical devolution of transportation planning and finance to the states, the involvement of private investment capital and management expertise in new transportation assets, and the replacement – not just the supplementing – of fuel charges and general taxes with tolling of specific roadways and charging drivers according to the miles they drive.
• Quite apart from questions of where to build new transportation corridors and how to finance them, policymakers should explore new technologies for managing existing road networks to reduce congestion. The Wall Street Journal explains some of the most promising innovation in a recent piece. “A symphony of light-emitting diodes, smartphones, global positioning systems and mobile sensors may soon work together to help drivers avoid traffic jams,” Roger Cheng reports. “Researchers from different universities are working on ways for cars to better communicate with each other and relay crucial driver information such as traffic speed, weather and road conditions. The data could be used to decipher faster routes. In the meantime, there are options for residents of big cities to check out live traffic feeds on their cellphones.The aim is to address the growing problem of traffic congestion through improved communications between cars.”
• Triangle Business Journal reports that the North Carolina Turnpike Authority has just moved its first major project closer to instigation. The Triangle Expressway project is now awaiting final approval from the U.S. Department of Transportation.
• If you haven’t already perused JLF’s past work on transportation policy, good places to start would be our Agenda 2008 briefing paper and adjunct policy analyst Dave Hartgen’s recent studies on transit policy, traffic congestion, and highway spending.
There’ll be a test soon after the first of the year, so study hard.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation