Stimulating the status quo
Barack Obama is proposing a massive economic stimulus package including speding on “roads and bridges.” So naturally, cities and states are writing up wish lists. The Texas Department of Tranportation has one (pdf), totalling $6.2 billion, including $670 million in Houston-area projects. The City of Houston put $587 million in projects on the Conference of Mayors’ list. No doubt Harris County has its own list.
What’s striking about these lists is how ordinary they are. Most of the TxDOT list is made up of the likes of “Base Repair and Overlay,” “Pavement Markings,” and “landscape development.” Nearly a quarter of the city list is made up of sewer rehabilitation projects. And the major projects on the lists are nothing all that remarkable, either: a grade separation in Lake Jackson, 4 new ramps at Beltway 8 and 59, reconstruction of I-10 from Washington to Taylor (one of the least congested highways in Houston) and a widening of Greens Road. (There is one unusual exception, but I’ll get to that later.)
These kinds of projects will create jobs, and most are likely sensible. But this is hardly a “new deal” for American infrastructure. Tory, Carroll, and I talked in our Chronicle piece of projects built in the 1930s that helped reshape the country and that still help us today. These lists are not those sorts of projects. They’re routine maintenance and minor expansions, the kinds of things that ought to be funded from ongoing revenues.
There is a reasoning behind this. Bills introduced in Congress have proposed funding only projects that are within 90 days of being bid to contractors. TxDOT’s list includes only projects within 9 months of construction start. That criteria naturally favors projects that are small and simple. It also pulls in projects that have been designed and not funded, perhaps because they weren’t a good idea in the first place. The reason the 59/BW8 interchange doesn’t have a full set of ramps, for example, is that traffic is simply not that heavy.
Picking up a list of already designed projects also perpetuates the status quo in transportation planning, a status quo that has increased how much we drive, decreased access to alternative forms of transportation, and increased dependence on oil. We are overdue for reevaluating transportation priorities; pulling projects off the shelf doesn’t do that.
Many projections have the recession lasting through 2010. There’s good sense in spending some money quickly. But there’s also time to be more deliberate and design some projects that will truly improve our country. November’s election was not a vote for more of the same.
Oh, and that exception: the second largest project in the city list, behind a bundle of flood control expenditures, is $175 million for streets at the Intermodal Terminal Site. As I’ve noted before, METRO’s Intermodal Terminal plan is not really a transit project; it’s an attempt to create the infrastructure for a new neighborhood just north of Downtown. With rampant construction cost inflation and METRO’s decision to build LRT instead of BRT [corrected 12/15], that project seemed to be receding in METRO’s priority list (it even lost its place on the METRO Solutions web site). Now, curiously, the city is asking for federal funds for a large chunk of it. That may make sense: streets, sidewalks, and sewers are more the city’s job than METRO’s. But I worry whenever a project this big is being proposed without real public input. METRO has gone through a federal environmental impact process on this project, but that included no discussion of what kind of development might come with that infrastructure. If we’re going to spend millions on a new neighborhood, shouldn’t there be a clear vision of what kind of place it should be? And shouldn’t the public have some input in that? I suspect this may be a better use of money than, say, building frontage roads through the Heights and ramps on Beltway 8.
The stimulus package could be an opportunity to build transformative infrastructure that will not only create jobs in the short run but improve our cities and strengthen our economy in the long run. It could be a way to fund routine maintenance. Or it could be an opportunity for second-rate projects to see the light of day. As always, it’s in the details.
I cna pretty much guarantee that our great grandchildren won’t be reading your comments in the forums. But they might trigger some good thinking today.