The Highway System is Going to Shrink

Recently, the director of the Iowa Department of Transportation Paul Trombino made these remarks about the highways his department is responsible for in Iowa:

I said the numbers before. 114,000 lane miles, 25,000 bridges, 4,000 miles of rail. I said this a lot in my conversation when we were talking about fuel tax increases. It’s not affordable. Nobody’s going to pay.

… And so the reality is, the system is going to shrink.

There’s nothing I have to do. Bridges close themselves. Roads deteriorate and go away. That’s what happens.

And reality is, for us, let’s not let the system degrade and then we’re left with sorta whatever’s left. Let’s try to make a conscious choice – it’s not going to be perfect, I would agree it’s going to be complex and messy – but let’s figure out which ones we really want to keep.

And quite honestly, it’s not everything that we have, which means some changes.

Many DOT directors around the country privately admit to a similar kind of thinking, but Mr. Trombino is the first to say it aloud to the public, for which he should be lauded — and emulated.  Because the cold, financial truth is, we have way overbuilt our national roadway system compared to what we can afford or be willing to pay to maintain.  We’ve done this because as a result of a 60-year experiment with auto-oriented infrastructure, cheap money (borrowing) and faulty government policies and incentives that have aided and abetted this flawed idea.

For the last few decades, I have been become increasingly thoughtful about auto-centric planning and its profound impact on our nation’s infrastructure and urban development.  Many people never really think about our country’s decaying infrastructure until they blow a tire when their auto runs over a neglected pothole, but even the densest politician realizes our transportation infrastructure is broken.  Conventional wisdom suggests we should throw a lot of money at our decaying road, bridge and rail system to fix it.

I insist that no new roads should be built until the nation’s existing road infrastructure is fixed.  This may seem a little draconian given the fact politicians love to name new roads after themselves, but it’s become obvious that infrastructure planning over the past 60 years has revolved around the automobile rather than people.   Some would even suggest transportation planning was more of a social experiment than any real attempt to develop a limited but effective transportation system.

Regardless of one’s point of view, our current infrastructure planning requires quite a bit of rethinking.  Especially at the city level, we lost sight of what the infrastructure is there for — the people.