How soon these short sighted politicians forget. The purpose of Federal interest in roads, and surface transportation in general, has been long standing. The 1919 U.S. Army Transcontinental Motor Convoy**, a post WW I effort to find out how long it would take to move troops and supplies cross country, averaged a paltry 5.7 mph (one could do that on a touring bicycle) getting what amounted to an army company across the country on the nascent Lincoln Highway. A Lt. Col. Eisenhower was a member of that effort and together with seeing the German Autobahn, convinced him that the Federal government had a strategic interest in ensuring excellent transportation systems in place in advance of when we need them. I’m sure that is why the Federal Aid Highway Act (i.e., the act that created the Interstate Highway system) was passed under his administration.

** http://www.eisenhower.archives.gov/research/online_documents/1919_convoy.html

I don’t think that strategic interest by the Feds has diminished. Perhaps it has expanded, i.e., in addition to the need to move strategic goods and people in a crisis (whether a military one or a civilian crisis such as Superstorm Sandy), we need to plan for a future that is less reliant on fossil fuels and that uses energy wisely. This cannot be done patchwork.

Mike Lee and his ill-advised cohorts fail their history lessons at our peril.

I can’t help thinking they’re trying to usurp the TEA moniker, as in ISTEA/TEA

1.4% of people in republican held house districts take transit as their primary commuting method vs. 8.9% for democrat held house districts. It explains a lot, especially for a party that don’t seem interested in winning over new voters.

Source: The Atlantic excellently spelled out:
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/11/there-really-are-two-americas-republistan-and-democravia/281412/ Data at the bottom of the article.

If states had to fund their own transportation, we would see a very different landscape shaped by local needs

Khal, your car bias is showing. Probably unconsciously.

You should have written “…how long it would take to move troops and supplies cross country BY ROAD.”

In 1919 troops and supplies would normally move cross country by railway. Fast and efficient.

Mike you aren’t going far enough, and neither is the Heritage Foundation.

The gas tax should be kept as an air pollution tax, but I favor federal transportation spending going to nearly zero. The FAA, the NTSB, other regulatory functions need to be federal. But I don’t want decisions in Washington anymore.

How about having the feds pick up a larger share of Medicaid, or some other direct to people service, to make the states whole? But localize the decisionmaking. I for one am not afraid of entitlements and defense taking over the federal budget. A lot of mistakes in housing, transportation, infrastructure etc. would have been avoided if that was always the case.

It would be difficult to rebuild the national passenger rail network by leaving it up to the states. But perhaps that’s the other 10% you referred to.

Perhaps it is showing, Kevin. I suspect there is more than just a tad of anti-car bias on Streetsblog as well, eh?

Rail *is* surface transportation, although its a shame so much of the old rail system no longer exists except as bike paths.

I think the Feds should have an interest in interstate transportation and mobility and in transportation needs that are of a national or strategic nature, such as ensuring there is good connectivity to strategic resources such as bases or ports or population centers not only for economic vitality (cities, ports) but also in the event of an evacuation or supply emergency. As far as what is needed whether it be rail or road would depend on the specifics. Recall that during the Battle of the Bulge, it was the strategic confluence of roads, not rail, that made Bastogne so important.

Not sure rail would serve the needs of another superstorm, but neither do roads unless good planning and geography prevail. Bad planning trumps good transportation. No one had any idea how to evacuate Long Island, for example, if Shoreham Nuclear Power Station (I once lived less than ten miles away) were to have a major accident; the LIE, Northern State Parkway, Southern State Parkway, etc, are parking lots under even normal circumstances. I’d have gotten off Long Island faster on my Cannondale. Hence Shoreham was cancelled.

States have an interest in what happens inside their borders or between adjacent states. Sometimes these are hard to untie. I suppose one can count on state agreements between each other, such as NY-NJ-CT-PA.

The Feds have traditionally thrown money at highways and have a terrible bias towards highways rather than the needs of urban areas and that tends to create a self-serving and perpetuating constituency. Combine that with race and class bias and we have the perfect storm.

That doesn’t mean the states are much better. New Mexico, for example, currently ranks close to dead last in the LAB Bicycle-Friendly State evaluations and that is one instance where I’ll gladly buy LAB Exec Director Andy Clarke a beer in support of their analysis. Perhaps that is because our state exists at the teat of the Federal bureaucracy, but not sure how to change it for the better. Perhaps left to its own devices, NM would continue to build more US 550 four lane highways to nowhere while letting urban transportation languish with 1960’s designs, which is what the NMDoT has been doing since I’ve lived here. Even Albuquerque, a somewhat progressive and Bronze Level BFC, has its administration putting the I25/Paseo del Norte Interchange above virtually all else. Duke City residents by and large drive. So to me, cities and states are not necessarily an acceptable alternative to bad Federal planning.

Or maybe not….wanna trade crystal balls?

Highways and rail lines by their nature transcend state lines while bicycle, bus, and walking are local issues, albeit ones with national impact (health, pollution, fossil energy dependence). How one manages surface transportation to make it less biased towards highway links to nowhere while ensuring national continuity in standards is a good challenge, regardless of the scale of interest.

My problem with Lee et al is I think they are knee jerk conservatives who are wedded to special interests and who see solutions to their pet political points of view rather then addressing problems needing to be solved in a less ideological manner. I’d love to have an honest, non-car-centric conversation at the Federal level.

U.S. DOT is not in charge. Congress is. If transportation were locally funded, some states would be held back but others would move forward. The federal government could pull the whole country backward.

My state government is one of the worst, but I’d still rather that decisions on the margin made there than in Washington. Robert Moses was a long time ago. And without federal money, and lots of it starting with New Deal money for the Triboro Bridge, he’d have done a lot less of the things you object to.

But do all the states have a bad track record? You can find bad examples everywhere, but there have to be some states that are better than others.

County or city/town is the level at which bike/ped infrastructure is decided, and I would hope that places that already have good bike/ped infrastructure would keep fighting for that state money if the federal money went away.

There’s a big difference between letting states make the decisions and letting cities or metropolitan regions make the decisions. The state of New York has a lot of concerns that don’t involve the economic activity on a few islands off its southeast corner. And the states of New Jersey and Connecticut really don’t care about what goes on there. But if you got the mayors of a few dozen towns around NYC to agree to a unified regional taxation package that would fund metropolitan transportation, you’d probably end up with something better than what the feds come up with, and definitely better than what three separate states operating independently would.

That might be true if states were local entities. But other than Delaware and Rhode Island, and maybe a few others, most states are just like the nation as strange agglomerations of urban, rural, suburban, and everything in between. Decisions for East St. Louis are no better off made in Springield, IL than they are in Washington, DC.

At some level regional planning needs to take place – with that said, no state legislature would ever agree to spend the lavish amounts of money on things the way the feds do. It would be the end of vast interstates and more NJ Turnpikes – that is broad support across the state to fund the thing and devise a means to maintain it. The current system encourages states to develop projects that win federal grant money – not projects that everyone involved understands and supports getting done. The subway was subsidized by the city of new york’s dual contracts because the elected officials agreed that it needed to be done. It is much easier to convince a rural legislator 200 miles away from your city to fund your local needs than a congressman from 2000 miles away.