Our Transportation Budget Is a Fraud We Perpetuate on Ourselves

Image via Unsplash.

The Senate has now agreed to discuss an infrastructure bill, the next step in the ongoing process of allocating extra money to transportation and other infrastructure investments. There is a lot of parsing of what is in the bill and what is out (The New York Times has a particularly good graphic on it) and whether the House will sink the compromise for not sufficiently addressing progressive priorities. I don’t care about the horse race, insider baseball aspects of this. It bores me, actually, especially given the narrow parameters of the conversation. 

The president wanted $154 billion for roads and bridges. As I wrote earlier this year, that amount was wholly inadequate to even maintain 12% of our existing roads and bridges currently in poor condition, yet the president’s plan was going to spend a large percentage of that money on expansion. Republicans liked the outline of that plan, but reduced the amount to $110 billion. Do we call that victory or defeat?

The administration wanted to spend $77 billion on transit. The agreement is for $39 billion, a token above half of what was proposed. It is my contention that the top-down approach to transit has crowded out transit investments many multiples of whatever money is ultimately allocated, as local transit officials obsess over commuters and being good partners in the war against auto congestion. Whether $77 billion or $39 billion, it is just enough to ensure that transit stays in its place as the charitable appendage to our dysfunctional, auto-based transportation system. 

The $24 billion in “reconnecting communities” money proposed by the administration was reduced to…(checks notes)…$1 billion. I kind of thought this was a political gimmick anyway, but I’m inclined to be cynical of Transit Equity Day suggestions that we will, "rebuild our nation's infrastructure into something that creates opportunities for all, especially those who have been historically shut out." That would require a bottom-up humility that is the antithesis of the hubris in a multitrillion-dollar infrastructure proposal. In that sense, Transit Equity Day and Infrastructure Week have a lot in common.

I could go on, but why? What we’re watching is an unraveling, the last gasps of a social and economic order that came of age in the post-war boom, made stunning wealth in the final decades of the 20th century, and has been propping itself up through recurring crises as it clings to its last shreds of credibility and power.

To that point, I don’t think we will have Infrastructure Week a decade from now. We all know it is a joke—the emperor truly has no clothes—but the people who believe in that aspect of our cultural theater still insist on it. So, what the heck, it’s not really hurting anything and there are more important things to fight over. Have your preening and your platitudes. Whatever.

We may still have Transit Equity Day a decade from now, however. It might even be Transit Equity Week or Transit Equity Month, who knows. We are slowly shifting our cultural priorities from a Baby Boomer world, one defined by a receding view of their own accomplishments, to a new social order of things, one we are all seemingly anxious to see play out (some with anxious hope and others with anxious dread).

Journalist and author George Packer wrote an amazing piece in the Atlantic titled, How America Fractured Into Four Parts. It explains how we have four competing visions of the nation’s purpose, values, history, and meaning. None is quite right—they all have fatal blind spots—but they all capture essential truths. There is a generational aspect to Packer’s analysis, especially when he talks about “Just America,” perhaps the newest of the four on the scene, a group that “could smell out the bad faith of parents” and others who can have endless versions of Infrastructure Week that only make the infrastructure problem worse.

“No wonder the bland promises of middle-aged liberals left them furious,” Packer writes. I’ve never believed in the promises of middle-aged liberals and so I don’t share Just America’s fury. Even so, I’m left wondering what we will do when we stop lying to ourselves about all of this. 

What do we do once we stop pretending that a transportation budget that supposedly seeks to address the urgency of thousands of miles of roadways in poor condition, funds repairs for 12% of those miles, diverts most of that funding to building new roads, and then compromises away even that meager funding, is anything but a fraud perpetrated on ourselves?

In 2012, I wrote “Can Baby Boomers Be Part of the Solution,” where I asked, “is substantive reform possible from a generation that is this vested in the current approach and this close to the finish line?” I took some heat from my elders who felt I was discounting their commitment to reform, but the intervening decade has added credibility to my assertion. Watching the septuagenarians leading the decisions on infrastructure investments that their great grandkids will maintain or watch fall apart, it’s hard to see this debate as worthy of our time.

What do we do? We can start by recognizing that the only thing that is going to scale, the only set of actions that will have the necessary nuance for a fractured America, the only path that respects the experiences of individuals, serves the disadvantaged, and puts us on a path to prosperity, the only choice we have that acknowledges the real financial and resource constraints we face, is one that starts from the bottom.

You, me, our neighbors, all working together, all doing what we can, to build a nation of Strong Towns. Once you recognize that, the only thing left to do is to get started.

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