Bad Roads in Cities Are Everybody’s Problem

By Conference President Denver Mayor Wellington E. Webb
April 3, 2000

Press accounts of a recent report by The Road Information Program (TRIP) on the condition of urban roads caught my attention. It struck me that the report really didn’t inform the public on the full story of what is happening to our city and urban roadways. The lead of USA Today’s front page story on the report (‘Bad Roads Cost Cities, Motorists,’ 3/21/00) read, “More than one third of the roads in the USA’s largest cities are rutted, uneven or pocked with potholes”. But, as mayors, we know that there are a few more lines to the story.

What the report does convey is that the recent debate in Washington about cutting the federal excise taxes on gasoline by 4.3 cents per gallon is surely not the answer. By cutting the federal gas tax by this amount, we put at risk nearly all of the increased transportation investment provided under the “TEA-21” law – more than $7 billion annually. We need these resources to upgrade our urban roadways and offer more diverse transportation choices, such as improved public transportation systems, to lighten the load on our urban highway systems. And, it is sobering to consider that the average American can achieve similar savings simply by keeping their tires properly inflated or by skipping one out of every 40 car trips.

What this report doesn’t acknowledge is the expanding burdens these same urban roadways now carry as telecommunications companies frantically carve up these highways and other streets to install the information superhighways of the 21st Century, the high-speed, fiber-optic cables of the new information economy. Of course, mayors want these essential improvements for our economies, but they do result in the further decline of our roadways.

And, importantly, what this report doesn’t tell the public is that for state transportation officials and state legislatures – those who primarily control funds for maintenance of our major urban highways – ‘transportation investment’ too often means building new roads elsewhere to satisfy new suburban and ex-urban development, both residential and strip commercial development. Or it means building new and expensive highway capacity in rural parts of our states, in the hope that this investment might somehow reverse the continuing declines in rural economies all across America.

As mayors, we have pressed our states to step up maintenance investments in our cities, to preserve the essential transportation systems that now carry our economy and serve most Americans.

We know this is a challenge. A new study by the Surface Transportation Policy Project (STPP) shows that our roads, characterized in the TRIP report as “rutted, uneven and pocked with potholes,” may be getting even worse. It documents that states are again shifting more funds into new highway construction, while reducing the share of federal transportation funds through TEA-21 that are used for the maintenance of existing roads, principally the major highways in our cities and urban areas.

As mayors, we know that these urban road networks are one of the crucial public assets underpinning our nation’s city/county metropolitan economies. To underscore how these metro economic engines matter to all of us (including state transportation officials), the Conference of Mayors joined with the National Association of Counties and Standard and Poor’s DRI to document their importance to America.  We learned that since 1992, our nation’s city/county metro areas provided 89 cents of every dollar of new growth for the U.S. economy, distributing wealth and public dollars that benefit all of us, regardless of where we live. Among nations, we now know that 47 U. S. metro areas made the top 100 list of world economies.

With this level of economic output, we shouldn’t be surprised to learn that our major road systems are showing the wear and tear of constant use, day after day of carrying the U.S. economy to record levels of output.

The TRIP report also leaves the impression that cities and counties are not doing their part. What is often ignored is the considerable tax effort by cities and counties—locally imposed sales taxes, property taxes, taxes and fees levied on telecommunications companies who use the streets to install new fiber-optic cables, and so on—to support investment in urban highways and other road and street networks. This local tax expenditure, which is largely dedicated to maintenance of the road and street systems now in place, is roughly equal to a gas tax increase of twenty cents per gallon.

While the debate in Washington focuses on gas tax cuts, another part of the story line comes from Dallas last month and the final meeting of the Congressionally created E-commerce Commission. Some of the nation’s largest telecommunications companies were there, pressing the 19 public and private members of the commission to agree to a Internet tax plan that would require each state to agree to a “single rate” state sales tax on remote sales. Sounds simple enough, but there’s a little snag. Such an approach would likely threaten local option sales taxes, which are now used by cities and counties all across America to finance local government services. In fact, local option sales taxes are now the single largest source of revenue to support the more than $30 billion localities spend each year to maintain their urban roadways and the local streets in front of our homes.

As mayors, we know that there are always a few more lines to the story.

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