First of all, let me say a couple of words about the putative leader of the Federal Highway Administration. If confirmed by the Senate, Arizona DOT Director Mary Peters will become the first female Federal Highway Administrator in history . . . that's significant to many people. What's significant to me is that Director Peters will be an outstanding Administrator, carrying with her the earnest esteem of her peers and of those of us who have worked with her. We haven't always agreed on issues, but we have always found the Director to be a consummate professional who is, knowledgeable in her field and who will examine all sides of an issue thoroughly before making decisions which command respect, if not always concurrence, by all parties.

As an example, you will not hear her perpetuating banal folklore such as "you can't build your way out of congestion," as we heard from the previous Administrator. How would anyone know if we can or cannot build our way out of congestion? We know that if you add highway capacity it does relieve congestion and improve traffic flows, just as adding a railcar to our subway system provides more seats.

Dispelling Myths

Let me expand on this and a few more myths about highways. Highway opponents have done an excellent job manufacturing and promoting myths about highways and highway use. A myth that is repeated often enough soon becomes accepted lore. For the sake of time, I'll limit my examples to three of the most prominent myths (if you want a more complete list, talk to me later or call Rutgers Professor James Dunn, who's compiled a host of them):

Myth #1) New road capacity will completely fill up with new drivers. Setting aside the ludicrous notion that potential motorists are sitting in their driveways with their engines running as they wait for a new road to open up, the fact is that road use has grown without increased capacity. Since 1970, total US road mileage has grown by a scant 6% and lane-mile capacity by around 15%, but our population has growth by 32%, the number of licensed drivers by 63%, the number of vehicles by 90% and the vehicle miles traveled by 132%! No wonder traffic congestion is growing, threatening safety, stifling production, slowing deliveries, and taking time from our families. Each year, more of us are driving more cars and trucks more miles on about the same road system. And those trends don't appear likely to change in the near future regardless of whether we build new capacity. Consider this: a recent economic report found that by the year 2008, the number of Class 6, 7 and 8 trucks on our roads will grow by nearly 40% and Class 3, 4, and 5 trucks will double — these increases are based on economic expectations, not road capacity!

In fact, for a nearly perfect case study in support of additional road capacity, all we have to do is look in our own back yard, Washington, DC:

In the 1960's, the national capital area released a plan for its transportation future. Included in their plan were three components — 1) a network of 14 new roads, 2) the metrorail system and 3) a number of high occupancy vehicle (HOV) lanes. As you probably know, they built the metrorail. They also built the HOV lanes, but they only built one of the 14 new roads — I-66 (which is HOV during rush hour).

Like the rest of the US, Washington's car pooling is declining. But our transit system, which has seen gains in ridership in the last few years, has attracted 12.8% of DC's commuters, 2nd highest in the nation. And use of our car pool lanes leads the nation, attracting 16% of commuters. But, because we failed to build those 13 other new roads, Washington has earned the dubious title of having the second worst congestion in the nation . . . second only to Los Angeles.

The reason I called this case study "nearly" perfect is because no other US city can hope to match DC's relative success with car pooling and metro use. Why? Because no other US city has tens of thousands of people working the same hours in the same buildings, federal government buildings that house the gigantic IRS, State Department and so many other government bureaucracies . . . buildings located at or near Metrorail stops and departments which give preferential parking to car poolers and transit passes to employees.

The point is that Washington's highway use has grown dramatically WITHOUT new roads or bridges. If building roads and not building roads both result in greater highway use and if traffic congestion brings with it a host of safety, environmental, economic, and personal time management problems, isn't the better route to include new highway capacity in our transportation plans?

Myth #2) Transit use is growing faster than highway use. With great giddiness, transit advocates have concluded that "America's love affair with the car has ended" because transit use grew by a greater percentage than highway use from 1999 to 2000. But even if their figures are correct and transit use increased by 4.5% and highway use only grew by 2.3%, percentage increases can be deceiving. Nationwide, there were 9 billion transit boardings in 1999, but there were over 1 trillion trips by private vehicle!! A 2.3% increase in private vehicle trips is 23 billion additional trips, 2½ times the total number of transit boardings with or without the 4.5% increase!!! The fact is that transit still comprises about 2% of all trips made in America and about 5% of all commutes.

Myth #3) The costs of highways exceed their benefits. Some academics have estimated that the external costs of highways, when added to the real costs, far exceed highway benefits. First of all, total revenues generated because Americans drive far exceed the total cost of road construction, maintenance, policing, and administration. In fact, according to the most recent estimate, actual revenues exceeded actual costs by $38 billion a year. But perhaps most importantly, those who count intangible costs, like environmental costs, seldom offset them with the intangible benefits of highways, such as the benefits of having a mobile society, having speedy emergency services, and having an economy that can boost productivity by replacing warehouses with productive space, and make reliable in-time deliveries of raw materials, supplies, and finished products.

The Benefits of Roads

In an effort to quantify the benefits of roads, we commissioned the most comprehensive study of the subject in history. So that no one would question the numbers, we selected the prestigious transportation firm, Cambridge Systematics to identify the benefits of bringing the nation's worst bottlenecks from "Service Level F" to "Service Level D" (roads are graded much as students are — can you image the public uproar if our education leaders set "Ds" as their goal for student achievement)?

The Cambridge bottleneck study (entitled Unclogging America's Arteries: Prescriptions for Healthier Highways) unearthed myriad benefits of fixing the 167 worst chokepoints will, over the 20-year life of the improvements:

• 290,000 fewer crashes, including nearly 1,150 fatalities and 141,000 injuries;
• A 45% reduction in carbon monoxide and 44% cut in smog-causing volatile organic compounds by vehicles in the bottlenecks;
• A whopping 71 percent reduction in emissions of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas; and
• A reduction of an average of 19 minutes to drive through the bottlenecks — that's nearly 40 minutes per day for a commuter who must negotiate a bottleneck in both morning and evening rush hours.

Any one of those benefits should justify a massive program to identify and fix our worst bottlenecks. We're honored to learn that Minnesota has implemented just that — they're identifying, prioritizing, and improving the state's worst chokepoints.

Front Burner Issues: Kyoto, Energy, and CAFE

It's easy to see how those benefits will aid in three of the front burner issues facing President Bush and the Congress:

The Kyoto Protocol — For over a decade, Germany and Japan have understood a simple fact of engineering: If vehicles are driven at a constant speed, instead of accelerating and decelerating or idling in gridlock, they use fuel more efficiently and emit less greenhouse gases and criteria pollutants. A study, conducted in 1990 for the German auto industry reached some startling conclusions . . . improving traffic flow can have a dramatic impact on CO2 emissions:

As mentioned earlier, the Cambridge Systematics confirmed those dramatic results, finding that bottleneck improvements would reduce CO2 emissions from cars and trucks driving through the bottlenecks by 71% (from 284,590,001 metric tons [313,770,674 short tons] to 82,325,319 metric tons [90,766,614 short tons])!

National Energy Policy — In its 2001 Urban Mobility Report, the Texas Transportation Institute (TTI) concluded that traffic congestion costs the 68 cities it analyzed a whopping $78 billion annually (the sum of 4.5 billion hours of wasted time and 6.8 billions gallons of excess fuel consumed)! According to TTI: "To keep congestion from growing between 1998 and 1999 would have required 1,800 new lane-miles of freeway and 2,500 new lane-miles of streets . . ."

Again these findings were mirrored by the Cambridge study, which found that improving our worst bottlenecks (only a few hundred of the nearly four million miles of US roads) would reduce gasoline and diesel consumption by 19,883,611,000 gallons over the next 20 years.

CAFE Standards — Last night, a House Subcommittee passed legislation tightening Corporate Average Fuel Economy Standards, or CAFE. Unfortunately, Uncle Sam telling automakers what kinds of vehicles to make bears no relation to the kind of vehicles Americans want to buy. Forcing consumers to drive smaller and lighter vehicles will result in increased fatalities and injuries on our roads. It will also restrict consumer choice, cost American jobs and would divert scarce resources away from advanced technology programs to improve fuel efficiency, increase occupant protection and lower emissions. The Highway Users believes if Congress really wants to improve fuel economy for America's vehicle fleet, they should look for measures to relieve the stifling traffic congestion that is choking our nation's highways, not tighten CAFE standards. Idling in traffic jams and frequent accelerations caused by start-stop traffic not only waste time, but burn billions of gallons of fuel unnecessarily.

Streamlining

On average, it takes 11 years for a major highway construction project to wend its way through the stages of planning, design, environmental review, and right-of-way acquisition. Dozens of federal agencies can review (and delay) projects. And our legal system facilitates further project delays through lawsuits. Many in Congress believe that we can speed up the time it takes to improve our roads while retaining any and all environmental protections. The ambitious program adopted unanimously by the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee and almost unanimously by the full House of Representatives in BESTEA, the ultimate language in TEA21, and the congressional ire over the Clinton Administration's foot-dragging in implementing that language speak to the priority Congress has assigned to it.

Since last May, The Highway Users has quietly embarked on a program to develop a legislative proposal that will significantly speed the planning process related to highway projects, while leaving all environmental laws and requirements intact. With the key organizational elements in place, on May 1, we hosted the first national conference on the issue — bringing both sides of the issue to the table to throughly address its pros and cons.

In addition, we've accomplished the following tasks:

1) First, we asked Kevin Heanue to identify the chokepoints in the review process and to craft workable solutions. I suspect that to most of you here, Kevin hardly needs an introduction, but let me provide a brief one. Kevin Heanue is a civil engineer and the author of numerous published papers on transportation planning and environmental issues. Including serving as the former director of the Federal Highway Administration's office of environment and planning, where he served as the agency's chief administrator for the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Air Act, and the Clean Water Act, Kevin has amassed over 40 years of experience and expertise in environmental regulation and analysis, transportation planning, and land use issues.

The result of Kevin's superb work is the white paper that we released at our conference and are distributing today. In it, he discusses three key points:

2) Second, we conducted focus groups in six cities to examine what people think about and how they react to the environmental review process for highways. We followed those focus groups with a nationwide poll to assess what the general public thinks about traffic congestion, its relationship to the length of time it takes to build a major road project, and how they react to some potential solutions. The results of that poll were somewhat surprising:

3) Third, using Kevin's legislative suggestions and the environmental review language included in the original House reauthorization bill (BESTEA) as a guide, we developed a specific legislative proposal that we believe could substantially cut the amount of time required for a typical Environmental Impact Statement without changing any of the environmental requirements of NEPA. Our proposal contains three basic elements:

With those key steps completed, we're entering the next phases of this important program — garnering bipartisan support, introducing the legislation with that support and taking the steps that will lead to the proposal's enactment.

We believe the groundwork we've laid will improve the chances for the success of effort. The time has come to take the step of assembling our public sector champions to introduce the legislation and provide the necessary media cover to endure the onslaught that the environmentalists will levy at the proposal. Enacting our legislative proposal won't be easy, but it will go along way toward solving the delays that needlessly detour highway projects. While the essence of our proposed legislation has overwhelmingly passed the full House of representatives and while the Bush Administration has signaled its desire to expand the cooperation between state and federal governments, the fact remains that there will be substantial opposition from those who don't see a problem existing. And then there's the Senate, which argued for substantially modifying BESTEA's provisions in the conference committee that ultimately resolved TEA21.

TEA21 Reauthorization

Highway opponents don't assess the results of TEA21 the way we do. With our victory came resentment from those who do not support road investments or the freedom to choose to drive. These forces saw TEA21 as a resounding defeat for their position . . . they have responded by mounting an orchestrated, nationwide anti-road, anti-driving campaign — sometimes direct, sometimes indirect, to ensure that we will not repeat our success when TEA21 is renewed. Highway opponents are strong, gaining strength, and far better funded than we are — in some cases, environmental groups are actually paid money to withdraw their opposition to specific road projects. They then use that money to fight us on other road projects. They're opposing highway investments on six fronts:

First, nearly all of TEA21's funding can be diverted to non-highway spending. Anti-highway, anti-driving forces know this, and have mounted aggressive grassroots campaigns to discourage state and local governments from investing in highways.

Second, anti-road activists are working to get the public and the media on their side. The Sierra Club's website has a tool kit teaching people how to stop highway projects — how to organize protest rallies, disrupt public hearings, hold press conferences, and provoke public opposition to roads.

Third, as discussed earlier, US laws and regulations make it easier to stop a road project than to improve one.

Fourth, our Clean Air Act takes highway funds away from cities that fail to meet air quality standards, even though road improvements — by reducing traffic congestion— are the most important tool a city has to clean its air . . . . it's the equivalent of taking a scalpels away from surgeons and expecting them to operate.

Fifth, a growing campaign against suburban sprawl, called "Smart Growth" and championed by former Vice President Gore, is yet another assault on highways. In most cases, it would shift funds from highways to alternatives, such as transit and bicycle paths — this despite the fact that, since 1970, US highway use has outpaced highway capacity growth by 25 times, while transit use has been largely stagnant, and virtually no one bicycles to work. In its most extreme case, Smart Growth will: 1) stifle the freedom to choose where to live and how we travel, 2) encourage high density, apartment-style living near transit (although polls show that Americans won't live in them), and 3) stop new highway projects, worsening traffic congestion for the growing number of people who choose to drive.

Sixth, TEA21's funding guarantee is under attack by road opponents and many in our Congress.

The Highway Users focus is clear and our priorities in 2001 and beyond are ambitious, but vitally important:

Specifically, we've identified Eight objectives that will improve America's freedom of mobility and roadway safety.

Our Challenge

As Advocates For Highway Use and Investments The Highway Users is a consumers' group for America's motorists and truckers, and for others that use or improve our roadways.

I'd like to say that all of our members wake up every morning wondering how they can ensure better road policies. But unlike highway opponents, they don't — they don't go door to door. Too often, highway issues don't even make their list of corporate priorities. Too often, they don't devote enough resources to those priorities. Too often, they take roads for granted. We must begin to take a page from those who want to stop highway improvements — taking the offensive by becoming more active and vocal, encouraging our side to attend each city council meeting and every congressional hearing, telling all who will listen how highways save lives, reduce crashes and injuries, improve the environment, give us faster emergency services, speed product deliveries, and give us more time that we can spend with our families or in other productive activities. We must better dispel the myths through faster response mechanisms with the general public, the media, and elected officials.

Tough Road Ahead

I won't sugar coat it. Road advocates are swimming upstream in the United States, fighting all six fronts as once with resources that pale in comparison with our opponents.

The good news is that public opinion polls and focus groups show that the American public agrees with our policies. But we must engage them in the debate over highway policy, taxation and funding, and that requires extensive and expensive media, advertising, lobbying, and grassroots activism.