How to Fix Our Interstates... Hint: Not with more asphalt. [View all]

[Agschmid]

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I hate the Interstate Highway System. I realize that this is an awkward time to bring this up. Many of you are no doubt planning road trips, and I’m sure you’re grateful for the fact that you do not have to traverse dirt roads in your Conestoga wagon en route to the Grand Canyon. Though I don’t know how to drive myself, I can absolutely see the appeal of barreling down the highway at top speed, singing along to Top 40 radio between bites of my delicious egg and cheese biscuit taco. I don’t begrudge you your love of the interstate, nor would I dream of dynamiting it into oblivion. Now that we have these wildly expensive marvels of modern engineering, we shouldn’t allow them to crumble, to the point where only Imperator Furiosa and Mad Max would have the guts to drive them. But we have to do something about the interstate highways, because as things stand, crumbling highways are exactly what we’re going to get.

In case you’ve missed the latest highway news, the Senate and the House have been battling it out over which idiotic short-term fix we ought to settle for in order to keep federal highway funding flowing for the next few months or the next few years. One group of lawmakers, led by Sens. James Inhofe, R-Oklahoma, and Barbara Boxer, D-California, has devised a grab bag of revenue-raisers, from selling off oil in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to hiking various custom fees to funky maneuvers involving the Federal Reserve that I won’t even pretend to understand. This deal, backed by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, would have financed the highways for the next three years. Another group, led by Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wisconsin, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, wants to link highway funding to a broader overhaul of corporate taxes, with an eye toward encouraging U.S. multinationals to bring profits back home from their foreign subsidiaries. For now, however, Republicans in both chambers appear to have coalesced around a short-term solution that will fund the highways for the next three months to buy time.

What’s so awful about these stopgap proposals? For one thing, they don’t fully account for the fact that most of the Interstate Highway System needs to be rebuilt, as the highways were built to last about 50 years, and the system was first established in 1956. Even with the best maintenance money can buy, you can only extend the life of these old roads by so much. How much will it cost to rebuild these highways, and to expand them to accommodate increases in traffic? Robert W. Poole Jr., a transportation expert at the Reason Foundation, estimates that it will take roughly $1 trillion. Others have estimated that reconstruction and modernization could cost as much as $3 trillion. You will be shocked to learn that Congress has barely begun to think through what it will take to rebuild and upgrade our highways.

In a perfect world, we could
hop in a time machine and
convince Ike that the Interstate
Highway System was in fact
a terrible idea.

But our real challenge is not squeezing out just enough money to keep our existing interstate highways in good working order. Nor is it figuring out how to find a trillion, or trillions, of dollars to pay for an upgrade. It is facing up to the fact that the Interstate Highway System has helped drain the life out of our big cities and figuring out a better, smarter, more sustainable way to connect Americans from one end of the country to the other.

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