DC Velocity - October 2017

64 DC VELOCITY OCTOBER 2017 www.dcvelocity.com PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP, A MAN WHO ALWAYS HAS a lot to say, has been promoting a plan to spend $1 trillion (yes, that’s trillion with a “T”) to get our nation’s badly crumbling infrastructure into 21st century shape. As with so many proposals bandied about by the current administration, time will tell whether Trump will actually translate his words into action.

The current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. is not the first tenant in recent memory who has pledged to fix the roads and bridges that form the backbone of the U.S. transportation system. Anyone remember all those “shovel ready” projects Trump’s predecessor talked about but that never saw the light of day?

So, as we wait to see if anything will come from all the talk, it
was refreshing to review a policy brief on infra-
structure from the Committee for Economic
Development of the Conference Board (CED).
The CED, founded in 1942, is a nonprofit,
nonpartisan, business-led public policy orga-
nization that in its words, “delivers research,
analysis, and reasoned solutions to our nation’s
most critical issues.”
Titled Fixing America’s Roads & Bridges: The
Path Forward, the CED report pulls no punch-
es. “Although America’s network of roads,
bridges, and tunnels is critical to the economy
and American quality of life, it has been poorly
maintained for decades,” the authors write.

That history of deferred maintenance, taken together with what they describe as “a growing gap between investment needs and available funds,” threatens our collective access to a safe, reliable transportation network, they warn.

What’s particularly notable about the study is its thoughtful analysis of how the U.S.—a nation that once boasted the world’s best surface transportation system—ended up in this plight. As the authors make clear, money alone didn’t cause the problem and money alone won’t fix it. Factors like poor project selection, the politicization of transportation spending, and slipshod financial analysis have played into it as well. These challenges, too, must be addressed if we hope to return our highways and bridges to a state of good repair.

As part of its brief, the group offered recommendations for fix-
ing America’s infrastructure. They are as follows:
b Encourage greater private-sector participation in road building
and maintenance. Among other benefits, increased private-sector
participation would likely mean faster project com-
pletion because the risk of delay is transferred to
private partners through contractual penalties and
rewards.
b Improve project selection and foster “modal coor-
dination” across systems. Public officials should
consider road, bridge, and other modal investment
decisions as part of the larger transportation net-
work and not as standalone projects. Politics, not
system needs, often drive project selection, which
increases costs.
b Streamline regulatory review and permitting at
all levels. Inefficient regulatory
review processes often cause long
delays and substantially increase
project costs.
b Invest in technology. Driverless
and increasingly autonomous
cars, for example, will require
modernized roads. Furthermore,
greater use of roadbed sensors to
communicate with vehicles, and
integration of real-time traffic
and weather alerts, should be the
norm, not the exception.
b Move toward user fees to fund
roads and bridges. Greater use of
such fees would provide an equi-
table, reliable revenue source to cover operational
and maintenance costs.

b Inform and educate the public. Many Americans are understandably unfamiliar with the complexities of infrastructure funding. Leaders in both the public and private sectors should work together to communicate the importance of a strong surface transportation system directly to the public to mobilize support for infrastructure that is second to none.