Smart Growth America Wants to Ask...

Whither Will the Highway Dollars Go?

By Robert Struckman, 9-22-08

A Washington, D.C. group wants help from U.S. Sen. Max Baucus to transform the U.S. Department of Transportation from a pork barrel into a focused agency with a mission.

“We’re funding bridges-to-nowhere while bridges in Minneapolis are collapsing,” said Smart Growth America president Geoffrey Anderson, whose organization is part of a $4 million campaign called Transportation for America. The money goes toward grass roots organizing, research and lobbying for the group’s platform. Click here for a list of partners behind Transportation for America.

The platform? The goal is to revamp the nation’s transportation mission statement. Its mission, which dates to the 1950s, comes from President Dwight Eisenhower: to construct the interstate highway system in order to get soldiers across the continent and to get farmers to market.

“Well, that’s been done,” Anderson said.

Since then, that mission has never been overhauled and re-tooled to fit modern needs and sensibilities.

What should the nation’s transportation focus be? It should be fixing crumbling roads and bridges, connect rural areas to economic centers, provide good public transportation within cities and downs and, on the neighborhood level, provide walking and bicycling paths. It could also include a significant focus on rail transit and other means, he said.

Whatever the ultimate focus, the need to responsibly target the billions spent by the DOT is dire, Anderson warned. Earmarks send dollars willy-nilly while vital infrastructure crumbles. (In her recent visit to Montana, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure will be one of the nation’s biggest growth industries—its needs are so extensive, and the funding will be so immense.)

That’s why Anderson came through Helena, Missoula and Big Sky last week—to make his case in Montana, with the hope that the state’s senior senator, a Democratic who chairs the Senate Finance Committee, might listen. Aside from Montana, the campaign’s key states include California and those in the Northeast corridor.

“Baucus is in a great position to play a big leadership role,” Anderson said. 

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