Originally Posted by
myrridin
Yes, hence my comment about earmarks.
However, the Highway fund was and is used for many types of projects (or components added through legislative requirement) that were never part of the original concept. And funding has never kept up with the additional requirements/uses or even with inflation for the original intended purposes. You can find a reference study in the link I posted earlier in the thread. In that study it was estimated that in 2004 the funding shortfall was approximately 100 billion dollars from what was needed to just maintain the status quo on existing facilities much less construct new capacity to deal with growth.
About 20% of the nations roads are below acceptable grade.
In excess of 300,000 bridges in this country are deemed unsafe or insufficient.
Examples of special interest changes that have added costs to roadways:
Requirements for bicycles lanes and/or pedestrian facilities
Environmental justice legislation
Environmental protection studies and mitigation
Building recreational trails using transportation funds.
These are just a few examples. Whether you think they are a good idea or not, is irrelevant. They add cost to transportation projects, in some cases substantial costs. Yet funding/revenue was not increased to account for the increased costs.
That's just absurd. Pedestrian facilities are absolutely a mandatory part of road construction. In no way is that special interest. It's how you accommodate people, you know, walking on the legs God gave them...
I know the trail funds have been tiny. To some extent environmental protection studies are important: You can do a lot of harm building a bridge the wrong way and blocking a waterway, or contaminating a water way: Not just to the environment in general, but to farms. I've heard some examples of environmental studies gone to the extreme, but I don't know the character of the average study. Given that we build lots of highways I'm guessing the environmental studies aren't crazy on average.