Editorial: Serious on Infrastructure

It was gratifying to see someone with a really big soap box — CBS News’ “60 Minutes” — speaking so clearly about infrastructure needs.

Regular readers of Transport Topics may not have learned much new from the Nov. 23 broadcast, but there was still great value in the venerable news program giving time to Ray LaHood and Edward Rendell so they could talk about bridges, roads, airports and seaports. It’s good that our fellow citizens not directly involved in freight transportation got to see pictures of the cracked and crumbling infrastructure over which trucks must drive on a daily basis.

Rendell, a Democrat and a former Pennsylvania governor, shared a mind-boggling anecdote about a construction worker’s quest for a sandwich that led to emergency bridge repair in his state. However, remarks from LaHood, a Republican and the immediate past secretary of transportation, were more instructive.

“Politicians in Washington don’t have the political courage to say, ‘This is what we have to do.’ That’s what it takes,” said LaHood, a colleague of Rendell’s within the Building America’s Future Educational Fund.

This is another example of how entitlement spending and interest payments gobble up an ever-higher proportion of federal spending, leaving less for discretionary spending such as transportation infrastructure.

There’s certainly no constituency for crumbling bridges, but the fear is that it will actually take an outcry from more bridge collapses for legislators to overcome the antipathy toward taxation.

There is some support for paying for transportation. “60 Minutes” showed the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the AFL-CIO jointly supporting infrastructure projects. Separately, American Trucking Associations has said repeatedly that freight transportation companies are willing to pay more in fuel taxes — if that money goes to much needed repairs.

We report in this issue, and in other recent editions, about several small-scale tax bills that could help trucking and related industries. Taxing liquefied natural gas on an energy-equivalent basis to diesel rather than volume equivalence is particularly worthwhile and should be adopted as a matter of basic fairness.

There are other ideas that sound good in isolation, but they are mainly distractions from the matter of overwhelming importance to be pursued: a multiyear infrastructure plan.

Pursuing the small, routine items until a genuine, long-term plan is crafted is not particularly bad, but we would happily see all of those proposals swept away in favor of a coherent budget plan that includes dedicated long-term funding to fix the nation’s collapsing infrastructure.