Opinion: Highway Improvement Delays Can Kill

If a proposed highway improvement project has passed every environmental test required by the federal government once — a necessary yet very expensive process that takes many months, even years, to complete — should it have to go through the same process over and over again?

That’s the key question raised by a recent federal court decision in a suit brought by the Environmental Defense Fund against a common sense rule implemented several years ago by the Clinton administration’s Environmental Protection Agency.

A number of transportation leaders in Congress agree with the transportation construction industry that once should be enough. The EDF, Sierra Club and other no-growth advocates, not surprisingly, don’t. Their agenda, when it comes to highway improvements, can be summed up in one word: delay.

The problem is that delaying highway improvements hurts and kills people.

According to U.S. Department of Transportation research, poor road conditions or obsolete road and bridge alignments are a factor in 12,000 highway-related deaths each year. That’s four times the number of Americans killed in accidental fires and a third more than die annually of asthma and bronchitis combined. How many more die needlessly because congested road conditions impede emergency vehicles? Those are public health issues the EDF chooses to ignore.

Regrettably, two of three judges on the court panel agreed with EDF that the 1990 Clean Air Act transportation conformity provisions are so rigid that under a number of circumstances, proposed road projects can be put back into the expensive and complex environmental approval process over and over again. The conformity law ties road project approval to regional and state attainment of federal air quality goals. Conformity sets up a “Catch-22” situation that the EDF and its no-growth allies use routinely to stop and delay needed road improvements.

Their approach, of course, not only has public health consequences, but also suggests a disturbing lack of concern for American citizens and businesses who are being forced to waste millions of hours and billions of dollars each year in unnecessary traffic congestion.

We predict, however, that this court decision will ultimately prove to be the first step in the undoing of the ill-conceived conformity law.

The statute is based on a now proven faulty assumption: that a regional or state transportation plan or program can be readily modified to conform with air quality targets by adding projects believed to substantially reduce emissions — such as the addition or extension of transit services — or by deleting highway projects that were believed to substantially increase emissions.

Research by the EPA, DOT and others over the past 10 years, however, has conclusively demonstrated that both transit and highway projects and plans have a minimal impact on regional air pollutant emissions — at best, a 1% to 2% reduction in overall emissions regardless of the infrastructure mix. Here’s why: EPA data show that despite a doubling of vehicle miles traveled in the United States over the past 30 years, total motor vehicle pollutant emissions have declined by almost 60%. And they will continue to go down for years to come.

Transportation-related emission levels are largely driven by improvements in automotive emission reduction and motor fuel technologies, economic growth, and overall population increase, lifestyle choices and demographics. Contrary to what the EDF and its allies would have the public believe, providing new road capacity to meet demand is simply a logical response to help eliminate pollution-generating traffic congestion.

Today, the CAA transportation conformity regulations are only serving the goals of one constituency — the small, yet vocal and mean-spirited minority of no-growth advocates who want to use the power of the federal government to force their views of how and where Americans should live, work and travel on the rest of us. They are using the conformity regulations and the court system to delay and stop needed transportation improvements that have been demonstrated to be environmentally sound.

To us, that’s pretty sad when traffic accidents are the leading cause of death of Americans six to 28 years of age.

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