State politicians are looking to “bring home the bacon” by leveraging scarce state dollars.That inherently favors new or replacement structures over maintaining existing assets, to the extent states can get away with it. Usually, politicians don’t much care if the new road is actually the best possible investment for taxpayers. What matters to them is prestige (your name on this highway), votes (via the patronage that comes with holding the public purse strings) and campaign contributions from construction companies.

The politics of transit would work the same way if enough middle class voters were interested in riding transit. More often than not, they still want “someone else” to use it so there’s more room on the road for them and their cars. The cultural shift to low-carbon transportation is happening very slowly, if at all. Families may be buying more fuel efficient cars but few volunteer to own fewer of them because the alternatives are insufficiently developed. To some extent, it’s a chicken and egg problem. The willingness to support transit expansion and upgrades is only high where population density is also high (e.g. NYC) or urban planning is transit oriented (e.g. Portland) to create pockets of density near stops.

Even with a concerted push from the top plus grassroots efforts plus high oil prices plus awareness of climate change, it’s still going to take some time to overcome the traditional state DOT bias in favor of roads. Senior bureaucrats want to keep doing what they know how to do, they don’t want to risk their careers on implementing systems they’re unfamiliar with.

The consequence is waste and destruction on a grand scale, while older, essential, core infrastructure continues to crumble. In Illinois, you’ll likely see the Freeport-Galena freeway in US20 even though that road currently carries only 5,000 vehicles a day except in the one congested spot (through downtown Galena itself, about 12,000 vehicles a day, a good many of them tourists for whom Galena is the destination, not the speedbump). And you may also see Denny Hastert’s Prairie Parkway (aka “Prairie Porkway”) opening up new territory for sprawl.

But the life-expired structure that is North Lake Shore Drive in Chicago is still not in the state’s five year plan. North LSD consists of, from Chestnut Street to Irving Park Road, worn-out 1991 overlay on top of 1933 concrete. It is pockmarked with frost-heaves and potholes. From Irving Park to Foster, the 1937 concrete was finally overlaid a year ago, as some miracle workers from the city working on a shoestring dug up all the shattered expansion joints, filled them up, and then overlaid the whole works and actually produced something that looks like it could actually last a while — but as they warned us at the time, this is a five year bandaid. And from Foster to the end, you’ve got approximately 1999 overlay on top of 1954 concrete that I can tell you, having used the entire drive before all the patching, was of far poorer quality than the 1930s stuff.

So let’s review that again. In today’s Washington and state DOT priority list, a crumbling 75 year old urban expressway that depends on most of its original structures is not considered due for reconstruction. But a decent two-lane highway in bucolic northwestern Illinois that carries 1/30th of Lake Shore Drive’s traffic is advancing towards being completely replaced by an all-new billion dollar interstate that will ruin the countryside most of the existing traffic is going to see as tourists.

And that’s before we even start debating rail.

… and rgere is also more to fight for than ratios – fighting for all road spending in a jobs bill to be on road repair first until a state has caught up with its full backlog of road and support infrastructure requiring repair would be popular with the electorate, while allowing transit to increase its share of corridor miles even at a 4:1 share of spending.

It can be done, but the political will in this country to make real, tough decisions is pathetically lacking – from local government all the way to the top.

Frustrating but true. The only time things move quickly is after a disaster.

Why various other projects can’t be expedited to this degree without a major infrastructure failure is beyond me. The 35W bridge shows that nearly any project can be started within a year of conception. Which would be good for the economy, and good for the country.