A Preview of Bi-Partisan Compromise on Infrastructure (Sorry, It's Not Good)
Bikers and pedestrians in Minneapolis. Image via Unsplash.
The 2015 legislative session was the closest Minnesota has come in recent years to passing the state version of a broad transportation spending package, the kind of ambitious effort currently being debated at the federal level.
At the time, I drew the scorn of my state’s transportation advocates, especially the bike–walk and transit supporters, for my steady opposition to MoveMN, the coalition of engineers, contractors, unions, and others supporting former Governor Mark Dayton’s spending proposal.
Just prior to that session, I wrote and self-published an e-book based on Governor Dayton’s assertion that he wanted a “world-class transportation system.” To start 2015, we ran a series of articles attacking the mindset behind MoveMN’s advocacy, including “No New Roads”—a clarion call for reform before new spending—and “The Classic Case,” where I highlighted the words of the executive director of the MoveMN coalition, who identified the frontage roads, big box stores, and strip development of my neighboring city of Baxter as the epitome of success.
Shortly after those articles, an engineer affiliated with MoveMN filed a complaint against me with the engineering licensing board. (That complaint was dismissed, but it is certainly influencing the current licensing predicament we’re dealing with.) Just before the MoveMN legislation went down to defeat, I wrote “Why I Do Not Support MoveMN,” which was widely circulated here in Minnesota.
In that article, I said that the binary options of (1) passing a huge transportation spending increase for existing programs, sans reform, or (2) watching Minnesota’s transportation infrastructure crumble, was:
...a construct of the current political debate, shaped by the propaganda from organizations like MoveMN. [These two choices] are not a serious examination of our complex and intertwined transportation, land use, economic and social challenges, struggles that go way beyond how much money we are going to spend on transportation. The MoveMN proposal may be good politics, but it is bad policy. Enacting it will lead to a weaker Minnesota.
If this sounds familiar, it is essentially the same criticism we have for the American Jobs Plan, the Biden administration’s proposal for a massive funding increase for legacy transportation and infrastructure programs, which I wrote will “make our infrastructure crisis worse.” We hold the Republican Roadmap (a non-serious propaganda flyer) in similar disdain. Shoveling unprecedented levels of funding into current programs prior to any serious work on reform is a terrible idea, regardless of who proposes it.
Yet, now there is a bipartisan coalition supporting a spending approach that seems both filibuster proof and has the support of the administration. Details are sketchy but, as we wrote earlier, the only real consensus in these dueling approaches is for spending a lot more money on roads, bridges, and interchanges, especially to expand existing systems. It is far more likely than not that this will be a terrible bill, one that should never be made into law.
Again, Minnesota presents a scenario for how federal consensus is likely to end up. Our governor is a moderate Democrat. Our House of Representatives is also Democratic but is heavily influenced by progressives in Minneapolis and St. Paul. Our Senate is Republican, but by a slim majority, with most of that caucus coming from rural Minnesota, places that became “Trump Country” in 2016. Our legislative session just ended with a bipartisan compromise on transportation spending passed by both chambers. You will never guess what’s in that bill. (That was sarcasm.)
First, the spin from MoveMN. According to them, the bill is a “funding win” for transit with “strong funding” for biking, walking, and rolling. (I must admit, I’m not sure what they mean by “rolling” in this context.) Their press release contains “key highlights,” including $5 million in MnDOT’s active transportation account, $5 million for Safe Routes to School, and $57.5 million in bus rapid transit. If your love language is government spending on biking and walking (and rolling), these feel like big numbers.
Here is a link to the House bill. While $5 million for active transportation sounds nice, you’ll find $4.2 billion for trunk highways in the bill. If the $5 million for Safe Routes for School gets you excited, perhaps you won’t mind the $1.7 billion for county state aid highways. That $57.5 million in bus rapid transit seems really progressive until it is compared to the $430 million being spent on municipal state aid routes (a program to essentially turn local streets into highways).
Nearly half a billion dollars is going to the Department of Public Safety, with $226 million of that just for patrolling highways. We’re going to spend more in two weeks on highway patrols than we will spend in two years in the active transportation account.
Heck, we’re spending more than half a billion dollars just on debt service. I wonder what those projects were. (Sarcasm again: we all know what they were.)
There is $200 million for Corridors of Commerce, which is as despicable a program as its name suggests. It has funded some of the worst of the worst types of projects in the name of economic development, including a $25 million bypass of a city of 1,000 serving just 7,000 vehicles per day; the construction of a fourth interchange for a city of only 3,400 (that’s one interchange for every 850 people!); building frontage roads and interchanges to support franchise restaurants and big box stores on the outskirts of small towns; and paying to relocate a business from one suburb to another suburb.
Corridors of Commerce should have been killed off years ago; it is a horrible program doing great damage to cities and small businesses. Regardless, the bipartisan consensus is to spend 40 times more on it than on Safe Routes to School.
Here’s a flashback to that press release from MoveMN, which encourages its supporters to “keep it up!”
In 2015, there were a lot of advocates here in Minnesota who wanted to brand me a right-wing, starve-the-best, anti-government radical because I didn’t support their legislation. They sought to apply cheap labels to avoid having to deal with the substance of my critique. It didn’t work and their bill went down in flames, not because Minnesotans are anti-government or anti-spending but because nobody, conservative or progressive, seriously looks at legislation like this and says, “this is how we build a stronger Minnesota.”
They might say, “this is how we build a coalition” or “this is how we get legislation passed,” but nobody who really cares about walking or biking (or rolling), and nobody who cares about the financial health and solvency of our cities—let alone small businesses, climate, families, equity, public health, children, etc.—can justify expanding the existing slate of infrastructure programs.
Nobody.
We have had more than 75 years of massive horizontal expansion of our infrastructure systems through a series of programs enacted in the New Deal and in the years following World War II. That is over. We have built way too much and experienced not nearly enough productivity to justify, let alone afford to maintain, those investments. All of those programs need to end or be radically reformed.
The next 75 years need to be about making better use of our existing infrastructure investments. Our top-down infrastructure programs need to shift to support maintenance, not expansion, and make room for the bottom-up adaptations and innovations needed to drive gains in productivity. The next 75 years need to be about cities and how they transform to become Strong Towns.
If your love language is government spending, you will love the next 75 years, because we have to spend a lot of money. It is going to cost an astronomical amount just to maintain what we have already built—way more than we are currently planning to spend. Strong Towns is not anti-government nor anti-spending, but we are against pouring more money into these legacy infrastructure programs, at both the state and the federal level.
We should not be cheering on a bi-partisan consensus based on some simulacrum of reform while an overwhelming amount of spending is going to programs that are making us weaker as a country, as cities, and as neighborhoods. Advocacy groups like MoveMN do a disservice to the public—they insult us—when they claim $10 million in biking and walking (and rolling) in a $6.5 billion spending bill is somehow winning. It actually disgusts me.
“With your help, we make more and more progress every year—let’s keep it up.”
It’s not progress. The bi-partisan consensus we need right now is a rejection of any bill that expands these legacy infrastructure programs, along with support for a bottom-up approach to building a nation of Strong Towns.
The second book in the Strong Towns series, Confessions of a Recovering Engineer, comes out September 8 and includes a lengthy discussion on how we should be financing transportation. Reserve your copy, and get your pre-order bonuses, at www.confessions.engineer.
On this week’s episode of the Strong Towns Podcast, Chuck is joined by Beth Osborne, the director of Transportation for America, to discuss the Highway Trust Fund and how it affects federal and state transportation policies.