ISTEA: A Poisonous Brew for Urban Transport

Will American mobility continue to increase in the twenty-first century, or will we get bogged down by a cumbersome central planning process that simply creates congestion and gridlock in our cities? That is the question posed by the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA), passed in 1991 and up for reauthorization this year.

A better title for the law might be the "Urban Immobility and Pork Barrel Act." It creates enormous incentives for major urban areas to promote congestion and waste gas taxes on pork barrel projects.

A major device for creating congestion is the construction of expensive rail transit. Rails increase congestion because they carry so few people and divert funds from activities that could genuinely improve traffic flows. Light rail is a nineteenth-century technology that is slow (averaging 20 miles per hour), inconvenient, and expensive. Even Washington, DC's well-developed but expensive rail and bus transit network moves less than 14 percent of all commuters.

Portland, Oregon, is often touted as a model for urban planning and transportation. Yet its light rail line is a failure, carrying less than half the people originally projected by planners. Since the light rail went into operation, transit's share of weekday Portland traffic has significantly declined. Portland planners "have stopped trying to ease traffic congestion," reported National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" recently. "Instead, they are embracing congestion; they want to create more of it."

They are succeeding. The Texas Transportation Institute's annual report on urban congestion indicates that congestion in Portland is increasing faster than in any other western city. Portland planners have developed a long-term plan for the region which, they quietly predict, will triple congestion over current levels.

Why would anyone want more congestion? Supporters of immobility fall into four distinct groups:

• Central city officials, who (a) see immobility as a way to discourage people from living in the suburbs and (b) see rail transit as a way of getting federal pork;

• Urban environmentalists, who wish the automobile had never been invented;

• Urban planners, who think they know best how people should live, work, and move around and want to impose their ideas on everyone else; and

• Downtown business interests, who think that imposing congestion on the suburbs will return customers to downtown shopping districts.

ISTEA encourages the supporters of immobility in several ways. First, it allows the diversion of federal gasoline taxes into mass transit. Since rail transit makes better pork barrel than buses, most of the dollars are going into rail.

Second, ISTEA discourages or even forbids cities that fail to meet EPA air quality standards from expanding roadway capacity. This is ironic, as slower cars pollute more, making congestion a major source of air pollution.

ISTEA also imposes on cities a central planning process that has given supporters of immobility the upper hand in allocating transportation dollars. While they pacify auto drivers with rhetoric about easing congestion, they spend highway dollars on so-called "traffic calming" measures, such as concrete barriers and narrower lanes, that increase congestion by forcing cars to slow down.

The Department of Transportation uses ISTEA funds to encourage cities to adopt the "New Urban" planning philosophy, which promotes nineteenth-century, high-density housing. Portland, for example, is re-zoning large areas of the city for row houses and multi-family dwellings while discouraging or forbidding construction of homes on large lots. New Urban densities are supposed to promote transit, but all they really do is create more congestion, since high-density residents still drive most of the time.

You might applaud these efforts if you think that we should try to get people onto transit. The problem is, they don't even achieve that goal. In Portland, planners want to spend billions of dollars building ninety miles of light rail, increase population densities by 70 percent, and impose "traffic calming" on many major roads and streets. Yet Portland planners predict that all of these things will reduce the share of trips taken by car from 92 percent to 88 percent. The share riding transit will remain under 5 percent.

Urban transportation is essentially a local issue, not a federal one. The solution is to take the federal government out of the transportation funding process.

A proposal offered by Senator Connie Mack and Representative John Kasich comes closest to doing this. It would eliminate most of the federal gas tax and let cities and states plan and finance their own transportation systems. If that happened, many cities would come to their senses and plan for the twenty-first century rather than the nineteenth.

Randal O'Toole is an economist and executive director of the Thoreau Institute in Oak Grove, Oregon, a suburb of Portland.