How to capture the sorry state of our transportation? There are many good books, with solutions -- James Kunstler's classic "The Geography of Nowhere"; Jane Holtz Kay's "Asphalt Nation"; Katie Alvord's "Divorce Your Car!"; and Alex Marshall's "How Cities Work." Our bad transportation habits have become so embedded in infrastructure and culture that it's difficult to imagine extricating ourselves, but try we must.
Arkansas maintains 16,000 miles of highways, our nation's 12th-most extensive system despite the state's small and relatively poor population. It's hard to even maintain our present system, much less fund new roads. It's even become difficult to find the $50 million needed each year to match the $200 million federal highway contribution.
A statewide vote in 2012 approved a half-percent general sales tax for highways, to remain in place through 2023, and highway advocates have already asked to make this tax permanent beyond 2023. This is a bad idea because it drains funds that should be used for other purposes. Highways should be supported by user fees, never by more general taxes.
A proposed 6.5 percent sales tax on fuel would have raised $200 million per year, but was defeated recently in the state Legislature despite Rep. Dan Douglas' (R-Bentonville) plea that "this is your last chance to do anything to fund highways. ...We need $150 million per year just to maintain the highways we have, much less build anything new. It's a choice of maintaining our highways or managing their decline."
A recent survey by the Arkansas Good Roads Foundation showed drivers themselves have no appetite to increase the state gasoline tax, now 21.6 cents per gallon, in order to support their car habit. Thus drivers have voted, with their wallets, against better roads.
Like children, Arkansas drivers want their highways but they don't want to pay for them. So state highway advocates have another bad idea to support their addiction: Replace the present half-percent sales tax, which expires in 2023, with a quarter-percent sales tax beginning in 2024. This might be voted on as an initiated act in November 2018.
Most of the problem is national. Trains are the obvious people-mover between cities, but U.S. mass transit is a joke among other industrialized nations. Northwest Arkansans should be reaching places like Kansas City, St. Louis, and Dallas, on comfortable fast trains, yet we continue clutching our steering wheels while fighting traffic on giant, expensive, polluting, deadly, slow-moving, ugly, boring interstates that wreck our nerves and deplete our coffers.
Our biggest mistake is subsidization of automobiles at all government levels. User fees such as gasoline taxes don't even cover highway construction and maintenance, much less policing, fuel production, cleanup, parking, pollution damage, etc. European nations recognize this by high gasoline taxes that raise prices to $6 to $10 per gallon, which happily discourage driving while reducing highway costs. Their system, unlike ours, is reasonably sustainable.
The influential but secretive (its membership is not divulged) Northwest Arkansas Council recently issued a comprehensive description of their vision for future development of our four-county region. It predicts the present 525,000 population will expand to 800,000 by 2040. Although the report touts such growth, the council presents no evidence that it benefits typical current residents. It will, however, further clog regional highways and require more public funding. Two new interstate lanes are under construction and other new and expanded highways are planned, but regional planning director Jeff Hawkins observes "After 2020, as all these projects get finished, there'll be people driving on the six lanes wondering when they're going to do two more lanes."
So Arkansas' transportation coffers are empty while regional planners encourage population growth and add new highways. Can anybody say "unsustainable"?
One of the few bright spots in all this is the ongoing expansion of regional walking, running and bicycling trails. The University of Arkansas could contribute to this fine trend away from cars by requiring out-of-town students to put their cars in long-term storage in far-distant lots, to be used only for trips home (since Arkansas hasn't figured out how to build passenger rail for such purposes). This requirement would reduce local traffic congestion, solve Fayetteville's parking headaches, save lives, reduce injuries, save highway maintenance dollars and boost local business.
When it comes to transportation, Northwest Arkansas is blinded by its "all cars, all the time" mentality. What about commuter rail, express buses, highway tolls and gasoline taxes to discourage driving, more and better sidewalks, bicycle lanes through every city?
We can do better.
Commentary on 05/16/2017