The U.S. Highway Trust Fund provides a large portion of the funding for building and maintaining our major roads and bridges. The fund is in such bad shape these days that the U.S. Department of Transportation now maintains a trust fund “ticker” on its website — essentially a countdown to insolvency. At the state level, the California Transportation Commission’s 2011 Statewide Transportation System Needs Assessment described the state highway system as “deteriorating at an accelerating rate.” Locally, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave Humboldt County’s roads a D+ and its bridges a C- in a 2014 report card.
That’s why the first priority of the newly formed Coalition for Responsible Transportation Priorities (CRTP) is to spend our limited transportation dollars on maintenance and repair. CRTP is a group of Humboldt and Del Norte County residents whose mission is to promote transportation solutions which protect and support a healthy environment, healthy people, healthy communities and a healthy economy on the North Coast. After maintenance and repair, our priorities for transportation infrastructure are to fund only new infrastructure which supports healthy, livable, sustainable communities, and to cancel counterproductive road expansion projects which don’t meet these basic criteria.
These are pretty common-sense priorities, and you might think that our public agencies wouldn’t need much prodding to follow them. Given the facts, you might even assume that every available transportation dollar would be allocated to maintaining our existing critical infrastructure in working order. But you’d be wrong. Instead, transportation planners often seem dead set on continuing to spend money to expand roads even more. They often promote projects which do little to make our communities more livable, but do bring in more traffic to cause more infrastructure damage we can’t afford to fix.
In our region, the most prominent examples of this type of misguided project are two big Caltrans developments intended to give the biggest trucks on the road new ways to access our region. These are the famous (or infamous) projects on Routes 199 and 197 in Del Norte and on Route 101 at Richardson Grove in Southern Humboldt.
These projects compete directly with maintenance and repair projects for funding. Much of the money for the two projects is slated to come from the State Highway Operations and Protection Program (SHOPP), a program whose explicit purpose is to fund maintenance and repair projects which do not add capacity to the system. To divert this money to the oversized truck projects, Caltrans apparently found a legal loophole big enough to drive a whole lot of trucks through. But with bridges throughout our region crumbling and the road at Last Chance Grade sliding into the sea, it defies common sense to spend our limited maintenance and repair dollars on new highway expansion.
So how have supporters of these projects tried to justify them? You’ve probably heard the arguments. Boosters claim that they will improve our local economy by lowering shipping costs for local businesses. But few details have been made public. In fact, the only publicly available raw data on economic impacts of either project comes from a survey of 37 businesses expected to benefit from the 199/197 project. In that case, the Caltrans contractor conducting the survey could find only five businesses which said they might hire new employees as a result of the project. With an estimated project cost of almost $20 million to allow only a few businesses to consider expanding, that’s a risky and expensive economic development strategy!
Compare that to another form of transportation infrastructure: the humble trail. In addition to their many community and environmental benefits, trails are cheap to build and maintain and are well documented to increase property values and boost tourism. From an economic development standpoint, Caltrans would do much better to build bicycle and pedestrian trails. Sadly, the agency seems to dismiss most trail projects out of hand while it continues its single-minded quest to rebuild our roads for the benefit of oversized trucks.
It’s up to CRTP — and everyone who agrees with us — to change those priorities. You can find out more at http://ift.tt/1KEK5h6. We hope you’ll join us in taking up the challenge!
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