More interstate highway subsidies for truckers

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Sam Damon

OBS Chief
Joined
Jun 9, 2005
Messages
990
Copied verbatim from the press release:

DOT 95-07 Contact:(Internal press contact information redacted)

Monday, September 10, 2007

U.S. Department of Transportation Names Six Interstate Routes as “Corridors of the Future” to Help Fight Traffic Congestion

I-95, I-70, I-15, I-5, I-10, and I-69 selected

The U.S. Department of Transportation today announced six interstate routes that will be the first to participate in a new federal initiative to develop multi-state corridors to help reduce congestion.

“We are using a comprehensive approach to fighting congestion along these major interstate routes. What we are doing represents a real break from past approaches that have failed to address growing congestion along our busiest corridors,” said Deputy U.S. Secretary of Transportation Thomas J. Barrett.

Today’s announcement follows a year-long competition to select a handful of interstate corridors from among the 38 applications received from public and private sector entities to join the Department’s “Corridors of the Future” program aimed at developing innovative national and regional approaches to reduce congestion and improve the efficiency of freight delivery. The selected corridors carry 22.7 percent of the nation’s daily interstate travel.

The routes will receive the following funding amounts to implement their development plans: $21.8 million for I-95 from Florida to the Canadian border; $5 million for I-70 in Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio; $15 million for I-15 in Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and California; $15 million for I-5 in California, Oregon, and Washington; $8.6 million for I-10 from California to Florida; and $800,000 for I-69 from Texas to Michigan.

The proposals were selected for their potential to use public and private resources to reduce traffic congestion within the corridors and across the country. The concepts include building new roads and adding lanes to existing roads, building truck-only lanes and bypasses, and integrating real-time traffic technology like lane management that can match available capacity on roads to changing traffic demands.

The Department and the states will now work to finalize formal agreements by spring 2008 that will detail the commitments of the federal, state, and local governments involved. These agreements will outline the anticipated role of the private sector as well as how the partners will handle the financing, planning, design, construction, and maintenance of the corridor.

For more information on the selected corridors and the proposals, please visit http://www.fightgridlocknow.gov.
Let's see. We in the USA put perfectly good private railroads out of business, then hit the taxpayer to build roads to replace them. Wonderful!
 
With that tiny pittance of funding, all it constitutes is hot air that won't accomplish anything. Less than $22 million from I-95 from Florida to Canada? You probably couldn't stripe one lane for that much. Repairing or widening one bridge anywhere in the whole system would probably cost that much. This is just hot air to try to convince the public that they're actually doing something.
 
With that tiny pittance of funding, all it constitutes is hot air that won't accomplish anything. Less than $22 million from I-95 from Florida to Canada? You probably couldn't stripe one lane for that much. Repairing or widening one bridge anywhere in the whole system would probably cost that much. This is just hot air to try to convince the public that they're actually doing something.
This probably represents money to fund a few studies. Not one real item of work other than generating of paper. It is another let's fund a study so it looks like we are doing something. Unfortunately, a higher proportion of these highway oriented studies get the real work funded than do rail studies. In reality, there have been enough reasoably good, and a bunch more near laughable rail studies done that if you were to pick the top 10% of the good rail studies and say "let's do it" you would still be having to spend several times as much money as has been put into real rail work in the last who knows how many years. It is way past time to stop generating paper and start doing real work.
 
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