Better Highway Spending != Rocket Science
Matthew Yglesias ponders:
The operative question on the table is, how can we get to better highway spending? Simply hoping members of Congress wake up one day and decide to put the national interest over their parochial interests isn’t much of a plan. What’s needed is some kind of centralizing, rationalizing procedural reform.
I’ve got your centralizing rationalizing procedural reform right here.
Make drivers pay for the roads they use. Charge tolls that reflect the supply and demand for a given road at a given hour. The Major Deegan Expressway before a Yankees game should cost more than I-91 in Vermont at midnight, but they have the exact same toll - $0.00. That’s insane.
New roads will be built in areas where road supply exceeds demand to the point that there’s money to be made doing it. Our “highways to nowhere” in Alaska and Pennsylvania that only exist because of powerful Congressmen will fall on hard times, and it may be more profitable to tear them up and use the land for something else.
Not that our current Congress would ever dream of any of this….