Here in the Rust Belt, the season of snow and ice is giving way to the season of rain and potholes which is just a brief transition to the season of road repairs and endless traffic backups.

My personal belief is that we need the pavement ruptures to cause the construction and traffic delays so that we will be happy to see winter arrive, but that is another story.

Barring a bridge collapse or some equal disaster, the pothole season is generally the only time of year that motorists and taxpayers hereabouts talk about the problems with our roads. Since we can’t talk about paying more taxes to build and maintain roads — this is America, after all, and we’re entitled to free roads — the conversation usually turns to some variation on “why are our roads so crappy?”

The most popular public notions I hear include government corruption, government mismanagement, lazy employees (many motorists believe traffic flaggers at construction zones have easy jobs and work for the government), and the use of cheap materials and/or engineering designs.

The question of concrete versus asphalt is coming up more often in my reading material and conversations, perhaps an outgrowth of the marketing initiatives of advocates for those materials. It is a seductive scenario in a society that prefers to solve problems with the downing of a pill or the implementation of a simple solution: All we have to do is build all our roads with (pick one) asphalt or concrete and we’ll never have another pothole.

But the pothole season in the Chicago metro paradise I call home is an equal opportunity destroyer of pavements. The aging asphalt residential streets I use on my weekly errands are dotted with potholes, some tiny, some 6 inches deep. The concrete secondary road that leads to my subdivision, now somewhere in its second decade of life, has been tormented by freezes and thaws and perhaps a less than ideal sub base and now produces the ride quality of a logging road, with mismatched panels and deepening cracks at the seams.

kirk.landers@att.net

My friends and relatives are disappointed when I share this with them, and add that the great advances in pavement quality and longevity in the last quarter-century have mostly evolved from the freedom of engineers to design pavements for the specific, mile-by-mile conditions they must endure — traffic volumes, wheel loads, soil conditions, temperature extremes, and precipitation levels — and to select designs and materials based on system-wide budget realities.

Our problem in this, the season of rain and potholes, is not concrete or asphalt. It is not the work of our highway professionals or our contractors. It is the lack of priority the public has for roads and bridges. We would like to have roads that last 50 to 100 years, and they can be built out of concrete or asphalt or both. But those roads cost money, a lot more money than we the people and our chosen representatives have ever been willing to pay for roads.

Early in my career, I worked for a special interest consumer magazine that was getting beaten badly by the competition. In a series of meetings about how to save our magazine and our jobs, we identified the reasons we were getting whacked and outlined a list of potential solutions, then we systematically went through all the solutions and found each one was either too expensive or too risky. So we failed, though we never exceeded our spending budgets.

It was an interesting exercise for someone just learning about business. Companies, like individuals, can be so afraid of trying something new they will keep doing things that don’t work until they go out of business.

The same things happen in government, too, and it’s happening in our government. While one politician after another pays lip service to things like infrastructure spending, in the end, there is not even a hint of political will to increase a fuel tax that has been inadequate for more than a decade. So we careen along a path of self destruction and cloak it in the illusion of fiscal responsibility.

One manifestation of that illusion is the rise of voices claiming that what we are doing — or not doing — makes perfect sense. The budget sequester has won praise by some as, while not ideal, a step in the right direction … a thought based entirely on the concept that nothing is more important than reducing spending, no matter how.

The parallel thought in the road industry was offered in February by transportation consultant Ron Utt, a former budget official in the Reagan administration, speaking to a CNN.com reporter. In scoffing about the dire predictions coming from the American Society of Civil Engineers and other groups as varied as the Chamber of Commerce and the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, Utt said, “To hear some people tell it, you’d think we were Haiti.”

It’s true. We’re not Haiti and our decline won’t parallel that of an impoverished country.

Instead, the decline of our roads and bridges will continue to be by small, almost invisible degrees and easily misunderstood. For example, Utt pointed out that Federal Highway Administration statistics indicate the miles of pavement in good condition is trending up. This can only be an indication that things are getting better, right?

kirklanders@att.net

Probably not. The Obama stimulus spending on roads famously generated much less employment than expected because so much of the money went to small-crew projects like overlays and mill-and-fill interventions. Every mile of overlay goes instantly to the “good” category of pavement condition, so we had a brief burst of wide-scale improvement that will not be sustained by current revenues.

In addition, America’s road managers at every level have learned to give resource priority to preserving healthy pavements while just trying to keep failing roads useable. Inevitably, the inventory of failing roads will begin to grow again in the absence of adequate investment, and by the time this trend becomes visible, the cost to do something about it will be even higher than the cost we are unwilling to assume today.

Holland was in the news again this winter with small-scale demonstration projects seeking to make roads safer and greener.

This small, Old-European nation was the birthplace in the last decade of an attempt to use road and parking lot pavement to heat buildings in the winter and cool them in the summer. Created by the Dutch engineering firm Ooms Avenhorn Holding BV, the system implanted heat-transfer pipes in the roadway to heat water in the summer. The heated water was stored in a deep reservoir, then employed as a heat source in the cold months. In the first installation in the village of Avenhorn, the warm water was used to help heat a 70-unit apartment building and cycled under the pavement to keep it from freezing in the winter. The cold water was then stored in another reservoir to be employed for cooling the building and the pavement in the summer.

Now, another Dutch town is said to be evaluating the concept of heated bike lanes. As treacherous as snow and ice are for cars, it is even more so for bicycles. In a nation of hardy cyclists, the thinking is that heated bike lanes would encourage more bikers and fewer cars in the winter months. Heated lanes would also reduce accidents and reduce the need for chemical de-icers.

Separately, news reports from Europe highlighted a new “smart” lane marking system from Holland utilizing a paint compound that contains glow-in-the-dark crystals that are recharged by sunlight.

The website Allianz.com reports that pavement heating/cooling systems have been installed elsewhere in Europe, including a project in Scotland engineered by Invisible Heating Systems that reportedly generates 108 megawatts of solar energy a year from a 400-square-meter parking lot. It is used to heat an adjacent building and workshops.

“We can extract about 270 kilowatts per square meter a year,” IHS technical director Henk Verweijmerem tells Allianz.com. While a roof-mounted solar panel would be twice as productive, he says, the cost of the tarmac panel is about one-twelfth that of a solar panel.

The cost justification for these installations is neither simple nor universal. Holland’s heated bike lanes would cost the government more money but hopefully save citizens the cost of accidents and gasoline. The heat exchanging systems for pavement need to be installed when the road section or parking lot is being built or rebuilt — it would be cost-prohibitive otherwise. The site must have space for deep excavation and proximity to the buildings that will employ the energy.

Kirk Landers,
Editor Emeritus,
kirk.landers@att.net

The list of qualifiers and limitations is undoubtedly a long one, but you have to think each installation will advance the knowledge and potential of harnessing the potential of our hundreds of thousands of miles of paved roads.

And that is why it would be good to see the United States get involved in this small-stakes exploration of pavement potential. Here’s an opportunity to invest small amounts of money in a few demonstration projects that actually demonstrate something new and experimental … and something that just might open new horizons for road design and America’s energy needs in the future.

kirk.landers@att.net

By Kirk Landers, Editor Emeritus

Some people just know how to sell.

In mid-December, Ohio governor John R. Kasich and the leaders of Ohio’s Department of Transportation and Turnpike Authority announced that the state would raise $3 billion for roads without leasing the Ohio Turnpike to a private vendor and without laying off Turnpike employees.

Hailed as the Ohio Jobs and Transportation Plan, the new initiative called for raising $1.5 billion through bonds issued by the Turnpike Commission and backed by future toll revenues, then raising another $1.5 billion or so via matching local and federal funds. The $3 billion (or so) would be used to rebuild the Turnpike and fund construction projects on other major highways.

As news releases go, it was more interesting than most because Governor Kasich, ODOT Director Jerry Wray and Ohio Turnpike Director Rick Hodges called it a “first of its kind” plan, and it stood in stark contrast to major announcements in recent years involving states like Indiana and Illinois leasing state-constructed infrastructure to private firms to raise cash.

It was interesting, but it wasn’t the kind of thing you would write a column about except maybe in a very slow news month. It’s what came next that put it to the top of my list.

In the hours following the first release came a steady stream of short announcements expressing enthusiasm for the plan. Six mayors endorsed the plan, including the mayor of Cleveland. The Ohio Operating Engineers Local 18 thanked Kasich for the plan. So did the Ohio Contractors Association. So did the Ohio Trucking Association and the American Trucking Associations, and the County Engineers Association, and a long list of state representatives and senators and county commissioners and a number of business groups, including the Dayton Chamber of Commerce and the president of the Greater Cleveland Partnership.

The message was simple and dramatic: Kasich and his highway managers had taken partisan politics out of the process by including a full spectrum of stakeholders in the process, and by somehow finding enough common ground to announce a high stakes financial proposition with a tidal wave of bipartisan support.

Kasich, if you didn’t know, is a Republican. The old fashioned upper Midwest kind — fiscally conservative, socially aware, politically pragmatic, and willing to do what’s right even when it isn’t politically expedient. You don’t have to bother checking the political affiliations of all the endorsers to know there were plenty of Democrats and Republicans who supported this plan.

They should. It will stimulate construction and jobs on a great, if not grand, scale in northern Ohio, and it will invest in critical infrastructure at a time when competitive pressure on contractors promises to keep bids low. It also locks in favorable toll rates for years to come. And it focuses the bond revenues on roads.

The final brilliant stroke of this initiative was announcing it with two dozen or more endorsements by civic and business leaders throughout the state representing a full continuum of political affiliations. It was a strong message to the press and to other politicians that this is a plan with support that runs long and deep in the state of Ohio.

Well done, Governor Kasich. Well done, Ohio!

kirk.landers@att.net

When we talk about public-private partnerships, we mostly think of tollways and tolled bridges. But in this age of tax aversion and desperate underfunding, states are exploring smaller-dollar possibilities for the concept, some quite clever, and others opening the doors to some humorous possibilities.

According to the AASHTO Journal, the weekly transportation newsletter published by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, several states are offering sponsorship opportunities to private corporations.

Perhaps the most inventive of these is an arrangement between the New Hampshire Department of Transportation and State Farm insurance company. In that partnership, State Farm is sponsoring the state’s Motorist Service Patrol in exchange for having its decals displayed on MSP vehicles. The private money is said to help the DOT maintain and possibly expand its Motorist Service Patrol and it gives safety-conscious State Farm a truly positive affiliation.

Elsewhere, Ohio is selling advertising and sponsorship opportunities at its rest areas, while Virginia has recently authorized a program to sell naming rights for highways and bridges and other transportation facilities. And New Hampshire itself is considering a sponsorship program for bridges and overpasses.

The sometimes bizarre names of sponsored college football bowl games shows how awkward this can get. Then there’s the potential for unfortunate juxtapositions of sponsor names and the infrastructure that bears them. A corporation in the news for financial weakness, for example, might reflect negatively on a bridge bearing its name. Especially an older bridge. At the very least, it would become the target of jokes.

Similarly, you wouldn’t want a bridge or overpass emblazoned with a company name or slogan that included words like “crush” or “fall” or “collapse” or “disintegrate.”

On the other hand, there is the potential for some very creative, symbiotic relationships. One that comes immediately to mind is a paint brand like RustOleum sponsoring a bridge and using it as a canvas for its products, painting the structure regularly in creative patterns that show off a panoply of bright colors to remind consumers that its products are beautiful, fun and practical.

These programs probably won’t bring game-changing money to DOT coffers and they would bring some challenges along with the revenue, mostly stemming from the fact that selling advertising is not easy and it can’t be done on the side. You have to commit resources to it, even if you hire an outside firm to do the work, and state DOT resources are more limited today than they have been in years.

As a motorist, I also fear the day when, at the behest of the DOT, traffic reporters work sponsor-named bridges and highways into their reporting. Even now, in Chicago, a place I’ve called home since the presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower, when traffic reporters refer to Interstates by their dedicated local names instead of their numeric designations, thousands of us are mystified. The Jane Adams Expressway? I don’t know where that is even though I probably use it frequently. What happens when it gets segmented into General Foods, General Motors and General Electric?

By Kirk Landers

With another bitterly contentious election under our belts, most Americans would like to live in a world without politicians and robocalls and super PACs for at least a little while. But for people in the transportation industry, this is a time to keep writing letters to senators and representatives, because this is a great time to extol the unique virtues of a fuel tax increase as a way to raise revenues without reducing consumer spending — the most diabolical of the challenges facing Congress today.

kirk.landers@att.net

Here is the letter I sent to my senators and representative. Please feel free to use it or a variation on it, but please take the time to contact your elected officials.

Dear Congressman,

As you and your colleagues wrestle with the challenge of raising revenues and lowering costs in this short session of Congress, I’d like you to be aware of the several immediate benefits that would stem from an aggressive increase in the federal fuel tax with all proceeds going to transportation.

1. As President Ronald Reagan pointed out several decades ago when he signed off on a fuel tax increase, the fuel tax is a user fee, as long as the income is spent on transportation and nothing else.

2. As taxes go, the fuel tax is relatively well regarded by American citizens. President Reagan’s 5-cent increase in 1982 more than doubled the federal fuel tax and is still the largest percentage increase in its history. The citizenry accepted it without rancor. The fuel tax was increased again during both the George H.W. Bush and the Clinton administrations and it was again widely accepted by the electorate.

Today, even the American Trucking Associations and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce are calling for an aggressive increase in the fuel tax to support a long overdue modernization of our roads and bridges.

3. The federal fuel tax is not regressive in terms of its affect on the economy. Over the past decade, gasoline prices in America have fluctuated by more than a dollar a gallon in many years, but only the Great Recession itself reduced vehicle miles traveled. Fuel taxes don’t even affect consumer choices in vehicles, as the continuing popularity of SUVs attests.

Our current federal transportation program, inadequate though it may be, draws billions of dollars of funding from general revenues. Increasing the fuel tax 5 cents per gallon for 2013 will eliminate the need for general revenues for roads and help restore the balance in the Highway Trust Fund. We should increase the fuel tax 5 cents every year for five years to get our highway program where it needs to be to handle the volume of users it must handle if our economy is going to continue to grow in the 21st Century.

I know taxes are never popular, not even the fuel tax. But the one clear mandate from the recent national elections was for Congress and the administration to take positive action in solving America’s frightening economic problems. This won’t solve all of them, but it will help by increasing revenues without dampening consumer spending, and by putting millions of people back to work on infrastructure projects that are as vital to our economy as debt reduction is.

By Kirk Landers

Over the past few decades advances in technology, methodology and best practices have made for vital information sessions at the annual meetings of industry groups and trade shows.

kirk.landers@att.net

Attendance at those sessions is invariably strong, but one group is always under-represented: engineers from government road agencies.

It is axiomatic among seminar planners in the road industry that agency attendance at educational venues will be mostly limited to those who can make a day trip of it by car. Overnight stays and airline travel are dearly rationed in most road departments, and the nicer the destination, the less likely it is that agency people will come from beyond commuting distance.

It’s not just a budget thing.

“It’s an image problem, especially,” a trade show executive once told me. “Some reporter takes a picture of Joe Smith having a drink at a Las Vegas blackjack table and writes a story about how Joe spent three days in Vegas on the taxpayers’ dime, and all of a sudden Joe’s boss and all the bosses between him and the governor look like big-spending louts.”

So the engineers who design structures, devise drainage and safety schemes, select pavement components and chemistry — the people who make the decisions that determine whether a $30 million road project will last 10 years or 50 — those folks stay home and wait for the information to reach them by other means . . . usually, papers posted on the Internet.

It’s like having elite military personnel read about jungle training at a base in the United States instead of getting trained in a tropical jungle in Asia or Central America.

The end result of sequestering agency engineers has not been catastrophic for the American taxpayer. Transportation departments get the information eventually. Perhaps some of the work they do prior to learning of a new technology or method could have been done more effectively, but by and large the taxpayer is not severely disadvantaged by the delay.

Or are they?

The time — and money — it takes to get information to decision-making agency engineers works against smaller, entrepreneurial businesses. Small businesses generate a lot of new ideas in a capitalistic economy, and they get a lot of lip service in election years, but few road industry entrepreneurs have the means to get their message to key engineers, one city and one state at a time.

So some creative ideas for doing things differently are not getting through to our agencies, and that undoubtedly contributes the sometimes glacial pace of change in the road industry.

The other great drawback of closeting our agency professionals is that their own expertise and the wealth of their experiences don’t get shared. Contractors don’t hear from them and neither do thousands of their colleagues in other states and cities.

As we get ready for another winter season of annual meetings and trade shows, let’s hope some agency executives and mayors and governors take a new look at educational travel for road professionals. A little common sense would solve all the reasonable objections to this practice, and a little courage would take care of the rest.

kirk.landers@att.net

While the citizenry and media of the United States focused on election polls and campaign rumors this summer, the U.S. Department of Transportation quietly announced that more than $470 million in unobligated earmark funds was being released to the states for investment in transportation infrastructure.

The unspent earmarks were originally appropriated for the 2003-2006 fiscal years, according to the AASHTO Journal, which reported the story.

So, six to nine years after it was supposed to have been invested, nearly a half-billion dollars is finally being put to use for transportation infrastructure.

No doubt the state transportation departments receiving these funds are delighted to have access to the money at last. And it’s a good bet that the money will go further today than it would have in the halcyon days of 2003-06.

But this is a horribly inefficient way to run a transportation system.

While populist politicians, editorial writers and the general citizenry have become focused on earmarks as a dastardly form of corruption, the main practical drawback to earmarks — as practiced on the last two long-term transportation bills — was the way they tied up substantial amounts of investment dollars in a long-term limbo until the earmarked project was at last ready to be let … or all hope for the project was gone.

It goes something like this: Congressman Smith obtains funds for a long-needed project in his district — a bridge, a road, a parking lot for a commuter rail station — only for the project to be delayed or killed by public opposition, or political intrigue, or environmental compliance problems, or changing needs. The earmarked funds sit in limbo for years, depriving Congressman Smith’s district and state the infrastructure improvements and jobs the Highway Trust Fund revenues are supposed to provide.

This problem can be solved with new rules about earmark-funded projects, rules that release the funds sooner if the project is not underway in a reasonable time frame.

The other valid objections to earmarks can also be solved with rules changes. If we limit earmarks on the transportation bill to, say, one per congressman and one or two per senator, we’re back under 500 earmarks, a reasonable number. We might also limit the amount of an earmark, or stipulate that earmarks over a certain amount have to be approved by the state’s governor.

The point is, earmarks have a valuable and legitimate place in American politics. They help make large spending bills more relevant to local constituents. They help congressmen justify their votes for major spending bills like transportation to the folks back home. And they allow otherwise forgotten congressional districts — such as a red district in a blue state, or vice-versa — to get the bridge or the exit ramp or the new highway they need without kowtowing to the powers that be.

Corrupt? No more so than the rural congressman voting for farm interests, or the urban representative voting for city issues.

Corruption? Exhibit A is MAP-21, an earmark-free transportation act that is such a breach of congressional responsibility that its authors — the entire Senate and House — should be cited for dereliction of duty.

By Kirk Landers

A lifetime of eager anticipation is swallowed in the sudden realization that his world is a lesser place after his victory, that his role model has fallen and he must now face the mud storms of life head on, with no one to buffer him from the chaos.

kirk.landers@att.net

We don’t want these thresholds, but there it was, in black and white, laid out in an on-line German newspaper for all to see: Germany’s Autobahn is being overtaken by gridlock and crumbling pavement.

The icon of modern automotive transportation, the inspiration for America’s Interstate Highway System, the engineering marvel that changed modern transportation as much as the automobile itself is said to be overwhelmed by the twin evils of over-use and underinvestment.

Sounds familiar, eh?

What makes this news especially shocking is the knowledge that the German economy has been more robust than many others in the West over the past decade, including our own, and Germany’s national government has taxed fuel and vehicle-related items like licenses, cars and trucks with an aggressiveness that road professionals in the United States can only fantasize about.

There are several life lessons that we here in the colonies can take away from this parable.

First, in this arm-wrestling match, there is no winner. The match pitted two cancer victims, both in degenerative states. The winner is the one least close to death at the moment, not the one getting stronger faster.

Second, and most important, Germany’s situation is proof positive that road funding is a universal and chronic problem. German roads have been a source of national pride for eight decades, give or take, and German citizens have been willing to pay dearly for them. Where our fuel taxes are measured in pennies per gallon, theirs are measured in dollars.

According to the news article, German road professionals put the national need for a road budget at 5 billion euros per year. Taxes on trucks alone create nearly that much revenue, and taxes on cars and fuel harvest billions more.

The problem, of course, is that these tax revenues are not dedicated to roads. They are part of general revenues and where they get spent is part of an annual budgeting crapshoot, just like our general revenues.

Overcrowding and pavement integrity problems are hardly unique to Germany’s autobahns and America’s Interstates. These conditions are, in fact, nearly universal ills plaguing road systems serving highly populated areas in many developed countries. Indeed, it’s likely that America’s woes are less severe than some others if for no other reason than our federal fuel tax, inadequate as it may be, is dedicated to highway and mass transit investment.

As we give thanks to the industry advocates who were able to get Congress to designate the fuel tax as a pure user fee, let us also resolve to protect this status with every future transportation bill, no matter how disappointing it is in any other regard.

kirk.landers@att.net

“A tie,” football coach Vince Lombardi is said to have famously said, “is like kissing your sister.”

If we accept this wisdom from the Green Bay Packers legend, it follows that the recently enacted federal transportation bill is like shaking hands with your ex-spouse’s spouse … awkward, embarrassing and unfulfilling.

The ironically named MAP-21 (Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century) is easily the worst, most inadequate infrastructure legislation passed in the last half century. It is a two-year bill when five or six years is a minimum practical need. It federally funds roads and bridges at less than $40 billion a year when $70 billion is widely recognized as a minimum need. It does not replenish the Highway Trust Fund, drawing instead on the general revenues of a dangerously overdrawn national treasury to cover the shortfalls.

MAP-21 is not progress at all. It is more like a kidney stone that has taken three excruciatingly painful years to pass, leaving the host organism with a luxurious pain-free moment before the cycle of agony starts again.

The best that can be said of MAP-21 is that it exceeds the sum of its parts. It is a better plan than either the House or the Senate bills that the conference committee had to work with. The House “bill” was a pathetic tribute to the inability of today’s Republican Party to solve a difficult problem; it wasn’t a bill so much as it was a willingness to enact yet another short-term extension of the long-ago expired SAFTEA-LU program of the last decade. SAFTEA-LU was inadequate for its own times and has been extended for more than three years via nine short-term extensions, and the best the GOP leadership could offer was another extension with even less money for roads and bridges.

Not that anyone should be gushing over the Democrat solution. Its sole virtue was a two-year time frame – grossly inadequate, but a half-notch higher on the courage scale than the House’s extension. The rest of the Senate package was a plan to supplement the Highway Trust Fund with questionable new revenues and general revenues.

The conference committee wisely adopted the House’s proposals for streamlining projects and giving more discretion to state DOTs in how they invest their federal dollars, and it adopted the Senate’s time frame and funding levels because the Senate approach was less bad than the House’s.

We can blame this mess on the members of the House and Senate. That is the popular thing to do these days and it’s fair to ridicule them for being so loudly and unapologetically ineffective.

But we should blame ourselves too. We the people elected them and they very accurately reflect what a divided, acrimonious citizenry we have become. We won’t get a fuel tax increase until it’s safe for a politician to explain to his or her constituency that a fuel tax increase is the only intelligent solution. On a broader scale, we can’t solve problems until we authorize our elected officials to acknowledge problems and make the compromises necessary to create solutions that reflect the consensus of the American people.