Via Bloomberg
Sitting in traffic is expensive.
An estimated $100 billion a year goes down the U.S. economy’s drain
as a result of congestion, says the Texas Transportation Institute.
Trucking companies pay about a quarter of that, and now Congress is
toying with ways to get them out of first gear.
Fancy that. The masters of political gridlock are considering an answer for highway gridlock.
BGOV transportation analyst Matthew Hummer takes a closer look at the
Senate’s proposed highway bill, which would include $2.5 billion a year
to ease freight movement.
His Bloomberg Government Study suggests that
the bill has several shortcomings. It proposes to spend the money in the
same states as the last bill did, whether the state has a freight
movement problem or not. And because truckers share the roads with cars,
spending money on roads may encourage more use by cars, adding to the
congestion.
The stakes aren’t small. Hummer calculates that every
7.5-mile-per-hour slowdown amounts to $12.42 an hour in lost revenue for
five of the biggest trucking companies.
Transportation policy is famously slow moving. The Senate’s plan may
be an opening gambit in a long-term shift in spending federal highway
money. Or it may be dead by the end of the summer.
Adding more infrastructure may backfire since it may encourage more cars to be on the road only furthering congestion??
ReplyDeleteThat makes no sense... if that is true, does it then reasons that if we reduce the highway infrastructure... like removing a lane... cars would be encouraged to stay off the roads, thus decreasing congestion??