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At hand is a Report to the Governor, the Legislature
and the Citizens of Colorado
about Meeting
Colorado's Long-Term Transportation Needs,
issued May
14 by a Blue-Ribbon Panel on Transportation.
(Just out of curiosity, why is Colorado so enamored of
blue-ribbon
boards, panels and commissions? Coors
and Anheuser-Busch are major industries, there are scores
of brew-pubs, Pabst Brewing has a minimal presence here --
and yet we keep seeing blue-ribbon.
Is something
going on that we don't know about and should?)
As you might have guessed, the Blue Ribbon Transportation Report calls for a tax increase. This was a report to the governor, and our governor never met a problem that couldn't be solved with a tax increase. Remember how he was going to fix the schools with more sales tax in 1992? Or how his proposed gasoline-tax increase leaked out before the '94 election, even though we weren't supposed to hear about it until afterward?
The Blue Ribbon Report says state highways will need an additional $8 billion over the next 20 years. Highway funds are distributed among the state (60 percent), counties (22 percent) and municipalities (18 percent). So to get $8 billion more for the state highways, they need to take in an additional $13 billion.
Why do we need to do this, when we already have one of the highest gasoline taxes in the country? The report says that demand is increasing on account of population growth.
But it doesn't analyze that growth, and not all growth is equal.
Somebody moving to a Lodo loft or a Capitol Hill townhouse in Denver, who walks or rides the bus everywhere, demands much less from the highway system than does a couple in fast-growing Douglas County with one spouse commuting to Denver and the other to Colorado Springs.
Obviously, if we're going to endure growths, then some kinds are preferable to others. But the report doesn't address this, or suggest how state transportation policy could encourage cheap growth and discourage costly growth.
In days of yore, the public wasn't expected to subsidize suburban growth. If a developer wanted to subdivide real estate on the edge of Denver in 1910, the developer also paid to extend the street-car line.
These days, the developer just plows right ahead. If there isn't sufficient highway in place to handle the consequent commuter traffic, the new residents -- generally people of means who are respected by our political system -- agitate until they get their road.
This, of course, inspires other development farther down the road, and there's no mention in the report of drawing a line somewhere. But without some kind of limit, what's the future? Greater Los Angeles, where people commute for two hours each way from Riverside? Is that what we want here?
Perhaps it is, but if that's the case, the report should forthrightly say so, instead of leaving us to guess about it.
The Blue Ribbon Report also fails to address demand
reduction.
In the past 20 years, utility companies have
discovered that the cheapest way to add capacity is to
reduce demand.
That is, an electric company can build a new generating plant to accommodate growth. That's expensive. Or it can persuade its customers to install more efficient appliances and the like, thereby making more electricity available.
Municipal water departments do the same thing when they encourage xeriscaping and water conservation.
So if we're looking at exacting $4,000 from every Coloradan to increase highway capacity, wouldn't it make sense to at least look into ways to reduce highway demand -- telecommuting, increased rail usage, etc.?
It might turn out to be impractical when applied to transportation as opposed to electricity or water, but we won't know until we give it some serious thought -- and the Blue Ribbon Panel didn't give it any thought, let alone serious consideration.
The Blue Ribbon Report also fails to mention that in a market economy, certain problems are self-correcting to some degree. That is, if it becomes increasingly difficult and expensive to drive in private automobiles, people will drive less. And clever entrepreneurs will come up with solutions, rather than expecting the government to just build new roads.
But the Blue Ribbon people just extrapolate from current patterns. If they had been around a century ago, they would have predicted a Colorado buried in horse manure by 1996.
Which isn't too far off the mark, at least in a figurative sense, when it comes to state transportation policy proposals.
Perhaps Colorado does need a tax increase to finance highway expansion. But if so, the Blue Ribbon report is miles away from making that case.
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