Road Rage

Earlier this fall, the Transportation Finance Commission issued a second report, this one recommending steps Massachusetts can take to raise the money needed for its looming maintenance deficit. Among the suggestions were increasing highway tolls, raising the gas tax, and eliminating the state’s appalling requirement that police officers be paid to direct traffic at construction sites. But you have to wonder whether things have gotten so bad that new money will only make things worse. “I’m not ready to endorse new revenue proposals until the reform stuff gets done,” says Poftak. “We have such inefficiencies built into the system, the notion of just throwing more money at it is absurd.” Poftak works for an organization that leans Libertarian, so this sentiment is hardly a surprise. But he just might be right.

How, then, do we go about making the necessary changes? How do we begin to fix this debacle? As a start, the Patrick administration (which does seem to be making the sorry state of our infrastructure a priority) has floated an idea that everyone from Salvucci to the Pioneer Institute to Joseph Giglio to Luisa Paiewonsky supports, at least in theory. It wants to overhaul the state’s tangled transportation network and create a single entity—MassTrans is the working name—that would control all of our roads, bridges, tunnels, rail lines, and ports. This being Massachusetts, though, everyone wants to see the fine print first. “Do I like it conceptually? Yes,” says Giglio. “Do I have confidence that it can be done effectively? Not necessarily.”

Poftak, meanwhile, has a few sensible recommendations of his own, including rules mandating that agencies devote a fixed percentage of their budgets to maintenance, and strict limitations on how bonded money may be spent. His Pioneer Institute, unsurprisingly, given its free-market disposition, also wants the state to at least explore the privatization of our infrastructure. Other states have had success auctioning off to private companies the right to build and operate their highways. Under this model—which proponents prefer to call “public-private partnerships”—the private company makes its money by charging tolls. The state receives revenue from the sale of the rights, and, according to this line of thinking, an assurance that its highways will be maintained, since the contractor has a financial incentive to keep the roads in good shape. The Patrick administration seems to have an open mind on this issue. “I think more and more we’re going to have to look at public and private partnerships,” Secretary Cohen said at the transportation forum. “We have to accept the fact that people who use public transportation are consuming it, and need to pay for it.”

It’s hard to escape the conclusion that, in the aftermath of the tragedy in Minnesota, private industry smells an opportunity to capitalize on our fears that Massachusetts—or other states that are getting the same hard sell these days—could be next. At the same time, it’s difficult to disagree with something Giglio told me: “You cannot expect the same people who created the problem, and are part of the problem,” he said, referring to state government, “to fix the problem.”

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