The National Transportation Policy Commission—created by Congress in 2005 to draft a comprehensive approach to American surface transport—released its report in January. To remarkably little public notice. Surprised?

If the Commission’s mandate was grand (“to preserve and enhance the surface transportation system to meet the needs of the United States for the 21st century”) and the gravity of its conclusions sobering, the prospects for action on its recommendations is unlikely.

Jack Schenendorf, Vice Chairman of the Commission (and a long-time veteran in Congressional budget politics), recently underscored to an American Association of Port Authorities audience just how bad things are. “We’re at a crisis and a cross-roads,” he said. “If we continue to go as we are going, we’ll have a second- or third-tier transportation”

Even  advocates of shrinking the federal government recognize the magnitude of the danger. “It’s just too big a problem to hand off to state and local government and the private sector and be able to look out twenty years to see systemic improvement,” noted Schenendorf (a Republican who served as chief of the transportation part of the Bush-Cheney transition team).

To cut to the chase, what will it take to insure first-tier transportation? An annual spend of $225 billion (federal, state and local) for the next fifty years! And our current spend? Eighty-seven billion dollars. In other words, for every dollar that goes to roads and rails today, there needs to be three.

Turns out that since the 1956 authorization to build the Eisenhower interstate system (which, as we speak, has reached its designed capacity and life span), funding for transportation has remained at essentially the same level, “it’s only been making changes at the margin,” says Schenendorf.

So how bad are things? Here’s a sampling of factoids from the report:

•            Cargo growth projections for container ports anticipate a doubling or tripling of throughput growth in the next 15 to 20 years with additional demands on eastern ports and congested freight facilities.

•            Despite the growth in demand for freight rail services over the past decade, today’s railroad system is about half the size of the system that existed in the 1900s;

•            Twenty-nine percent of the nation’s 585,500 bridges are deemed structurally deficient or functionally obsolete;

•            Average Daily Percent of Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) under congested conditions has increased from 25.9 percent in 1995 to 31.6 percent in 2004. 

Not a pretty picture.

The Report posits an action agenda—consolidating the 108 federal transportation programs into ten. Among the mandates of these ‘super agencies’ would be to restore the existing infrastructure to a state of good repair, to facilitate freight transport through investments in interstate highways and intermodal port connections to ‘avoid adding time and cost to the supply chain,’ and to reduce vehicle congestion 20 percnet by 2025 (in part through the deployment of inter-city passenger rail). 

Will any of this happen? 

The test comes next year, when the existing Highway Trust Fund appropriation is up for renewal. With the public uninterested in the issue (and ill-disposed to the tax hikes reform will entail), “elevated support by orders of magnitude from the past” is going to be required,” says Schenendorf.

“Continuing on the current $87 billion path means underinvestment and slow degradation. And, to repeat, you can’t have a first-rate economy without a first-rate transportation system.”