I’ve often compared the problem of our nation’s transportation infrastructure with Social Security: everybody knows the system is broken, but there’s never enough political will and funding to fix it.  Debate on the proposed $885 billion “American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan” began this week in the Senate.  The current version of the Senate bill allocates $27 billion (about 3 percent of the total) to highway investments.  The bill that passed the House allocated $30 billion for highway and bridge construction.  These amounts fall way short of the $85 billion recommended by Congressman Jim Oberstar, chairman of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, in early January.

On Tuesday, U.S. Senator Patty Murray, Chairman of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Transportation and Housing, and Senator Dianne Feinstein, Chairman of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Interior and the Environment, introduced an amendment to increase highway investments in the bill by $13 billion.  The amendment was defeated yesterday by a 58-39 vote.

Now, I’m not an expert on transportation infrastructure, so I don’t know if $27 billion is not enough funding or if $85 billion is too much.  Whatever the final number turns out to be, my main concern is that the money is spent intelligently.  As I wrote back in December (“Volvo Group and ‘Green’ Transportation Corridors“), many infrastructure projects are repair and maintenance related, which are long overdue.  But my concern is that in the rush to create jobs, the federal government and the states will fail to take a strategic and holistic view of our country’s transportation infrastructure requirements.  A few years from now, we could have new bridges, roads, rail lines, and ports, but if each project is treated independently (and each state acts independently), we may have solved nothing from a long-term perspective.

Unlike Vegas, what happens in Washington doesn’t stay in Washington.  The end result of the economic recovery plan matters to everybody in the logistics industry because (at a minimum) it will impact future transportation costs, in the form of higher fuel taxes and toll fees (see “Choose Your Poison: Higher Toll Fees or Higher Taxes” and “Federal and State Gas Taxes to Increase?“) or decreased productivity due to port and road congestion.

Unfortunately, the way things are going so far, it seems that it’ll be more of the same: a lot of lip service, but no real action.