TWO SYSTEMS OF BELIEF. Is tax money being allocated efficiently to roads? A USA Today article notes the hidden costs of deferred maintenance.

Crumbling roads and highways in the nation's metropolitan areas are imposing a "hidden tax" on motorists by increasing costs to maintain their vehicles, according to a survey released today.

Twenty-six percent of the USA's major urban and suburban roads have substandard pavement that provides an unacceptably rough ride to motorists, according to TRIP, a non-profit research group in Washington that is funded by the insurance, highway construction and automotive industries.

That the survey is the highway-lobby talking points does not automatically render it false. Blown tires and broken suspensions caused by potholes are real.

Sean Hackbarth comments, "Here in Wisconsin our road problem is we'll build a four-lane highway to just about anywhere." Believe me, expanding the road network before the traffic materializes is not a bad idea. Illinois insists on widening the existing roads, under traffic, during the summer excursion season. But even that spending, niggardly though it is, is too much for Destination: Freedom.

While the annual state support to Amtrak goes to $24 million, a jump from the present $12.1 allotment, $5.3 BILLION is being sought for road expansion as part of the governor’s Congestion-Relief Program. How much “congestion relief” can you expect when you spend 212 times as much money on highways as transit!? The interest alone on $5.3 billion would cover much of the operating cost of Amtrak in perpetuity. Where in this picture is the public being provided with adequate choices to function in today’s society without a car? And how do you “cure” congestion when you ADD to the problem? Do we “cure” obesity by eating more and then buying a larger belt??

Fast-rewind 100 years, to the emergence of the interurban. That the power companies were expanding interurbans along corridors most conducive to running power lines left a lot of hamlets, not to mention farms, devoid of the ability to function without a horse. Additional train frequencies along the existing Amtrak routes in Illinois will expand choices in Bloomington and Macomb and Carbondale and Urbana, but DeKalb and Charleston still have to make do without. Perhaps highway congestion cannot be cured (more on this before year's end.) But the Amtrak and Metra and Transit Authority service still leaves plenty of Illinois residents a long way from the nearest train station.

There's no easy way out. Some people see the expansion of the road network as undesirable.

Part of the problem is that states and communities keep building highways on the edges of metro areas instead of properly maintaining heavily used urban roads, an advocate of mass transit says.

"We don't maintain and operate what we have built already, and we are not providing alternatives to solo auto travel through transit and other investments," says Kevin McCarty, director of policy for the Surface Transportation Policy Partnership.

(Perhaps because "solo auto travel" isn't the blackboard home-to-work-in-city-and-return.)

Construction delays might be a necessary evil.

The Atlanta metropolitan area is an exception to deteriorating roads. This sprawling metropolis, where motorists are often delayed by road-construction backups, is one of three urban areas in the nation — along with Orlando and Phoenix — where at least 75% of the highways and major streets are in good condition, according to TRIP's survey.

"Our board adopted a policy in the '70s that we were not going to build anything we cannot maintain," says Harold Linnenkohl, commissioner of the Georgia Department of Transportation. "Our goal is to resurface 10% of our highway system each year. We stayed with that for a long time, but we're facing some budget crunches like everybody else. So, in recent years in some areas, we're doing 5%-6%."

But that deferred-maintenance hidden tax might also be a hidden subsidy.

Interstates generally are in better condition than local roads, and "urban interstates are much worse than rural interstates," [author Alan] Pisarski says.

You suppose all those 53 foot semi-trailers might have something to do with that?