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No. 287

November 5, 1997

Policy Analysis

ISTEA

A Poisonous Brew for American Cities

by Randal O'Toole

Executive Summary

Will travel be faster and easier in the 21st century, or

will traffic be bogged down by a cumbersome central planning

process that creates more urban congestion and gridlock?  The

answer depends on how Congress acts on the Intermodal Surface

Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA).  Passed in 1991 and

recently extended for six months, the act is to be reauthor-

ized early next year.

A better title for the law, which allocates billions of

dollars from the federal gasoline tax, might be the "Urban

Immobility and Pork-Barrel Act."  ISTEA creates enormous

incentives for urban areas to waste money on pork-barrel

projects that are unlikely to meet local needs and that will

actually promote congestion.

ISTEA especially promotes mass transit such as light rail

and subways.  But those systems carry only a fraction of

commuters and cost from 10 to a 100 times more per mile to

build than do roads.  Worse, many supporters of transit, the

so-called New Urbanists, actually favor increased congestion

on roads.  They see it as a way to get people out of cars and

to force them to live in central cities rather than suburbs.

But increased congestion will not result in significant

shifts by commuters to transit; it will only result in mil-

lions of wasted hours and increased levels of air pollution

as commuters sit in gridlocked traffic.

Transportation policy is best left with state and local

authorities as well as with the private sector.  Congress

thus could make travel more efficient by getting out of the

transportation business and repealing the federal gasoline

tax that pays for federal pork.

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Randal O'Toole is executive director of the Thoreau Institute

and an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute.