Missouri’s roads are often a mixed bag. Urban areas, such as Kansas City and St. Louis, face heavy traffic loads that strain infrastructure, while rural areas contend with neglect stemming from budget limitations. Harsh weather conditions further exacerbate the wear and tear, leaving many roads riddled with potholes and cracks. Rural highways critical for agriculture and trade can quickly deteriorate without sustained investment.

A recent post by the blog Construction Physics contained a chart depicting the road quality of the top 19 cities. It depicts the percentage of non-interstate roads at different quality levels, measured by the International Roughness Index (IRI) and tabulated by the Bureau of Transportation Statistics and Federal Highway Administration (FHWA). I’ve added St. Louis and Kansas City for comparison using the same scoring system.

Missouri’s interstates, whose standards and funding largely come from the federal government,  rank 15th out of 50th according to the IRI score. But our non-interstate roads rank 32nd, behind our neighboring state of Kansas (1st) but well ahead of Illinois (37th). Kansas has earned a reputation for relatively well-maintained highways, thanks to strategic funding and regular maintenance schedules. Illinois has committed significant resources to upgrading its aging infrastructure through recent legislative initiatives.

Importantly, both Kansas and Illinois employ toll roads to fund road maintenance. Missouri should, too. Show-Me authors have written extensively on tolling and road maintenance more generally. While Missouri recently increased its gas tax, it’s too soon to know how impactful it will be.

Improving Missouri’s roads requires more than patchwork solutions. Lawmakers and transportation officials must focus on sustainable funding mechanisms, better prioritization of projects, and more efficient use of resources. Policies that balance the needs of urban centers and rural areas will be critical in ensuring that all Missourians benefit from reliable roadways.

The post Kansas City and St. Louis Road Quality appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

When troubled or sickly aristocratic English youth needed a place to recuperate in private away from their cruel stepparents, they would go to Secret Gardens, where magic and mystery would solve all of their problems. We don’t need mysterious places to address our transportation needs in Missouri, and most of our “Secret Gardens” are actually illegal meth labs. But, amazing as it may seem, there really is a local transportation funding option that is unknown to most municipal officials in Missouri. Local gas taxes are a little-used yet very efficient method of funding important local transportation priorities for cities like Lake Ozark as it considers ways to improve Bagnell Dam Boulevard and Valley Road.

I know what you’re thinking. If there is tax that most politicians don’t know about, why would you tell them? Our gas taxes are low in Missouri, and Missouri voters clearly like them that way, as attempts to raise our second-lowest-in-the-nation rate have consistently failed at the polls.

That low tax rate has benefits and costs. If you stop at a gas station near the state border, you can’t help but notice the large percentage of license plates from border states gassing up over here in Missouri. Those drivers do much of their driving in other states but choose to give us their tax dollars for Missouri roads.

But the low gas tax has costs, too. Missouri’s roads and bridges could certainly be in better shape. A 2019 report from the Federal Highway Administration ranked our roads as 8th worst in the nation. We don’t want to commit the logical fallacy of drawing causation from correlation, but there might be a connection between those 2nd-lowest taxes and those 8th-worst roads. Even for roads in good condition, increases in population, tourism, and more can burden a system.

The fact is, we need to invest more in our road and bridge system in Missouri, and our local roads are no exception. Local roads are maintained by cities and counties, not the state, and are funded by a mixture of the state gas tax, local property taxes, and sales taxes. Unfortunately, local sales taxes are the mechanism most frequently expanded to fund local roads, and they are the worst option of the three. Funding roads by sales taxes subsidizes the act of driving by charging shoppers in a manner unconnected to driving. Walkers, bikers, or carpoolers will pay just as much as solo drivers for road improvements. People who can drive on roads without directly paying for their upkeep will drive more than they otherwise would, with the resulting extra traffic, pollution, and other road issues.

Ideally, the cost of driving should be connected as closely as possible to the act of driving. Lake Ozark city leaders are currently considering a sales tax-based transportation development district (TDD) to fund improvements to Bagnell Dam Boulevard and Valley Road, both key roads for the region. A better option for funding local roads like these would be a local gas tax. A local gas tax fixes the discrepancies that sales tax funding methods generate and, more importantly, can raise substantial money for road improvements.

Seven cities in Missouri have adopted local gas taxes. By law, the money raised from these taxes can only be spent on roads within those communities. All of the local gas taxes enacted have been very low—none higher than two cents per gallon. Even at that low level, they can raise significant money, but none of these seven cities have the combination of local population and tourism that Lake Ozark has. With those tourists, a local fuel tax of just two cents per gallon could potentially bring over one hundred thousand dollars per year on top of the existing road revenue sources. That money would fund a substantial amount of road improvements for Lake Ozark, all while properly maintaining the connection between the act and cost of driving. Or, if Camden and Miller county leaders have similar concerns, countywide gas taxes could be implemented that would raise even more money.

Lake Ozark is the heart of an area vital to our state. The residents who live there and the tourists who visit need and deserve quality roads. A local gas tax would be an efficient and beneficial way to fund road maintenance and improvement. Community leaders and residents should strongly consider passing one this year. Lake Ozark does not need a hidden code or a secret garden to deal with its transportation issues, just community support to address these key improvement needs.

The post Local Gas Taxes Are the Secret Garden of City Road Funding Options appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

While people might not think of roads as something to “consume,” the same concept applies. We pay for roads through gasoline taxes, vehicle sales taxes, and license fees. However, over the past decade, we’ve “consumed” a lot more road in Missouri than we’ve paid for.

The Federal Highway Association tracks the usage of Missouri roads, measured with vehicle miles traveled (VMT). Between 2008–2018, Missouri’s VMT increased 12% while the Missouri Department of Transportation’s (MoDOT) budget declined by 15%. The divergence in trends can be seen in the graph below.

Federal stimulus money and bonds provided the financial buoy from 2008 to 2011, both of which were used quickly and the latter of which required repayment. Increasing maintenance costs and MoDOT’s shrinking budget has taken its toll on Missouri’s road quality; the 21st Century Missouri Transportation System Task Force described Missouri’s roads as “deteriorating.”

Other than the federal government, MoDOT’s main source of funding is the fuel tax. The fuel tax has remained at 17 cents per gallon since 1996 despite inflation reducing the real value of the tax. Moreover, the revenue that has been collected has not kept pace with the increase in road usage. Between 2008–2018, fuel tax revenue declined by 0.5 percent.

So how do we fix this?

Several other states have indexed their fuel taxes to some measure, whether that be inflation, state GDP growth, or highway construction costs. Such indexing ensures that fuel tax revenue automatically adjusts to the pace at which the rest of the economy grows, rather than being stuck at a static level.

As “consumption” of Missouri’s roads increases, the question of how to pay for needed infrastructure improvements will not disappear. The fuel tax is an effective method of funding road maintenance, and indexing it to a measure that reflects road usage or costs of upkeep could help ensure Missouri’s roads and bridges are kept in good condition.

The post On the Road Again appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

It is important to realize that this marketing campaign, even though it uses biker-oriented talking points, is not talking about 36 cyclist lives—the latest annual data from 2017 showed zero cyclist fatalities. Instead, it estimates:

• 15 lives saved by increased physical activity
• 6 lives saved by improved air quality
• 15 lives saved by a reduction in fatal car crashes (not crashes that occur because a cyclist was involved—any fatal car accident counts)

Only the physical activity category is directly connected to bikers who would use the lanes.

There are problems with these estimates. Physical activity benefits, while hard to measure, are dependent upon more Kansas Citians choosing to bike instead of drive. Only 0.3 percent of commuters used bikes in 2018, and a survey noted that fewer than 50 percent of respondents were interested in biking more. More bike lanes could mean an increased number of bikers—but it’s just a projection, and there’s no way to know how many more bikers we’ll see with expanded bike lanes, let alone what the actual health benefits will be.

Six lives saved by improved air quality also seems a stretch. The number was achieved by expanding data from research in New Zealand. Even if this study was properly applied to Kansas City, the boasted number is the highest estimate possible. An economic summary of the Bike KC Master Plan read:

Assuming 1 death due to air quality for every 100 million vehicle miles traveled and 1 per 40 million vehicle starts (trips), the bike plan could reduce Kansas City air pollution fatalities anywhere from 1-6 deaths per year . . . [emphasis added]

The most puzzling estimate is that of fatal crash reduction. The economic summary of the bike plan noted that 228 fatal car crashes occurred within the city limits of Kansas City from 2015-2017, and that 94 of these occurred along the route of the proposed bike lanes. While the summary boasts a 47 percent reduction in these crashes due to the way bike lanes will change the flow of traffic, no crash data was included.

Upon reaching out to the authors of the economic summary for more information, I was told that they did not have any data on the cause of these car accidents: 

The dataset provided by the Mid-America Regional Council did not provide any context on the causes of the crash. There has been some analysis of the contributing factors in fatal crashes . . . but our FHWA source on road diets does not differentiate by crash cause or even crash severity. It is simply an empirical measure on the impact of road-dieted streets on total crash volume. These benefits accrue to all users, regardless of mode or how many people take up bicycling.

How can a 47 percent reduction in fatal crashes be a realistic estimate when there is no available data on what caused the crashes? If the reduction is due to fewer cars traveling the roads with the bike lanes, does that simply mean the crashes occur on the alternative routes these cars travel? Stating the number of crashes occurring within city limits and presenting some traffic flow statistics from other areas does not seem compelling. If BikeWalkKC wants to claim 15 fewer lives taken annually by fatal car accidents as a result of expanded bike lanes, shouldn’t there be more data to back that claim up?

By portraying the Bike KC Master Plan as a strategy that will save 36 lives per year, BikeWalkKC is not avoiding the real problem at hand: this project will cost hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars, money that could be better spent elsewhere. As my colleague Patrick Tuohey noted,

Kansas City has significant needs, significant transit needs. They are not biking. It is infrastructure. It is infrastructure repairs. It’s getting those steel plates off our streets.

The use of questionable statistics will not help develop solid city policy. If the city has millions of dollars to toss around and is concerned about saving lives, a better idea would be hiring more police officers, not building more bike lanes.

The post Would Kansas City Bike Lanes Actually Save 36 Lives per Year? Probably Not appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Currently, eight large highway projects either have been completed or are in progress using design-build project delivery, including KCicon and the new I-64/US 40. This process has resulted in significant savings for MoDOT and has improved project delivery.

Design-build differs from the traditional design-bid-build method we’ve been using for years. In design-bid-build, the design work is completed before the construction ever begins. Only after the design is finished—often by MoDOT’s own engineers—is the project bid out to contractors. While this ensures that MoDOT has complete control of the design phase, it often leads to additional expenses in time and potential change orders. MoDOT says so itself.

Design-build allows MoDOT to bid out the design and the construction at the same time. This means construction can start much sooner, and that while MoDOT has overall control of the design work, it may not all be completed before the project begins. The biggest benefit of design-build, however, is the significant cost savings.

A 2006 study by the Federal Highway Administration found that design-build projects were completed with significant time savings with little or no change orders and lower administrative costs. In Texas, design-build saved taxpayers 22 percent in costs over six years, and projects were completed 14 percent faster.

Allowing MoDOT to use design-build more often would require a change in statute. According to Missouri statute, MoDOT may use design-build sparingly and only until the middle of 2018:

The total number of highway design-build project contracts awarded by the commission in any state fiscal year shall not exceed two percent of the total number of all state highway system projects awarded to contracts for construction from projects listed in the commission's approved statewide transportation improvement project for that state fiscal year. Authority to enter into design-build projects granted by this section shall expire on July 1, 2018, unless extended by statute.

If the legislature wants to help MoDOT help itself by saving money, it ought to consider increasing the cap on design-build projects and extending them for much longer than 2018.

The post Design-Build and Save appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

“Moore [the representative] cited figures showing that Missouri spends the vast majority of its transportation funding in the rural areas of the state, even though more than 80 percent of the state's transportation dollars from gas and auto sales taxes come from the urban regions in and around St. Louis and Kansas City.”

Although Missouri does spend a significant amount on rural highways for structural reasons, MoDOT does not spend most of its money in rural areas, nor does it systematically underfund urban highways.

To show this, first we will look at total MoDOT capital and maintenance spending. As shown in the chart above, in 2013, 61% of total MoDOT outlays went to urban highways and 39% went to rural highways.

It’s clear that most spending happens in urban areas of the state, not rural ones. One might still think this is lopsided in favor of rural areas, as the vast majority of highway user fees come from urban areas. However, 86% of highway lane miles are in rural areas, and almost half of daily traffic in Missouri takes place in rural areas. Missouri’s rural highway system, mostly due to the Missouri State Routes (the letter routes), is the fourth largest rural highway system in the nation. While traffic per mile in rural areas is low outside of the interstates, roads need to be maintained and bridges need to be replaced.

Even though Missouri spends a significant amount of money on its rural highways, urban areas have not been starved. In fact, the latest Federal Highway Administration data shows that, whether one looks at how much money MoDOT spends per lane mile or vehicle, the state’s urban highway spending is at about at the national average.

Furthermore, MoDOT’s spending in Missouri’s largest urban areas has achieved enviable results. Both Saint Louis and Kansas City have significant highway capacity and low congestion. In Kansas City and Saint Louis, 80% or more of major highways are in good condition. That's excellent for a large metropolitan area and far better than cities like Indianapolis (62%), Milwaukee (38%), or Los Angeles (16%).

MoDOT’s continuing funding problems should prompt Missouri policy makers to consider the extent of the state highway system. Many lesser-used routes might be better handled at the local level, as they are in other states. Such a reform would allow to MoDOT to fund improvements and maintenance on both critical rural and urban thoroughfares. However, there is little evidence that MoDOT is starving its urban system as measured either by spending or current highway conditions.

The post The Urban-Rural Divide in MoDOT Spending appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

A recent release of Federal Highway Administration data only adds more support for this conclusion. As employment levels in Missouri increase, VMT on Missouri’s roads have begun a rapid increase, up almost 2.5% from May 2014 to May 2015. The increase has been even faster on Missouri’s major urban roads (2.8%):

 Of course, these trends could reverse themselves if the economy begins to struggle or some as-yet-unobserved shift to nonvehicular lifestyles occurs. However, trends over the last few years suggest that better times will mean more driving, an eventuality urban planners and Department of Transportation officials should prepare for. It would be unfortunate if the costs of an inefficient transportation system mean that Missouri cannot fully benefit from improving economic conditions.

The post With Improving Economy, Missourians Hit the Road appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Contradictions are most often resolved by reexamining premises, and in this case that means looking to Missouri’s actual driving statistics. Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) data shows there is little evidence that Missourians are abandoning the roads. In fact, the latest annual estimate (from Feb. 2014 to Jan. 2015) shows that Missouri’s roads have more traffic than ever.

As the chart above shows, total vehicle miles traveled (VMT) in the state remained remarkably resilient through the recession, dropping by only 3 percent from peak to trough. For comparison, Saint Louis Metro’s total passenger trips decreased 30 percent in the recession. Rebound was relatively rapid, and the overall trend is steady increase, at around the rate of population growth; per capita VMT in 2014 is almost identical to per capita VMT in 2005 (959 miles per month).

Trucking, which is more directly tied to economic activity and makes up a significant portion of Missouri’s total VMT, drives much of the strength in Missouri traffic. Even if we only look at Missouri’s urban arterial road traffic (where the proportion of personal vehicles to trucks is much higher), there is no evidence of a large downturn in driving.

Urban roads saw a steeper decline in traffic during the recession (around 5 percent peak to trough) than did all roads, but even they eclipsed prerecession traffic levels in January 2015. Per capita VMT on urban arterials were also higher than they were in 2005-06.

As things stand, Missouri’s roadways carry more than 90 percent of that state’s commuters and more than half of all the state’s freight movements by value. While increased investment in transit and changing living preferences may cut into overwhelming dominance in the future, there is no data that such a transformation is underway yet.

The post News of Driving’s Demise Has Been Greatly Exaggerated appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

In terms of sheer importance to the state economy, there is no contest between the Missouri state highway system and transit. The state highway system carries virtually all cross-state traffic, most commuters, and $711 billion of freight annually. Transit carries a tiny sliver of commuters in the state’s largest cities. Even in Saint Louis City and County, where the state’s transit network is most dense, less than 5 percent of commuters use transit.

What of subsidies? In 2013, the largest source of non-user funding the Missouri highways received was from the now chronically underfunded federal highway trust fund. In that year, Missourians sent the federal government about $877 million in road user funds and got back about $938 million to spend on highways. That’s a $66 million subsidy. Add in local spending and other small sources of non-user fees, and Missouri’s subsidies for all highways is around 10 percent.

How, then, can CAP claim that 46 percent of major highways do not pay for themselves? First, the study CAP issued broke highways and arterial roads into sections, which may not be an appropriate way of measuring the cost-effectiveness of highways. One should note that, on this measure, 54 percent of the system either broke even or was in the black (36 percent). Second, CAP’s study does not look at all forms of indirect user fees, including permit fees and other non-fuel taxes. Using incomplete data from the FHWA (which counts bonds and reserves that may be based on user fees as non-user revenue), At most, 24 percent of Missouri’s highway spending is not derived from user fees. That means, even with no tolling and the fifth lowest gasoline tax in the nation, user fees manage to pay for at least 76 percent of highway costs.

With transit in Missouri, taking 2013 as an example, fares only covered 16 percent of total costs. In years with major construction, this number falls below 10 percent. And while CAP claims 46 percent of highway segments are in the red, every segment of Metro, including MetroLink, is deep in the red. The best bus routes (counting only weekdays in Metro’s highest ridership months) recover 82 percent of its operating costs from fares. Most routes perform much worse, with a third of all routes receiving subsidies in excess of 80 percent of their operating costs. The numbers are no better in Kansas City.

Comparing the systems, it is clear that highways could be paid for entirely with user fees, especially if rigorous cost-benefit analysis is used to evaluate new highway projects. We argue for this all the time. Transit is a different story. It would be essentially impossible for Metro to break even using fares, which would have to quintuple in order to cover just its operating costs. As that would make a reduced monthly pass $195 and a regular pass $390, it is safe to say people would stop riding Metro altogether before it broke even.

CAP essentially would have Missouri take user revenue from the system virtually all Missourians use and depend on in order to give more money to a system that very few use despite incredible subsidies. CAP’s plan is fiscally irresponsible and endangers the future of transportation in Missouri.

The post Do User Taxes Pay for Highways? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Federal dollars for highway improvements is a fixed amount that comes for the federal Highway Trust Fund, which the federal fuel taxes mainly support. The amount that Missouri currently receives is fixed by federal obligation limitations and the proportion that the state received in the past. State lane mileage and vehicle activity mostly determined the portion the state received in the past. Simply put, the amount of money available for state highway projects is mostly fixed, and currently, Missouri does not leave any money on the table. If Missouri decided to spend an extra billion dollars this year, it is unlikely that federal money to the state would increase.

According to MoDOT’s cautious projections, in which the federal government reduces its support to Missouri, the state will begin failing to match federal funds in 2020, leaving $186 million on the table. But to meet that match (of 80 percent federal, 20 percent state) Missouri would only have to increase local revenue by just less than $50 million, nowhere near the current $534 million proposal.

If we assume that the federal government fixes the federal highway funding problems and support does not decrease, the problem of matching funds is larger. By 2022, Missouri would be leaving about $530 million of federal dollars unmatched. However, under that scenario, Missouri would only have to increase local revenue by $130 million per year to get that money.

When it comes to federal dollars, unless there are major policy changes in Washington, the amount Missouri could get for the highways is relatively fixed whether or not Missouri raises taxes. While Missouri may lose the ability to match those dollars in the future, Missouri will eventually need to raise annually between only $50 million and $130 million. If Amendment 7 passes, the federal government will not make it rain; if the amendment fails, the sky is not going to fall.

The post Do We Need Amendment 7 To Match Federal Highway Dollars? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

At an inflation-adjusted cost of about $450 billion paid out of highway user fees, the Interstate Highway System, to which high-speed rail is sometimes compared, provides more than 4,000 miles of passenger travel for every American, miles that Americans were not traveling before the system was built. By comparison, a $600 billion expenditure on high-speed rail will provide, at best, around 300 miles of travel per person.
[…]
Amtrak brags that its high-speed Acela between Boston and Washington covers its operating costs, though not its capital costs. It does so, however, only by collecting fares of about 75 cents per passenger mile. By comparison, airline fares average only 13 cents a passenger mile, and intercity buses (which, Amtrak doesn’t want you to know, carry about three times as many passengers between Boston and Washington as the Acela) are even less expensive.

According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, Americans spent about $950 billion on driving in 2008. This allowed us to travel, says the Federal Highway Administration, more than 2.7 trillion vehicle miles, for an average cost of about 35 cents per vehicle mile. Since the California High-Speed Rail Authority estimates cars in intercity travel carry an average of 2.4 people, the average cost is less than 15 cents a passenger mile.

O’Toole also points out that urban elites are the ones most likely to benefit from high-speed rail travel, because they are more likely to live in the downtown areas where train stations are typically located. The construction of high-speed rail has little to do with the costs and benefits of different modes of travel, and almost everything to do with aesthetic preferences. Unfortunately, aesthetics usually trump economics in the political world.

Back in February, I explained why Saint Louis should not expand the MetroLink light-rail system.

(Blog entry title reference here.)

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