The United States federal government should close the United States Department of Transportation
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- DOT fails -- nine reasons.
Exts – Close DOT SolvencyThe DOT makes poor regulation and mismanagement inevitable -- ending the department allows the private sector to take over and solves best.Edwards and DeHaven, 10—*director of transportation policy and Searle Freedom Trust Transportation Fellow at Reason Foundation, engineer from MIT AND **budget analyst on federal budget issues for the Cato Institute (Chris and Tad, “Privatize Transportation Spending”, Cato Institute, 6/17, http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/privatize-transportation-spending)//EM If the president ever gets serious about eliminating programs, the $91 billion Department of Transportation would be a good place to start. The DOT should be radically chopped. America's mobile citizens would be better off for it. Rising federal control over transportation has resulted in the political misallocation of funds, bureaucratic mismanagement and costly one-size-fits-all regulations of the states. The solution is to devolve most of DOT's activities back to state governments and the private sector. We should follow the lead of other nations that have turned to the private sector to fund their highways, airports, air traffic control and other infrastructure. Ending federal control over highways incentivizes the private sector to step in. Roth 10—civil engineer, transportation economist, research fellow at the Independent Institute (Gabriel, Federal Highway Funding, CATO Institute, June 2010, http://www.downsizinggovernment.org/transportation/highway-funding)//EM We need to recognize "road space" as a scarce resource and allow road owners to increase supply and charge market prices for it. We should allow the revenues to stimulate investment in new capacity and in technologies to reduce congestion. If the market is allowed to work, profits will attract investors willing to spend their own money to expand the road system in response to the wishes of consumers. To make progress toward a market-based highway system, we should first end the federal role in highway financing. In his 1982 State of the Union address, President Reagan proposed that all federal highway and transit programs, except the interstate highway system, be "turned back" to the states and the related federal gasoline taxes ended. Similar efforts to phase out federal financing of state roads were introduced in 1996 by Sen. Connie Mack (R-FL) and Rep. John Kasich (R-OH). Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) introduced a similar bill in 2002, and Rep. Scott Garrett (R-NJ) and Rep. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) have each proposed bills to allow states to fully or partly opt out of federal highway financing.47 Such reforms would give states the freedom to innovate with toll roads, electronic road-pricing technologies, and private highway investment. Unfortunately, these reforms have so far received little action in Congress. But there is a growing acceptance of innovative financing and management of highways in many states. Government regulation drives up costs and leads to inefficiencies. Roth 10--civil engineer, transportation economist, research fellow at the Independent Institute (Gabriel, Federal Highway Funding, CATO Institute, June 2010, http://www.downsizinggovernment.org/transportation/highway-funding)//EM The flow of federal funding to the states for highways comes part-in-parcel with top-down regulations. The growing mass of federal regulations makes highway building more expensive in numerous ways. First, federal specifications for road construction standards can be more demanding than state standards. But one-size-fits-all federal rules may ignore unique features of the states and not allow state officials to make efficient trade-offs on highway design. A second problem is that federal grants usually come with an array of extraneous federal regulations that increase costs. Highway grants, for example, come with Davis-Bacon rules and Buy America provisions, which raise highway costs substantially. Davis-Bacon rules require that workers on federally funded projects be paid "prevailing wages" in an area, which typically means higher union wages. Davis-Bacon rules increase the costs of federally funded projects by an average of about 10 percent, which wastes billions of dollars per year.27 Ralph Stanley, the entrepreneur who created the private Dulles Greenway toll highway in Virginia, estimated that federal regulations increase highway construction costs by about 20 percent.28 Robert Farris, who was commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Transportation and also head of the Federal Highway Administration, suggested that federal regulations increase costs by 30 percent.29 Finally, federal intervention adds substantial administrative costs to highway building. Planning for federally financed highways requires the detailed involvement of both federal and state governments. By dividing responsibility for projects, this split system encourages waste at both levels of government. Total federal, state, and local expenditures on highway "administration and research" when the highway trust fund was established in 1956 were 6.8 percent of construction costs. By 2002, these costs had risen to 17 percent of expenditures.30 The rise in federal intervention appears to have pushed up these expenditures substantially. DOT creates inconsistencies and takes funding away from where it is most needed. O’Toole, 6-- director of the Thoreau Institute and an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute (Randal, “A Desire Named Streetcar How Federal Subsidies Encourage Wasteful Local Transit Systems”, Cato Policy Analysis, 1/5, http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa559.pdf)//EM When the first secretary took office in January 1967, however, he could have aided such coordination by structuring the department according to transportation functions such as urban transport, interstate freight transport, and interstate passenger transport. Instead, he organized it according to transportation systems, such as mass transit, highways, air, rail, and waterway transport.50 Ever since then, transit projects have been evaluated according to one set of criteria, and urban highway projects have been evaluated using another totally incompatible set of criteria. The agencies themselves often effectively become lobbyists for the state and local agencies they fund, so they have no interest in a process that might increase a sister agency’s budget at their expense. As a result, it is nearly impossible to calculate whether President Kennedy’s goal of having a “properly balanced use of private vehicles and modern mass transportation” is ever reached in a given urban area. DOT fails -- nine reasons.O’Toole, 6-- director of the Thoreau Institute and an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute (Randal, “A Desire Named Streetcar How Federal Subsidies Encourage Wasteful Local Transit Systems”, Cato Policy Analysis, 1/5, http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa559.pdf)//EM Congress and the U.S. Department of Transportation have deliberately or inadvertently created numerous incentives for transit agencies and local governments to use transit funds for wasteful and misguided projects. Those adverse incentives are created by the following characteristics of the current federal transportation financing system: • an agency structure within the Department of Transportation that discourages the most efficient use of funds, • approval procedures that allow labor unions to prevent innovative transit solutions, • a requirement that most or all federal funds be used for capital projects, • a legal provision allowing cities to cancel plans to build more highways and apply those funds to transit, • a lack of any formula for allocating newstart transit funds among states and regions, • a “flexible fund” mechanism that allows funds to be used for either transit or highways and that allows transit project supporters to game the system, • a transit planning process that allows agencies to systematically low-ball cost estimates and overstate potential ridership, • a mandate for a comprehensive planning process that is biased in favor of high-cost transit projects, • federal grants to nonprofit anti-highway organizations, and • legislation tying the distribution of transportation funds to air quality planning. 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