SMART SPENDING Investments funded by gas tax must not become obsolete in 10 years
Tennessee Department of Transportation Commissioner John Schroer’s seventh-floor office in the Tennessee Performing Arts Center offers a panorama of Nashville’s north side.
Below the high vista, cars on Interstates 40 and 24 appear like miniatures moving across a diorama. It’s an instructive perspective for the head of the department tasked with maintaining the state’s transportation system and now putting more money to work after Tennessee’s gas tax increased Saturday.
“I want to make sure the capital investments I spend today are not obsolete in 10 years,” Schroer said from his office, looking out on the roadways below. “Those people are affected by what I do every day, and that’s humbling.”
Raising the tax on gasoline and diesel fuel to help pay for a $10 billion backlog in needed road work was Gov. Bill Haslam’s signature legislative initiative this year.
Although Haslam and Schroer have already listed a number of long-awaited projects in the department’s three-year plan — which will get funded in large part because of the extra money from the gas tax — the commissioner said addressing the state’s transportation needs is like aiming at a moving target, one he is careful not to set his sights behind.
DEPARTMENT READY TO HELP IMPROVE ROADS
While standing over Interstate 440 in Nashville, the governor said the passage of the gas tax increase, known as the IMPROVE Act, had been about partnerships, even among people with opposing views.
“When we talk about the IMPROVE Act, everybody thinks, well it’s about new roads,” Haslam said at a ceremonial signing of the bill in late May. ” A lot of times, it’s about fixing what we have.
“We had an issue with the way we paid for infrastructure, roads and bridges, that doesn’t work anymore,” he said. “So it took some people with courage to step up and say, ‘We are going to solve that problem.’”
Schroer said he was uncertain a long-term infrastructure bill would pass the Tennessee General Assembly this year, but he said the necessity of addressing the projects has kept his department planning for what-if scenarios for years.
No forecast has loomed more ominously over the transportation landscape of Middle Tennessee than the estimate that the 10-county region will grow by another million people by 2035.
Since Haslam proposed the bill in January, the discussion, sometimes contentious, has never been if the state’s transportation infrastructure needed improvement, only how best to fund the work.
Schroer said projects that demonstrate need related to safety and economic development take precedence over ones with other factors, such as long commutes.
TDOT’s ambitious threeyear project list released in early May includes high-profile projects such as reconstruction of the I-24/I-75 interchange in Hamilton County, repaving Interstate 440 from I-65 to I-24 in Davidson County, widening U.S. 78 in Shelby County and a $200 million project on I-75 in Loudon County.
But Schroer said a classic example of divergent interests on where improvements should happen played out in his own backyard.
As mayor of Franklin, a position Schroer held before Haslam appointed him commissioner, he campaigned for the completion of the Mack C. Hatcher Memorial Parkway. During that time, the city invested more than $5 million into the project.
But when he took the TDOT job, he said he had to look at problems across the state to assess their urgency.
“We authorized the design and the right-of-way acquisition and so everyone was sure when I got here that would be the first project we built, and it just wasn’t,” he said. “We will get it started in my seventh year of my term here, and it only got started because of the IMPROVE Act.”
Residents were shocked when they heard the news that the northwest quadrant of Mack Hatcher had made the list to be started by at least 2018.
“Through this process, I think a lot of people learned that economic development and safety are the things that move new road projects forward in the state of Tennessee,” said 12-year Westhaven resident Matthew Magallanes in mid-May. “Many of us were surprised to learn that TDOT doesn’t view residential expansion as economic development. I don’t think they have changed their criteria that greatly, we just moved to the top of the list by virtue of the budget.”
THE FUTURE OF ROADS IN TENNESSEE
Schroer also said his department aims to make the state’s roadways more efficient.
He has cited studies that interstates across the country are only operating near 10 percent capacity. The hope is that with more dynamic messaging, connecting data and drivers, that efficiency can be increased.
“We are looking at consistency instead of time,” he said. “If you know it is going to take you 45 minutes to get to town, then you can plan for it. The current uncertainty means drivers have to leave even more time. If we can streamline our systems to consistency, then that in itself will save time.”
Schroer has kept one image taped to the window behind his desk to remind him of the road ahead: side-by-side photographs of Fifth Avenue in New York City in 1900 and then the same shot taken 13 years later.
One scene is filled with horses and buggies and one car. In the other, there’s not a horse in sight.
Schroer said the impact of the photograph dawned on him at a recent conference of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials.
“We went from 1900 and there was one car, and then you go to 1913 and there are all cars, and two years later, the State of Tennessee and most states started highway departments. So in that 15-year period, we went from not even having any highway departments federally, or in our state, to every state having one,” the commissioner said. “I think that’s the time scale we are under.”
This time, instead of cars replacing the horse and buggy, Schroer said the disrupter is autonomous vehicles, and given the fact that transportation projects can easily span more than a decade, planners must consider whether by 2035 roads will even work the same way.
Over the next two decades, Schroer predicts, massive numbers of drivers will switch to autonomous vehicles guided by information gathered from their surroundings and sent to them from nodes across the city as well as other cars.
He envisions roads with smart lanes that alert cars and change direction with traffic flow, shared autonomous vehicles and the roughly 40,000 fatalities per year due to human error on United States roads.
“People might think, ‘Well, he’s a nut,’ but in the circles I run into and people that I listen to, including several at General Motors, Nissan and Volkswagen, they are all saying that’s where we’re headed,” he said.
Reporters Joel Ebert and Joey Garrison contributed to this story.
Contact Jordan Buie at 615726-5970 or by email at jbuie@ tennessean.com or on Twitter @jordanbuie.