Report shows Pa. failing on road, bridge repairs
Last week, the Pennsylvania State Council of the American Society of Civil Engineers released its latest report card on the state’s infrastructure. The grades were rough.
If this were an actual report card,
Pennsylvania would be in danger of academic probation and risk being ruled ineligible for the junior varsity wrestling team.
You can view the report in its entirety at www.pareportcard.org, and it makes for an interesting, if concerning, read. It doesn’t cite specific examples, so people looking to compare Lehigh Valley infrastructure to other parts of the state will be disappointed. Still, it provides a good mile-high perspective of the overwhelming need for improvements.
The nature of government makes it darn near impossible for states to ace reports like this. Elected officials want to keep their jobs, so they’re normally loath to raise taxes for anything. At the same time, society needs things like police, water and infrastructure. It turns into a delicate balancing act.
Under the council’s standards, B means things are fine for now but not necessarily long term. Given that standard, I think most taxpayers would be happy with straight Bs. Even Cs, which means things are in good or fair condition but showing signs of deterioration, could be acceptable if the state was taking steps to get them up to speed.
Overall, the council gave Pennsylvania a C- — right on the cusp of what people might consider vaguely acceptable. Its best grades went to things like aviation, freight rail and hazardous waste.
But this is the Road Warrior column, so the focus needs to be on roads, bridges and public transit. If we focus there, we’ll find that Pennsylvania is flunking miserably.
The council awarded the state a D+ for its roads, which is somehow an improvement from the last report card four years ago. Much of that improvement is due to projects funded by Act 89, which raised gas taxes so the state could dedicate billions of dollars to transportation maintenance as well as state police. The report found the added funding has pushed forward 2,600 maintenance projects.
But all that extra funding couldn’t boost Pennsylvania up a full letter grade. The council found that even with all that money, state roads are crumbling faster than the state can fix them. Now they’re just crumbling at a slower rate.
And I mean that literally. The most recent review of the state highway network found that more than 10,000 miles of the state highway network, or about 23 percent, has pavement in poor condition.
That number may increase in the years ahead thanks to the growing presence of tractortrailers, which put a greater strain on roads than regular passenger vehicles. Trucks make up more than a third of traffic on Pennsylvania’s Interstate highways, which is more than double the national average.
Interestingly, the report found that gas taxes may not be the wisest way to fund future improvements, as fuel efficiency is expected to improve in the decades ahead. Instead, it advocated the state explore a vehicle miles traveled tax, an idea discussed in this column a few months back. In case you forgot about that column — or didn’t bother to read to the end like many of the online commenters — I think a VMT tax may be worthwhile if it flat out replaces the gas tax.
Pennsylvania bridges received the same D+ grade for much of the same reasons. More than 18 percent of Pennsylvania bridges are in poor condition, more than twice the national average. But again, there are signs of improvement — 1,200 fewer bridges were rated in poor condition than in 2014.
Some of that improvement can be attributed to increased attention PennDOT has given to locally owned bridges. These small spans cross ravines and creeks and can be found on country roads all over Pennsylvania. While most of these aren’t on major highways, they’re still critical to communities. Just ask the folks in Tatamy what is was like when two of their bridges were out of commission a few years back.
Unlike the road problem, Pennsylvania is making progress when it comes to its bridges. It’s just very slow progress.
“Under current funding, it would take 13 years to reach the national average of poor condition bridges,” the report determined.
Mind you, the rest of the country isn’t doing so hot when it comes to infrastructure maintenance. We would just be as bad as everyone else.
If a $267 million state police subsidy from Act 89 was rededicated to bridge improvements, the state could cut that time in half, the council found. For the record, that’s not even the full amount of funding state police receive under Act 89. Personally, I find it’s a poor reflection of the state’s finances that we have to dip into transportation funds to finance police matters, but that’s an complaint for another day.
Generally speaking, these report cards have some known weaknesses, and this one is no different. Because of the report’s ambitiously wide nature, the council relies on data and information churned up in government reports rather than conduct its own research. That’s not a problem so long as the information is still relevant and accurate. But for some of the information the council had to use reports dating to 2011. Most of the data was more recent than that, but it highlights the limits of this kind of report.
In at least one case, I found data was just wrong. The report listed the average LANTA bus as being 21.8 years old, a number I immediately found fishy. Nearly a third of the fleet has been replaced with vehicles fueled by natural gas in the past two years. I checked in with LANTA spokesman Chuck Genna, who confirmed the oldest buses in service date to 2002. For the record, those old buses are scheduled to be replaced early next year.
There’s a good chance this is a case of the council using dated information and extrapolating to get it to the present. While it’s solid logic in theory, it doesn’t always work in practice.
For what its worth, the council awarded the state’s public transit systems a D, saying Pennsylvania needed to invest more in fixing rail lines and buses, growing ridership and using alternate fuels. If LANTA’s priorities are any indication, the state is taking positive steps.
So where does this leave us overall for transportation matters? Pretty much right where we I assumed we were. Act 89 is throwing a giant heap of money at an enormous backlog of recognized problems, but the state was in such a deep hole it still has a long way to dig. Worse still, the report card determined more funding is needed to get ahead of needed road improvements, and I can’t imagine where that cash would come from.
Between the continued improvements funded by Act 89 and the state’s poor overall financial picture, Pennsylvanians should expect modest improvements at best when the next report comes out.