Traffic safety AND mobility: dual imperatives, not trade-offs

The American Automobile Association last week released The AAA Crashes vs. Congestion Report arguing that societal costs from traffic fatalities and injuries is more than double the costs of congestion.  Good reminder.  We object only to the "versus" separating the twin concerns.  We must insist on roads that are safe and congestion-free.

The study by Cambridge Systematics estimates that traffic crashes cost each American $1,051 for a total economic burden on the economy of $164.2 billion.  Data from the Texas Transportation Institute put the tab for congestion at $67.6 billion or $430 per person.  With Congress readying itself to tackle reauthorization of the federal surface transportation program next year and with the federal Highway Trust Fund approaching insolvency, these measures should be front-and-center in the public policy discussion.

For years, the anti-highway lobby has inveighed against "paving over America" and the highway lobby has foolishly cast the argument in terms of the deteriorating condition of the nation's roads and bridges.  Too true.  And when the I-35W bridge plunged into the Mississippi, the poignancy of the roadbuilders' lament was manifest.  The thought of an aging and inadequate roadway infrastructure contributing to the 42,642 people killed last year on American roads is totally unacceptable. We know most of those deaths are avoidable and now we know the cost of under-funding highway improvments.

The quality of the policy debate, however, would be improved if we move beyond contesting the number of "structurally deficient" bridges or pothole-pocked or rutted roadway surfaces.  Nor should we accept the notion that we need to starve investments in congestion relief to pay for safer roads.  The two go hand in hand.  Non-recurring congestion (the kind not caused by "rush hour") is associated with clearing traffic crashes and combatting weather conditions like snow & ice storms that contribute so much to those crashes.  Simply applying salt as part of a professional winter operations program cuts 88.3% of the injury crashes and keeps the roads reliably available for our mobile society.  In fact, in most states, the cost of failing to keep winter roads open through winter maintenance operations generally costs more for each day of failure than the annual cost of snowfighting (data by Global Insight, Inc.).

As Congress sets up the debate on highway spending, let's focus attention on the outcomes we can expect our roads to deliver.  We shouldn't be building roads to create jobs (or re-elect politicos) nor should we endanger drivers' lives and our national economic competitiveness by short-sightedly opposing transportation improvements due to suspicion over the self-interested motivation of construction companies.  Let's measure transportation outcomes -- the service we driver are paying for through our gas taxes -- and invest to reduce the tragic waste of more than 40,000 lives every year and reverse the corrosive erosion of reliable highway mobility caused by congestion.

And let's let the engineers and the Federal Highway Administration's Office of Operations help us define the choices rather than jury-rig our national highway priorities through Congressional earmarks.

It's not AAA versus AASHTO (the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials).  Both AAA and AASHTO care deeply about BOTH safety and mobility.  Let's not make this mountain tougher to scale than it already is.