And Now Billions for High Speed Rail to nowhere! The Infrastructure Delusion

Stop lights are interminable because of the Americans with Disabilities Act and bureaucrats coming up with their own times to cross a street in a wheelchair. The light finally changes and you proceed a block only to have the next light turn red and stop you for another interminable period. Traffic is not designed to flow smoothly. It is planned to make your drive as unpleasant as possible to force you into public transportation (or to make speed to get through the light so you will get a ticket).

Then there are tolls. They are gas and time wasting, not to mention expensive. When they offer electronic fee passes, the meters are taking photos because the scans may catch a violation to get more revenue. The fees are raised periodically and because they are scanned, generally go unnoticed until the bill arrives too late. On top of it all, the costs are more than the tolls taken. On the NJ Turnpike, actual road maintenance accounts for just 12% of the fees taken in. The remainder of the fees go to administration, toll taking and toll access maintenance.

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The Infrastructure Delusion | The Freeman | Ideas On Liberty

by Richard W. Fulmer 8-15-11

Infrastructure does not an economy make. Highways and railroads, airports and seaports, communications towers and fiber optics cables are essential for the flow of commerce, but it is the people, goods, and information moving over and through this infrastructure that are the heart of an economy. Overinvestment in roads, bridges, and airports means underinvestment in the productive base that is an economy’s life blood. Government spending means more than just an outlay of dollars; it means consuming scarce resources that cannot then be used for other things. Such spending does not increase production, it simply shifts resources into areas where they would not otherwise have gone.

As described in William J. Bernstein’s book The Birth of Plenty: How the Prosperity of the Modern World Was Created ^[1], France’s minister of finances under Louis XIV from 1665 to 1683, Jean-Baptiste Colbert ^[2], worked tirelessly to expand commerce by improving his country’s roads and canals. Unfortunately, trade was hindered by more than potholes — a complex system of internal tariffs was throttling commerce. Colbert tried to dismantle the tariffs but was only partially successful. After his death, “all fiscal restraint was lost. By the end of Louis XIV’s reign three decades later, the State had doubled the tolls on the roads and rivers it controlled, and the nation that had once been Europe’s breadbasket … was bled white….” Bad regulations trumped good roads.

Prometheus Bound (in Red Tape)

During the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt initiated massive public-works programs to improve the nation’s infrastructure in hopes of putting people back to work and jumpstarting the economy. The construction efforts were staggering. ...

Yet these extraordinary accomplishments were not enough to pull the nation out of the Depression. Neither were the millions of jobs generated by this monumental work.

High-Speed Rail to Nowhere

Today, Barack Obama is touting high-speed rail and other infrastructure improvements as keys to economic renewal. But if massive infrastructure investments were not enough to turn the economy around in the 1930s, they are far less likely to do so today. ...

[Read on at above link.]