- Excerpt from “Here is New York” by E.B. White

Laura Tyson – Why We Need a Second Stimulus – NYTimes.com.

Laura Tyson, member of the Presidential Economic Recovery Advisory Board (PERAB), describes important components needed in an infrastructure-focused second stimulus. The benefits of infrastructure investment are numerous, creating jobs several orders out beyond the road workers and civil engineers involved in construction. Building or rehabilitating functional assets facilitates long-term economic growth, energy efficiency, environmental protection, and individual savings from reduced commuting time and diminished vehicle wear and tear. Most of the argument is boilerplate (citing ASCE/CBO figures) but it represents a significant voice advising the President and is still right on the mark, regardless of how often these specific arguments are made or the political realities of getting anything passed with an obstructionist sophistic party impeding necessary action to ignorantly grandstand.

An increase in government investment in roads, airports and other kinds of public infrastructure would be cost-effective, too, as measured by the number of jobs created per dollar of spending. And it would help reduce the road congestion, airport delays and freight bottlenecks that reduce productivity and make the United States a less attractive place to do business. The American Society of Engineers has identified more than $2.2 trillion in public infrastructure needs nationwide, and a 2008 study by the Congressional Budget Office found that, on strict cost-benefit grounds, it would make sense to increase annual spending on transportation projects alone by 74 percent.

Over the next five years, the federal government should work with state and local governments and the private sector to finance $1 trillion worth of additional investment in infrastructure. It should extend the Build America Bonds stimulus program, which in the past year has helped states finance $120 billion in infrastructure improvement.

The federal government should also create and capitalize a National Infrastructure Bank that would provide greater certainty about the level of infrastructure financing over several years, select projects based on rigorous cost-benefit analysis, invest in things like interstate high-speed rail that require coordination among states and attract private co-investors in projects like toll roads and airports that generate dedicated future revenue streams.

You are the bread and the knife,
the crystal goblet and the wine.
You are the dew on the morning grass
and the burning wheel of the sun.
You are the white apron of the baker
and the marsh birds suddenly in flight.

However, you are not the wind in the orchard,
the plums on the counter,
or the house of cards.
And you are certainly not the pine-scented air.

There is just no way you are the pine-scented air.

It is possible that you are the fish under the bridge,
maybe even the pigeon on the general’s head,
but you are not even close
to being the field of cornflowers at dusk.

And a quick look in the mirror will show
that you are neither the boots in the corner
nor the boat asleep in its boathouse.

It might interest you to know,
speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world,
that I am the sound of rain on the roof.

I also happen to be the shooting star,
the evening paper blowing down an alley,
and the basket of chestnuts on the kitchen table.

I am also the moon in the trees
and the blind woman’s tea cup.
But don’t worry, I am not the bread and the knife.
You are still the bread and the knife.
You will always be the bread and the knife,
not to mention the crystal goblet and—somehow—the wine.

Michael Brooks, New Statesman – The spark rises in the east.

When I began reading this article, I started to get all riled up – feeling the nationalistic jealousy over a rising competitor. But this isn’t like an arms race or a space race – this is a race that benefits all those who participate. Scientific breakthroughs – often being the first to transcend the nominal boundaries that divide other competitions – will benefit humanity whether they are American, Chinese, or whatever combination in origin. If anything, the competition this should arouse in all Americans should drive us to work harder while also pushing forth the boundaries of our common and interlinked interests.

Science is rising in the east. China’s strategies for economic development, which are centred on creating a world-beating science base, don’t sound like much. They go by odd names: the 863 Programme and Project 211, for instance, and the Torch and Spark programmes. But they are proving to be more powerful than even the Chinese government could have hoped.

Last year, following a decade of phenomenal growth, China became the second-biggest producer of scientific knowledge in the world. In 1998, Chinese scientists published about 20,000 articles. In 2009, they produced more than 120,000. Only the US turns out more.

According to figures released this year by the US National Science Foundation, there are now as many researchers working in China as there are working in the US or the EU. The state is encouraging Chinese scientists trained in the west to return home, offering them enormous salaries and access to world-class laboratories. In 2008, for example, the molecular biologist Yigong Shi, one of Princeton University’s rising stars, walked away from a $10m research grant to set up a lab at Tsinghua University in Beijing. In January, the Chinese equivalent of the US National Institutes of Health was unveiled with £150m in its pockets, which will be distributed to new medical research projects.

“China is focusing on developing an elite group of institutions and the performance of these is going to go on improving,” says Jonathan Adams, director of research evaluation at Thomson Reuters in London and lead author of a 2009 report into China’s scientific research strategies and achievements.

If present trends continue, China will be the world leader in science by the end of this decade. “There’s going to be a new geography,” Adams says. “The map that people have in their minds of where science is taking place will have to be adjusted.” Scientists working in the west need to react, according to Xiaoqin Wang, director of a biomedical engineering centre that Johns Hopkins University runs jointly with Tsing hua University. “Collaboration will become more and more important,” he says.

Canny European and North American scientists are already reaching out to China. The number of east-west collaborations has doubled in the past five years and organisations such as the UK Research Councils, the British Council and the US National Science Foundation have made brokering such partnerships a priority.

Collaborate or die

According to Rainer Spurzem, an astronomer at the University of Heidelberg in Germany and the National Astronomical Observatories of China, collaboration with Chinese research ers is important because science in China is growing so fast. Not to pull these scientists into the international research effort “would be a loss for all sides”, says Spurzem.

Spurzem is a main player in one of the most recent collaborations, established in June. The International Centre for Computational Science, a joint venture between the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Heidelberg and the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, will develop computational resources for use by scientists across Europe, Asia and the US. This kind of partnership will act to speed China’s rise – and the Chinese know it, says Simon Collinson, an expert on Chinese innovation strategies based at Warwick Business School. “Part of the game plan is to learn as much as they can from the British, the Americans and others and use that knowledge to boost their own efforts.”

Those who don’t collaborate with their Chinese peers risk becoming second-rate. Given the sheer volume of Chinese researchers, they will come to dominate various fields; only through collaboration will western scientists know what is going on behind the scenes. “If you’ve missed out on the background thinking behind published papers, you don’t know what was tried and dropped,” Adams says.

It’s not all bad news for western researchers, because it will take more than money to achieve scientific supremacy. “Funding can be a strong attractor but this is just one of many components of doing good science,” says Artur Ekert, a quantum physicist who is a professor at Oxford and director of the Centre for Quantum Technologies in Singapore. “You also need a certain type of attitude, atmosphere, synergy, culture and so on.” Here, China is still weak, partly as a consequence of its culture. Ekert points out that the western tradition embraces adversarial debate, while the eastern approach is characterised by Confucianism’s search for harmony. “Despite many Chinese scientists being educated in the west, there is still a subtle division in the way we do science,” he says.

If China is serious about conquering the world of science, its culture will have to change, Wang says, because the less hierarchical western tradition produces better results. “At the moment, when a well-respected senior scientist gives a seminar in China, you don’t often see junior scientists stand up and criticise the ideas,” he says. But this is how scientists make progress. “In science, by its very nature, young people come up with new ideas; one generation passes another. This is something that the Chinese need to achieve.”

As collaborations increase, there will also be culture shocks for western scientists. Chinese intellectuals tend to have a more relaxed attitude, for instance, to using other people’s work without attributing what others would deem proper credit. “The idea of ownership is not something they associate with,” Collinson says. “That’s why patents don’t work very well in China and brands get stolen and reused all the time.” Though his main experience is in hi-tech industry, it applies in academia, too, he says. “People get very close to cutting and pasting papers and reusing them.”

This attitude, coupled with strong pressures to succeed, has led to some high-profile cases of scientific fraud. In December, the international chemistry journal Acta Crystallographica retracted 70 papers by Chinese authors after they were found to be riddled with falsified results. According to a report in Nature, one in three researchers surveyed at major Chinese universities and research institutions admitted to plagiarism, falsification or fabrication of data. The problem is exacerbated by universities offering incentives such as cash prizes for those who achieve high-profile publications. In January this year, an editorial in the Lancet issued a call for the state to step in to deal with China’s growing reputation as a hotbed of scientific fraud. “China’s government needs to take this episode as a cue to reinvigorate standards for teaching research ethics,” it said.

This is starting to happen, says David Evans, a British chemist who has been working at the Beijing University of Chemical Technology since 1996. The ministry of science and technology has established an office of research integrity that investigates allegations and issues guidelines for behaviour. Researchers are also taking matters into their own hands, exposing cases of misconduct (or, at least, alleged misconduct) on an unofficial website called New Threads.

Blue skies

Such creases need to be ironed out, but there are upsides to the differences between east and west. Chinese scientists will bring a fresh approach to western research. “The analysis of a problem, what they think of as the most interesting element and the tools they use will be an important part of development of some fields,” Adams says. In the short term, however, great innovation is unlikely. For the next few years, China’s dominance will be most visible in areas related to its economic well-being.

In July, for instance, China’s State Oceanic Administration announced that it would be receiving a funding boost in next year’s science budget. The money will go towards the construction of a new deep-sea exploration research centre in Qingdao, Shandong Province. The main aim is to bolster the hunt for oil and minerals seen as vital to future growth.

More widely, most of the research budget is focused on delivering advances that will increase the productivity of China’s industrial and manufacturing base. “A much smaller proportion of funds is allocated to basic research than in most other countries,” Evans says. However, the amount of money directed at “blue-skies research” is beginning to increase, driven partly by the desire for home-grown innovation that will bring prestige to the country.

Space science is one such area. Here, China hopes to lead the world and, as with America’s Apollo missions of the 1960s, any economic pay-off will be a bonus on top of the boost to national pride. Perhaps most important to China is the goal of generating Nobel Prizes. Although there have been four Chinese Nobel laureates in science, no research carried out in mainland China has been awarded a Nobel – yet. It’s 4,000 miles from Beijing to Stockholm, but it’s starting to seem a lot closer.

Michael Brooks is the author of “Thirteen Things that Don’t Make Sense” (Profile Books, £8.99) and an NS science columnist.

Doug Sanders – In 100 years, we’ll be a fully urban species, Deccan Chronicle.

The exploding urban populations around the world provide a unique opportunity to really test how we actively construct and adapt systems in concise geographic spaces to provide opportunities and resources to all. If we can begin to build the institutions and positive feedback loops between the way we collect and utilize resources, we can achieve a future level of human prosperity beyond what we can currently imagine.

Chongqing is a dense and smoky inland city, the heavy-industry, high-rise home to over 30 million people. It is to China what Chicago was to 20th-century America, or Manchester to 19th-century England, and it’s growing at an extraordinary rate. Every day a tide of 1,500 new people washes in to Chongqing. Every day an extra 1.5 million square feet of floor space is constructed for new residents. It’s a vast megalopolis, a megacity of the sort that will soon take over the world.

I met Mr and Mrs Zhang on the day they first arrived in Chongqing from their rural village. It had taken them almost 10 years to raise enough money to move and required outrageous sacrifice: They pooled together their accumulated cash from years of sweated labour in motorcycle-parts factories, and had paid the full purchase price of 150,000 yuan (£14,000) for a clean and elegant three-bedroom apartment, turning them, legally, into city-dwellers. In the next few months they will bring their parents over from the village, shutting the farm down and ending their family’s millennia-long connection to the fields.

The Zhangs are the archetypal people of the 21st century, and we ignore their story at our peril. For the defining force of this century, almost certainly more significant than war, recession and perhaps even climate change, will be the huge and final shift of human populations from rural areas to cities. It’s a crucial issue — one that every politician, every economist and sociologist should be considering. Because the mind-boggling fact is that we will end this century as a fully urban species.

It sounds frightening, especially to the lucky, affluent, Western middle classes who dream of nothing so much and so often as moving to the country. But our urban future shouldn’t be an alarming prospect. The migration to cities will create enormous tensions, conflicts and cultural clashes, but it also means a vast reduction in poverty and suffering, and an end to the major ongoing concern of human history: continuous, unrestrained population growth.

In Europe, North America, Australasia and Japan, the move to the largest cities is now fully complete. The rural areas represent between five and 25 per cent of the population, and those numbers have generally been stable for decades. For the most part these people live in villages by choice and not by force of necessity. But what about the countryside? What about farming? Well, fewer than five per cent of Western populations are now employed in agriculture — sometimes as little as two per cent — and this is enough to produce more food, at low cost, than their urban populations can consume. Now that the poor half of the world is once again experiencing food shortages, it is desperately important that this high-yield agriculture develop in the poor half of the world.

And, indeed, this is the transformation that is now taking place in South America, in Asia, and gradually but inexorably in Africa. At the moment, only 41 per cent of Asians and 38 per cent of Africans live in cities; the rest are largely subsistence farmers, people whose entire livelihoods depend on the vicissitudes of weather, fertilisation and crude credit relations. They are on the land not because it is a better life, but because they are trapped.

This is changing fast. Between now and 2050, the world’s cities will absorb an additional 3.1 billion people.

The population of the world’s countryside will stop growing around 2019, according to the UN Population Division’s more conservative estimates, and by 2050 will have fallen by 600 million because of migration to the city. India’s rural population, one of the last to stop growing, is set to peak in 2025 at 909 million, and shrink to 743 million by 2050. Each month, there are five million new city-dwellers created through migration or birth in Africa, Asia and West Asia.

By the end of 2025, 60 per cent of the world will live in cities; by 2050, more than 70 per cent; and by century’s end the entire world, even the poor nations of sub-Saharan Africa, will be at least three quarters urban. And this point, when the entire world is as urban as the West is today, will mark an end point. Once humans urbanise, or migrate to more urban countries, they almost never return.

Why is it so important to think about this now? Well, rural living is the largest single killer of humans today, the greatest source of malnutrition, infant mortality and early death.

Urban poverty may force a mother to send her child into the street to sell goods; rural poverty will cause that child to die of starvation. People do not, as an almost universal rule, die of hunger in cities. Urban incomes everywhere are higher; access to education, health, water and sanitation as well as communications and culture are always better in the city.

Urbanisation doesn’t just improve the lives of those who move to the city; it improves conditions in the countryside, too, by giving villages the finance they need to turn agriculture into a business with salaried jobs and stable incomes. These remittances are very much responsible for the decline of poverty and the rise of commercial agriculture in these countries.

The dramatic declines in the number of very poor people in the world around the turn of this century (world poverty rate fell from 34 per cent in 1999 to 25 per cent in 2009) were caused entirely by urbanisation: people made better livings when they moved to the city, and sent funds back to the village.

One last, crucial, calming fact for the anxious. It can feel to a native city-dweller as if the floods of newcomers to a city mean that the population as a whole is expanding wildly, beyond our ability to control it. But when villagers migrate to the city, their family size drops, on average, by at least one child per family. So, the urbanisation of the species will, in the end, be our salvation.

Steven Solomon – Drowning Today, Parched Tomorrow – NYTimes.com.

Whether skeptics believe climate change to be anthropogenic in origin or otherwise, resource scarcity and shifting climates will cause severe disruptions regardless, significantly impacting billions around the globe and causing us to make drastic shifts in short periods of time. The sooner we understand that what happens beyond our shores is most certainly still our problem, the sooner we’ll come to building a concerted effort to preemptively mitigate the negative effects of global warming. More now than ever, we need a Pax Americana – leading the world with the ideas, people, and investments that reshape a world stricken by 20th century shortsightedness, to chart out and build a 21st century system that provides sustainable opportunities for all.

HARD as it may be to believe when you see the images of the monsoon floods that are now devastating Pakistan, the country is actually on the verge of a critical shortage of fresh water. And water scarcity is not only a worry for Pakistan’s population — it is a threat to America’s national security as well.

Given the rapid melting of the Himalayan glaciers that feed the Indus River — a possible contributor to the current floods — and growing tensions with upriver archenemy India about use of the river’s tributaries, it’s unlikely that Pakistani food production will long keep pace with the growing population.

It’s no surprise, then, that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made Pakistani headlines a few weeks before the flooding by unveiling major water projects aimed at bolstering national storage capacity, irrigation, safe drinking water and faltering electrical power service under America’s new $7.5 billion assistance program. In March, the State Department announced that water scarcity had been upgraded to “a central U.S. foreign policy concern.” Pakistan is at the center of it.

This is because a widespread water shortage in Pakistan would further destabilize the fractious country, hurting its efforts to root out its resident international terrorists. The struggle for water could also become a tipping point for renewed war with India. The jihadists know how important the issue is: in April 2009, Taliban forces launched an offensive that got within 35 miles of the giant Tarbela Dam, the linchpin of Pakistan’s hydroelectric and irrigation system.

Pakistan needs to rebuild and overhaul the administration of the world’s largest contiguous irrigation network. For decades, Islamabad has spent far too little on basic maintenance, drainage and distribution canals, new water storage and hydropower plants.

To some extent, these deficiencies have been masked since the 1970s by farmers drilling hundreds of thousands of little tube wells, which now provide half of the country’s irrigation. But in many of these places the groundwater is running dry and becoming too salty for use. The result is an agricultural crisis of wasted water, inefficient production and incipient crop shortfalls.

Like Egypt on the Nile, arid Pakistan is totally reliant on the Indus and its tributaries. Yet the river’s water is already so overdrawn that it no longer reaches the sea, dribbling to a meager end near the Indian Ocean port of Karachi. Its once-fertile delta of rice paddies and fisheries has shriveled up.

Chronic water shortages in the southern province of Sindh breed suspicions that politically connected landowners in upriver Punjab are siphoning more than their allotted share. There have been repeated riots over lack of water and electricity in Karachi, and across the country people suffer from contaminated drinking water, poor sanitation and pollution.

The future looks grim. Pakistan’s population is expected to rise to 220 million over the next decade, up from around 170 million today. Yet, eventually, flows of the Indus are expected to decrease as global warming causes the Himalayan glaciers to retreat, while monsoons will get more intense. Terrifyingly, Pakistan only has the capacity to hold a 30-day reserve storage of water as a buffer against drought.

India, meanwhile, is straining the limits of the Indus Waters Treaty, a 1960 agreement on sharing the river system. To cope with its own severe electricity shortages, it is building a series of hydropower dams on Indus tributaries in Jammu and Kashmir State, where the rivers emerge from the Himalayas.

While technically permissible under the treaty provided the overall volumes flowing downstream aren’t diminished, untimely dam-filling by India during planting season could destroy Pakistan’s harvest. Pakistan, downriver and militarily weaker than India, understandably regards the dams’ cumulative one-month storage capacity as a potentially lethal new water weapon in India’s arsenal.

Now, on top of all this, come the monsoon floods, which have obliterated countless canals, diversion weirs and huge swaths of cropland. Pakistan needs help, and projects like those heralded by Secretary Clinton, while valuable, are not on the scale needed to turn things around.

The best first step is a huge one: for Washington to kick-start progress on the Diamer-Bhasha dam, an agricultural and hydroelectric project on the Indus that’s been on the drawing board for decades. The project, likely to cost more than $12 billion, has languished for want of financing. It has also has run afoul of the developed world’s knee-jerk disfavor of giant dams.

But there is simply no other project that can add so much desperately needed water storage and hydroelectricity — Pakistan is tapping just 12 percent of its hydropower potential. Giant dams, moreover, can be inspiring, iconic projects — the Hoover Dam was a statement of American fortitude at the height of the Depression. Beleaguered Pakistan could use a symbol of progress.

There are other projects, already shown to be successful, that on a larger scale could save more water than building half a dozen giant dams. Managers at one Punjabi canal branch, for example, are working with international experts to replace the traditional supply system called warabandi — in which farmers draw water on a simple rotational basis — with one that requires less overall water but delivers it on a reliable, as-needed basis.

Finally, President Obama should take a lesson from John F. Kennedy. In 1961 President Kennedy and President Ayub Khan of Pakistan established a technical collaboration between American experts and a young generation of Pakistani engineers who, together, largely ameliorated Pakistan’s seemingly intractable problem of waterlogging and soil salinization. Yes, Washington’s interest may have been more related to the cold war than to helping the Pakistani people, but we’ve again reached the point where national security and benevolence align.

The Pakistanis may never come to love us. But as the current spectacle of Islamic jihadists bringing emergency aid to flooded areas warns us, we can’t afford to ignore Pakistan’s looming freshwater crisis.

Google & Khosla: If AB32 Dies, So Goes CA’s Greentech Market.

The path to rebuilding our economy is predicated by a need to rebuild the pillars of American greatness – world class education, science & technology, and infrastructure. Facilitating these will offset the artificial growth perpetuated by financial wizardry over the past decade and enhance America’s engineering and manufacturing bases. Our greatest exports are our ideas, and the 21st century growth patterns show that we need to make some drastic choices to continue thriving as we have in the past regarding our use of natural resources. If we continue to rely on carbon-heavy subsidies over nurturing the start-ups which propelled our IT revolution, we will be doing our country, our planet, and future generations the greatest disservice imaginable. Can’t get better sources for how to nurture the leap ahead technology necessary than these two.

If California’s climate change bill AB32 — which was passed back in 2006 and creates a plan to reduce the state’s carbon emissions — is repealed, California’s greentech markets will be seriously jeopardized, said venture capitalist Vinod Khosla and Google’s Green Energy Czar Bill Weihl at an event at Google HQ on Tuesday morning. The main theme for the Google event was a discussion of Proposition 23, a ballot measure that, if passed on the upcoming November ballot, would essentially kill AB32, and is backed by Texas-based oil companies Valero and Tesoro.

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Khosla stated his position clearly on the oil-backed ballot measure: “Prop 23 will kill the market and the single largest source of job creation in California in the last two years.” Innovation started happening in California, and the next ten Googles of greentech will be created there, because the market is there, he said. If California’s market is destroyed, countries like China and other states will have a competitive edge and those next ten Googles will be built in those markets, said Khosla.

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Google’s Weihl agreed and said that AB32 has helped create companies and jobs and has been one of the brightest spots in the economy in the state. While many studies and researchers back this position, other conflicting studies have also found that AB32 could reduce the number of jobs (which is the fear that Prop 23 is tapping into). Think about AB32 as a 401K, said Khosla, you put aside a little bit month by month, but over time you save a whole lot. “It’s an investment in our future.”

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Weihl also noted that, in addition to maintaining AB32 in California, the federal government needs to increase its spending on basic energy research and development, as well as scaling of energy projects. While the stimulus has created a temporary market, the greentech market needs permanent funding over a ten-year period to move forward, said Weihl. Both Khosla and Weihl said that the federal government also needs to focus on funding “home runs” and breakthroughs, instead of funding incremental technology gains.

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As Khosla put it: “Right now California is in the pole position to win the greentech race. .  . It is our race to lose.”

San Francisco Rolls Out Supply-and-Demand Priced Parking

What a fantastic concept – it will be more interesting to see how this works in the long run but I think the strongest part of this story (beyond applied microeconomics) is the implementation of sensors and the data made available to drivers to increase fuel efficiency and decrease environmental impacts – simply putting a stop to crappy feedback loops. The challenges (beyond coordination) would seem to be the strength of the physical sensor if someone rolls over it (although the placement may just be for visualization purposes), crappy urban parkers, and how you feed drivers the information without distracting them (text messages and smart phone apps delivering spot availability).  Eventually, all this will form the connected “smart” infrastructure as depicted by former NSA chief, Mike McConnell. If Web 1.0 was about connecting people to information (Search), and 2.0 was about connecting people to people (social networks), then ‘Web 3.0′ will be about connecting information to information. I’m excited.

The endless search for a parking spot in the city may be a thing of the past—in San Francisco, at least. After years of preparation, the city is now rolling out SFpark, a high-tech new system that will set the price of parking spots according to supply and demand.

To reduce congestion, San Francisco is aiming to have one spot open at all times on every block. Here’s how the plan works: A network of wireless sensors let the city keep track of which parking spots are empty. If a particular block never has available spots, the city raises the meter rates until it does. In places where parking is plentiful, rates fall. As an added bonus, this information-age system lets residents check the rates and availability of parking online before deciding to drive.

In the first phase of the rollout, now underway, the city is installing 190 new meters in the Hayes Valley neighborhood. That will be followed by 5,100 more new meters in seven other areas.

The system is expected to increase revenue from parking meters, but decrease revenue from traffic tickets. How this will balance out for the city budget is unclear. Also unclear: Just how high the prices will go. Will there be $10 per hour parking?

What it should do, however, is keep the streets from being so crowded with cars and help people avoid needless driving. Average motorist, meet Adam Smith.

Transportation User Fee Model Obsolete, But No Solution on the Horizon « The Transport Politic.

The only real solution for now is a second stimulus (infrastructure oriented) that keeps the trust fund solvent until the economy rebounds. This should be coupled with a phased-in increase in the gas tax (discrepancy right now is just $22B/year), the transition to VMT by 2020 (we should be moving heavily to all-electric cars at the same time) and the establishment of a robust, self-replenishing National Infrastructure Bank. We keep framing the debate as if these are hard but necessary choices but its not really as difficult as it seems. Wide support across the country exists for enhancing our infrastructure – it is more about central messaging and utilizing some political capital to back it. The public support and the demonstrable benefits of investment to infrastructure exist (4 Es – employment, economic growth, energy efficiency, and environment). Let’s get moving.

FYI Yonah Freemark is one of my heroes.

» Even as GAO reveals that nearly all states received more federal allocations than they contributed to the Highway Trust Fund, Congressional inaction continues.Supposed alternatives, like L.A.’s 30/10 plan, don’t address core issues.

Here’s how the Highway Trust Fund was supposed to work, back when it was created in 1956 to fund the Interstate Highway System: Congress would redistribute annual revenue from a series of fuel taxes on a proportional basis to states to cover the majority of construction costs of freeways from Maine to Montana. Over the past five decades, that system has worked well enough both to construct the United States’ massive roads system but also to keep it in relatively adequate condition — all by relying only on fees covered by direct users of the system. The understanding, theoretically shared by both drivers and politicians, was that the road system “paid for itself.”

Over the last few decades, however, that relationship has become increasingly tenuous. In 1983, the Mass Transit Account was created to fund public transportation with one out of every nine collected cents from drivers going to support rail and bus projects. In 1993, a 4.3¢ increase to the tax was allocated towards deficit reduction rather than transportation (though the money was eventually directed back towards roads in 1997). In the past two years, though, the user fee system has met its most challenging situation yet: Because of a refusal of the Congress to approve tax increases, a decrease in overall vehicle miles traveled, and an increase in the fuel efficiency of vehicles, the Highway Trust Fund is now paying out more than it collects for the first time — to virtually every state, according to the Government Accountability Office.

For proponents of the idea that federal transportation spending should be self-supporting, these facts come as a serious blow. They put in question both assumptions about the manner in which transport is funded in the United States and the long-term viability of that funding.

The biggest obstacle faced by the American transportation system is simply that we have run out of money to pay for it. The Congress has made little effort to advance any reauthorization of highway and transit allocations because of an unwillingness throughout the process to identify any tax increases that would be politically acceptable enough to pay for the system. The general fund has become the de facto financing source (leading to the aforementioned situation in which states contribute less in fuel taxes than they receive), but support for its continued use, despite its merits, remains unclear, leaving the whole transportation program in the lurch.

This situation has been exacerbated by the Obama Administration’s steadfast failure to support any tax increases during the recession: Transportation Secretary Ray LaHooddeclared late last month that not only is no fuel increase in the cards, but also neither is a vehicle miles traveled fee, the only realistic alternative. Mr. LaHood argued that tolls could fill the gap — but there are structural impediments blocking that idea; more significantly, the federal government has no direct control over road tolls, so any increase in funds would go to state governments, not the national government.

Though states have the potential to be strong supporters of public transportation, they currently have shown little interest in doing so, even in the most progressive states. Apart from municipal and metropolitan governments, the overwhelming contributor to the financing of transit capital projects has been Washington.

Recently, two new alternatives have been promoted. Ken Orski, an Associate Administrator of the Urban Mass Transportation Administration (now FTA) in the 1970s, commented last week in his Innovation Briefs that Los Angeles’ 30/10 transit plan was one significant option, since it promoted “fiscal independence” by allowing the federal government to “facilitate” but not be responsible for the financing of transit in ten years through low-interest loans that would eventually be paid back through thirty years of tax revenues. This argument has been repeated by several other sources.

This discussion, however, is disingenuous, since it does not reflect the fact that each of the public transportation projects being proposed for Los Angeles, from the Westside Subway extension to the Crenshaw Line, will require a financial commitment from Washington through the New Starts grant program. In other words, the federal government must still find the money to pay for these projects through direct funding — through 30/10, Los Angeles is just trying to speed the process up. This could potentially make the situation worse for the already cash-strapped U.S. Department of Transportation, since it would only increase the immediate demand for more national transportation funds!

Meanwhile, Orski points to the proposal of the libertarian Reason Foundation to simply direct all transportation funds raised through the fuel tax — including those currently used for transit projects — towards a “results-oriented” “Interstate 2.0″ highway program. This proposal is a reflection of Reason’s sense that Americans “have lost trust in the Trust Fund,” a sense that only conservatives seem to share, based on the understanding that it is unreasonable to use driver user fees to pay for bike, pedestrian, and public transportation projects.

This is a dangerously anti-multimodal point of view that fails to reflect the fact that there are significant benefits to the nation as a whole to invest both in highway and transit projects, no matter the source of revenue used to pay for them. Moreover, it does not consider a political reality that lobbies for the roads and public transportation are mutually dependent; there must continue to be a role for both in any future federal transportation financial structure.

I do not have a miracle solution to these problems other than to suggest once again that if the government wants to support a well-maintained national infrastructure, there is no choice but to increase taxes to do so — most of the “alternatives” are either just as reliant on federal investment as is the current system or represent an overall reduction in spending, the exact opposite of what is necessary. While it may be politically inconvenient to force through a tax increase, whether that means on fuel or income taxes, the United States has no real choice but to do so if it continues to desire a functioning transportation network.