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Transportation and Infrastructure Policy Studies
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Obama’s Emerging Housing Policy: Will Ideology Trump Opportunity?
By Ronald Utt, The Heritage FoundationWebMemo, 09/10/2010
Beginning in mid-summer 2010, the Obama Administration and its supporters initiated an outreach to the press to discuss some of the broad policy themes that could be included in the President’s ongoing transformational narrative on housing policy, whose details are expected to be revealed in early 2011. Although there have been no official pronouncements on this emerging policy from the Administration, statements by mid-level political appointees to the media indicate that an emerging plan that would de-emphasize homeownership and elevate renting as one of its key components.
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19th Annual Highway Report
By David T. Hartgen, et al., Reason FoundationReport, 09/02/2010
Overall, North Dakota, Montana and Kansas have the most cost-effective state highway systems. Rhode Island, Alaska, California, Hawaii and New York have the least cost-effective roads.
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Restoring Trust in the Highway Trust Fund
By Robert W. Poole, Adrian T. Moore, Reason FoundationPolicy Study, 08/06/2010
The urgent need to rebuild and modernize vital Interstate highway infrastructure is bogged down by a Federal system that prioritizes politics and ribbon-cutting. The federal gas tax has become a general-purpose public works tax instead of a true highway user fee. Refocusing the federal program on Interstate 2.0, and restoring the true user fee nature of the federal fuel tax, offers a way to cut the Gordian knot.
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Florida’s Reedy Creek Improvement District
By Arin Greenwood, Competitive Enterprise InstituteIssue Analysis, 07/15/2010
A major storm could throw Florida into a state of financial crisis. And proposals to correct this crisis are yet unavailing. While small in scale in relation to the state’s insurance and storm mitigation needs, could Disney’s model of private government (the Reedy Creek Improvement District) provide some ideas on at least one way of reducing Florida’s massive insurance exposure by creating hardier properties?
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Public Transit in Washington
By Randal O’Toole, Washington Policy CenterPolicy Brief, 07/13/2010
Public transit is often portrayed as a low-cost, energy-efficient alternative to auto driving. In fact, transit is much more costly than driving, and requires huge subsidies to attract riders. Moreover, transit systems in the vast majority of American cities use more energy and emit more greenhouse gases than the average car. For every dollar collected in fares from transit riders, the average transit system in America requires more than $2 from taxpayers for operating subsidies plus more than $1 for capital improvements and maintenance. So it is not surprising that transit systems in Washington require large subsidies. What may be surprising is that many are more energy intensive and less environmentally friendly than a typical sports utility vehicle.
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Driven to Spend: Funding the State’s Transportation Needs Without Raising Taxes
By Talmadge Heflin, James Quintero, Texas Public Policy FoundationPolicy Perspective, 07/08/2010
Texas’s transportation system faces significant challenges in the coming years as the result of explosive population growth, current infrastructure maintenance requirements, and the need to plan future projects. Some argue that the best way to solve the state’s looming transportation troubles is through higher taxes and fees; but consumers and taxpayers, particularly in today’s recession weary environment, are looking for more responsible, innovative alternatives that maximize existing resources and directly address the problem of congestion. It is recommended that the Legislature adopt an approach that ends diversions; re-directs state government resources; re-prioritizes existing local sales taxes; allocates funds based on their ability to reduce congestion; and implements transparency reforms to identify inefficiencies and better educate the public.
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Menace to Mobility
By Gabriel Roth, American Enterprise InstituteThe American, 07/01/2010
The federal fuel tax needs to be reauthorized before March 2011; Congress should end it instead. Eliminating it would result in federal fuel taxes being phased out and give the states—which own the interstates—full responsibility for highway financing. States would have strong incentives to improve the highways in their jurisdiction, spawning innovation. Successful innovations, such as contracting out some or all of their operations to private firms, would be copied in other states.
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Federal Highway Trust Fund: Recommit to Better Highways and Enhanced Mobility
By Ronald D. Utt, The Heritage FoundationWebMemo, 06/30/2010
Over the past year Congressman James, chairman of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, has introduced a partial draft of new highway legislation that would divert even more money from roads to bicycles, walking, transit, land use planning, and more federal employees to operate the program. If these efforts are enacted into law as part of the next (now delayed) highway reauthorization bill, even more money from motorists will be diverted into non-highway and non-transportation purposes. Starved for funds, roads will continue to deteriorate and congestion will worsen as little or no new capacity is added to accommodate a growing population and economy.
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Washington’s War on Cars and the Suburbs: Secretary LaHood’s False Claims on Roads and Transit
By Wendell Cox, The Heritage FoundationSpecial Report, 06/17/2010
Many of the claims and assertions that U.S. Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood makes on behalf of the transit industry are inconsistent with the data and studies produced by many agencies of the federal government, including his own Department of Transportation. Secretary LaHood has based his policy largely on the work of lobbyists, rather than on the work of analysts and statisticians who work in the DOT, and has largely ignored the extensive work by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, Congressional Research Service, Congressional Budget Office, United States Bureau of the Census, and U.S.-based academics and independent research organizations. Virtually none of Secretary LaHood’s claims can withstand scrutiny. Unless realistic expectations based on objective and reliable information replace the ideological and undeliverable goal of trying to divert travel away from cars to transit, the nation could find itself spending hundreds of billions more dollars without accomplishing anything but further congesting its urban areas, increasing unemployment, and retarding productivity.
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Toward Creating Sustainable Transit
By Wendell Cox, Ronald Utt, The Heritage FoundationWebMemo, 06/15/2010
Making transit sustainable will not be easy. Transit must move from maximizing to minimizing expenditures per passenger. To do this, it needs to be subject to competition, and capital expenditures should be chosen that maximize passengers. A good place to start is a rewrite of the federal laws that discourage or prohibit communities from relying on the competitive forces to improve their foundering transit systems and federal rules that no longer allow wasteful rail systems where other alternatives would carry more passengers for less.
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