Steve Duncan's List: Stimulusstuff

• He maintains that figures show for every $1 billion spent on infrastructure improvements, roughly 35,000 direct and indirect jobs are created.
• Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, a student of Depression-era economics, is in favor of some sort of additional adrenaline boost for the economy. But Bernanke is concerned over whether infrastructure improvements could bring the near-term jolt the economy needs

• Build more roads in growing areas. Opponents of building more roads claim that we cannot build our way out of congestion because more highway capacity will simply attract more travelers. Due to triple convergence, that criticism is true for established roads that are already overcrowded. But the large projected growth of the U.S. population surely means that we will need a lot more road and lane mileage in peripheral areas.

• Surprises and startling statistics abound in the latest report about increasing traffic congestion that threatens the long-term health of the economy in the Chicago area.
• •Traffic costs the region $7.3 billion a year or nearly twice previous estimates in lost time, fuel and environmental damages, according to the MPC.
• •As people struggle with rising gas prices, they may be surprised to learn that lost time costs them nearly 20 times more than wasted fuel, according to the report, “Moving at the Speed of Congestion.” For every hour a driver sits in rush-hour traffic in the Chicago, he says goodbye to $14.76. That is $1,579, or enough to fill up the average gas tank 25 times. The annual increase in fuel costs per peak period traveler in 2005 came to $81. (Officials note, of course, that the figure would be greater with rising gas prices in 2008.)
• Gridlock also increases labor costs, impeding the creation of 87,000 jobs throughout the region.
• The annual costs of wasted time alone per car commuter ranges from $824 in some of the outlying counties to $3,014 in the city of Chicago.
• MPC commissioned HDR Decision Economics to conduct the research behind this report which divided the costs into three segments:
  •$6.98 billion in lost time.
  •$354 million in wasted fuel (The estimate is based on 2005 fuel prices, so HDR said today’s gas prices drive that figure closer to $680 million).
  •$33 million in environmental damages, which HDR called a very conservative estimate.

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• annual costs of congestion are roughly $7 billion
• The results show that $1 of government spending on highways reduces congestion cost by only 11 cents because a lot of the money is not spent on reducing congestion.

• increased traffic congestion is a growing threat to the Nation's economy and quality of life of all Americans

• "We've been relying on a patch-and-pray approach, not a strategic, more thoughtful approach," said Casey Dinges, senior managing director of the American Society of Civil Engineers.
• John Horsley, the executive director of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, said that the U.S. is lagging behind, investing less than 1 percent of its gross domestic product into infrastructure. In China it's 9 percent.
• "What they're doing is using infrastructure investment to position themselves to be the world leader in finance and commerce," Horsley said. "That's their ambition. Every one of our international competitors is making substantial investments in its infrastructure - airports, highways, transit, rails - for the next century. We're not."

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• If America does not act, says Robert Yaro of the Regional Plan Association (RPA), a body that plans for the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut region, it will have the infrastructure of a third-world country within a few decades. Economic growth will be constricted, and the quality of life will be diminished.
• Even worse is the influence of the pork-barrel. Only around 20 states use cost-benefit analyses to evaluate transport projects; of these, just six do so regularly. Alaska’s “bridge to nowhere” is an infamous result of this sort of planning. But it is not exceptional. Two months after the bridge collapsed in Minneapolis, the Senate approved a transport and housing bill that included money for a stadium in Montana and a museum in Las Vegas.
• Flight delays cost at least $15 billion each year in lost productivity.
• Congestion on roads costs $78 billion annually in the form of 4.2 billion lost hours and 2.9 billion gallons of wasted petrol, according to the Texas Transportation Institute.

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