The Feds help Michigan borrow $2 billion more to build more highways

We’ll never pay it back and you know it.

Mark,

So it’s a good idea for an already bankrupt government to take on more debt in the middle of a recession in order to create jobs? Why do we want jobs? Jobs are a hassle, you have to get out of bed in the morning, spend all day answering to some jerk. We’d all love it if our jobs were outsourced, just so long as our paychecks kept coming. We absolutely need to stop thinking about jobs as an economic good in and of themselves. Every crisis that we have to deal with, whether global warming or terrorism, requires sacrifice. The people working in the jobs dealing with the crisis, and all other resources used in the “war” of choice, are people that can’t be working at some other job, producing something of value to society. If we have to deal with global warming, then that’s that, but we would certainly be better off if it weren’t an issue at all, and the people dealing with that could instead be dealing with getting us food or shoes or ipods or whatever.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

We also need to open our eyes to the real nature of credit. As useful as the veil of money and prices is for economic calculation, it does distract people from the true nature of an economy. Brackache is right that MIGOV will never pay this money back (in any meaningful sense of the term) but that’s beside the point. Even though Chrysler paid back it’s loans from it’s first bailout back in the day, the damage was still done. When MIGOV gets these loans and starts to build roads, it will buy machinery and materials, thus bidding up the price higher than they would otherwise be. “Economists” who hope for a rise in new homebuilding (as if we didn’t have enough houses already, jackasses) out of one side of the mouth, and call for public works projects that use the same resources, are completely incoherent. Every time government bids up the prices of resources used by the private sector, it makes it harder for some struggling business to keep running. In the middle of a recession.

BTW, the website field, at least, needs to be substantially longer, unless we all start using lame tinyurls.

Curt, sorry I missed your reply. I was out back polishing up my buggy. ;^)

Yes, I can accept your idea of capacity delays helping to encourage a desire for a better way to commute, to a degree. My gut says that people in the position of having commutes through heavy traffic areas find ways of coping, be they audio books, talking on cell phones or adjusting their departure times to avoid some of the mess. I suspect that neither their first nor maybe even second thought is to give up their cars and find another way to travel. JMO And even if it is on their minds, for the foreseeable future they don’t have a lot of options. So, during the transition (again, transition) why not make car travel more fuel efficient?

Factors such as the cost of fuel, insurance, parking, required yearly emissions and safety inspections for autos (like many other states have), tolls (like many other states have) are just as likely, perhaps more likely, to sway people to demand better alternative modes of transportation.

Another way of looking at it is that it’s okay to leave them hungry, but you shouldn’t let your chickens die of malnutrition before the eggs have hatched. (I so wanted to get chickens in here somehow. It’s been too long since they’ve made an appearance on this blog.)

I suddenly have this massive urge to lift one eyebrow.

amused1 –

If, while repairing them, we find that widening the highway will make the existing system more efficient, and the price difference isn’t huge, then why waste an opportunity to potentially cut down on cars needlessly burning fuel due to traffic backups?

A fair assertion, but not backed by data. For the full story on traffic backups, I’d recommend Anthony Downs’ Still Stuck in Traffic, which is a pretty comprehensive and empirically-backed examination of various “solutions” to traffic congestion. (Relevant bit: widening roads works for a few years, but the excess capacity induces demand that quickly leads to the road being just as congested as it used to be.)

I don’t know much about the specific project – but “widening an interchange” is a little more complex/expensive than just adding through travel lanes. But, for reference, the cost of widening a freeway is in the range of $2.4m-$6.9m per lane mile. For reference, it looks like the annual capital budget of Kalamazoo Metro Transit is about $9m, so this interchange project could cover about 5 years worth of transit capital improvements for the Kalamazoo area – transit improvements, incidentally, being among the few things Downs shows to be effective in actually reducing road congestion.

Finally, look to Seattle’s experience in late 2007, where the public resoundingly voted down a transportation bond for the reason of “too much road spending, not enough transit spending”. (Generalizing, sure, but that’s what every single newspaper’s editorial board was saying.) While the measure was under consideration, a number of sources debunked the idea of highway congestion relief reducing greenhouse emissions. See, for example, the Sightline Institute’s piece, resulting in a prediction that each lane mile of highway expansion yielded, over 50 years, a net increase of 116,000-186,000 tons of CO2 emissions, even assuming that emissions per mile drop to 1/3 of current over that time. Or, in other words, “not as much as a coal-fired power plant, but worth being concerned about. ”

So, to sum up, yep, you’ve nailed the typical traffic engineer’s thinking – as long as we’ve got the contractors out there anyways, might as well have them widen the road, right? More road = less congestion, assuming everything else remains constant. Unfortunately, nothing else is constant, so the traffic engineer’s short-term gains end up consumed in the long-run, much to the consternation of transportation planners who watch this cycle happen over and over again…

Murph, thanks, as always, for the great info. I glanced at the link but won’t be able to dig into it until later. Yes, I can see how more access could lead to more usage, but my optimistic side envisions better options becoming available before the tipping point is reached. Maybe I need to check the prescription on my rose colored glasses. 8^)

Murph,

You might find this book interesting. “The Privatization of Roads and Highways,” by Walter Block, economist from Loyola University, New Orleans. None of that wussy privatization, either.

Well, if they are talking about widening that stretch around Jackson, I’m all for it. That area’s known to be a safety hazard.