Mandelbaum On The FHWA, I-80, And The Loss Of Imagination
From David Mandelbaum, GT Philadelphia.
On April 6, the Federal Highway Administration disapproved Pennsylvania's proposal to 
impose tolls on Interstate 80, one of two main east-west highways through the Commonwealth. The funds were to be used to provide secure funding for a broad range of transportation needs in Pennsylvania, including, importantly, capital improvements to the major metropolitan public transportation systems. FHWA reasoned that federal law restricted the use of toll revenues to improvements of I-80, and would not permit use of the funds to rebuild other roads and bridges or to fund mass transit.
If you believe that the cost of transportation fuels will increase because of climate policy, international politics, or availability of petroleum, then you believe that those regions that can do business 
with less fuel will do better. Cities with better transit will, all other things equal, be where businesses and people want to be. In the process, the nation as a whole will become more efficient as activity flows to those places. As a practical matter, capital improvements to urban transit systems are just not going to be funded by the bus fairy. Pennsylvania tried one interesting approach to having one transportation mode help fund the sort of capital improvements that climate-friendliness and energy-efficiency would require. We see here an example of the sclerotic complexity that rebuilding the economy for an energy- or carbon-constrained world encounters.
