Bill of fair?

I’ll bet you sleep better knowing Congress finally passed a highway bill. Now the roadways that are vital to our national defense against terrorism will be fully protected! (I know that sounds like a stray bit of dialogue from Team America: World Police.)

We have just committed the staggering sum of $286.5 billion to the nation’s roads through fiscal year 2009. According to a Defenders of Wildlife analysis, the bill includes a whopping 6,500 pork-barrel projects, including roads-to-nowhere in certain congressional districts, for which $24 billion will be paid.

Congressman Don Young (R-Alaska) is one of the House’s most proficient feeders at the public trough. He thinks the highway bill is not quite generous enough. As Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby wrote, "One wonders what more Young could have wanted. The bill funnels upward of $941 million to 119 earmarked projects in Alaska, including $223 million for a mile-long bridge linking an island with 50 residents to the town of Ketchikan on the mainland. Another $231 million is earmarked for a new bridge in Anchorage, to be named – this is specified in the legislation – Don Young’s Way … If Carl Sandburg had lived to see this massive avalanche of bacon greasing its way down Capitol Hill, he’d have named Congress, not Chicago, the hog butcher of the world."

There’s all kinds of giveaways like that in the highway bill, including $600,000 for horse-riding facilities in Virginia and $2.75 million for the National Packard Museum in Ohio.

In the last fiscal year, 25 million people rode Amtrak trains, but that didn’t stop President Bush from "zeroing out" Amtrak in the original fiscal 2006 budget. All of Amtrak’s subsidies together since its founding do not equal one year’s highway funding.

Here’s typical bombast against Amtrak from Citizens Against Government Waste: "Amtrak has failed to produce a profit since its inception in 1971 and still has not met the Congressional deadline … to achieve self-sufficiency. As a result, it has become a black hole for taxpayer dollars."

But "self-sufficiency" is a smoke screen. Very few public transportation systems around the world are self-sufficient, but they pay massive benefits in terms of reduced congestion and better air quality. As we saw after 9/11 and again with Hurricane Katrina, the nation needs an alternative form of transit because highways become immediately jammed and impassible in emergencies.

Amtrak is continuing to limp along. I recently took the service to Pittsburgh, but arrived to find this line was soon to be discontinued and, along with it, the only rail service to many small cities.

It’s not all pork, though. There are some interesting aspects of the highway bill. For instance, there is money to provide safe passage for fish under forest roads; to control invasive species that are squeezing out natives along roadsides; and to offer alternative transportation to the cars that are choking our national parks to death.

There’s even funding for a Wildlife Vehicle Collision Reduction Study. Yes, the feds are trying to figure out how to reduce roadkill. Every day, 190 million vehicles take to the road in the U.S. and kill an estimated one million animals. In Pennsylvania alone 26,000 deer were hit in one year. Drivers swerving to avoid animals or colliding with them also kills hundreds of drivers every year.

It’s a two-year study that should result in a "best practices" manual to reduce collisions. Sounds better than a bridge to nowhere.