Spilling the ISTEA

Mix with a little lemon and and re-up your transportation policy.

The Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act of 1991, acronymed ISTEA and pronounced “ice tea,” transformed the mechanism by which the United States builds transportation infrastructure. The law instructs that Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs), themselves in existence since the early 1960s, take a lead role in developing long-range transportation planning documents and the accompanying projects to achieve goals set forth therein.

The fiscal goals, of balancing the pinhead thin axes of federal versus non federal, up and down, and sustainable versus ruinous, left and right, are noble and every project falls on this plane somewhere, but if we consider only this plane, the only projects that make sense are toll roads.

It, however, did almost nothing to change the manner by which state DOTs conduct business: more roads, more spending on projects that dubiously solve issues of access, and access to opportunity. A “faster commute” is not an appropriate reason to spend billion…