Steelmanning Reauthorization: Way More Than You Wanted to Know II
ISTEA (1991), not just a tasty beverage.
Reference (will be at the top of every post):
Power: How does power influence how, where, and what projects are favored? How has this changed over time?
Mode: What’s the focus of this bill? How can we tell what the focus is? How should we talk about this? Is it still highways?
Complexity: How complex does this bill expect our system to be? Are we set up to handle the dispersion of money?
Flexibility: How can money be used? Does the language allocate spending to specific programs or functions? How much is formula vs discretionary?
Geography: Where’s the focus of the investment? More spread out? Need or merit?
ISTEA:
“Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act of 1991”
Four years after STURAA, we’re chillin’ with the MPO-maker. Multimodalism rears its ugly head. Transportation might be “intelligent.”
Power: State >> Regional >> Federal >> Local. The big shift here is the focus on MPOs, long required and long quasi-dormant because of the chasm between required activity (long-range transportation planning at a regional level) and the funding (you know, to build1 the stuff). Nearly 30 years since the Federal government mandated substate, regional planning, and crucially, the end of Interstate Highway spending, the authors of this bill turned their attention to regional planning—where most trips actually happen.
Mode: This bill unsticks the surface modes from their rigid silos (sort of) and, while it still focuses on highways more than (probably) reflects the national handle-grabbing that’s the highway system, the focus on mass transit and shift toward “intermodality” as a system is a reflection of contemporary thought around surface/aviation/maritime at the time. It was a novel approach.
Complexity: ISTEA acknowledged the growing complexity of movement. That the Interstate Highway System was nearly functionally done, this was likely a turning point for the “point” of USDOT—if its original purpose was to coordinate, manage, and fund the majority of the national highways, what was the need for a federal agency (bigger question)? I bet there was a growing sentiment to toss it out and devolve the spending to states; this is a common refrain for anti-Federalists whose sole purpose is seemingly to shrink the size of the Federal government. Intermodalism / multimodalism was a very obvious way to demonstrate the need. For the first time, the bill talks about “intelligent” transportation systems.
Flexibility: ISTEA promoted and recentered the idea of regional planning as a necessary dominant form of vertical federalism to spend and allocate resources most efficiently. While a political boundary is set by the states, a travel boundary is driven by commutes and movement patterns. What’s a reasonable purview for a single or chained trip to work, school, doctor, etc? What does that look like now and in the future? By imposing these rules from the federal standpoint, the government could compel states to think more flexibly about the future of spending, and hopefully(!?) rethink how to build and maintain our system, which is both broadly and nationally complementary and competitive.
Geography: MPOs and regional authorities were a big idea in ISTEA. The money still needed to passthrough the state DOTs (more on that) and earmarks still dominated a majority of the bill text, but ISTEA demonstrated that there was a possibility to rethink how we distributed money. Also important to note is the inclusion of “high priority corridors,”—which had the added benefit of being politically popular with the pork parade.
and maintain!