That was the core message Dr. William Buechner, a Harvard-trained economist and American Road & Transportation Builders Association (ARTBA) vice president of economics and research, delivered at a March 3 Senate Environment & Public Works Committee hearing on the subject of transportation investment-related jobs and U.S. global competitiveness.
“To think of the federal highway program only as a jobs program is a fundamental mistake,” Buechner testified. “Jobs are only part of the contribution of transportation investment to the U.S. economy. Much more important is the contribution of investment in transportation infrastructure to the long-run growth, productivity and competitiveness of the American economy.”
Buechner told the committee a conservative estimate is that 78 million American jobs in the tourism, manufacturing, retail, trucking and warehousing industries are dependent on the nation’s network of highways, airports, transit, railway and water ports.
“Most economists will tell you that, along with advanced telecommunications, the relatively low cost and reliability of freight transportation in the United States has been critical to the country’s economic success for years,” Buechner said. “Unfortunately, we are letting this competitive edge slip quickly away.”
He pointed to the latest Commodity Flow Survey, which shows that almost 80% of freight in the U.S. is shipped by truck over the nation’s highways, and much of the rest is multimodal including trucks. But growth of traffic in recent years, he said, has far outstripped the increase in highway capacity, and each year, congestion gets worse and worse. “The impact on trucking is costing American businesses billions of dollars each year in lost productivity and higher costs that make U.S. industry less competitive.”
The ARTBA economist called on Congress to enact a long-term surface transportation authorization bill this year. “This measure must focus on clearly unmet national needs, such as goods movement, traffic congestion and public safety,” he said. “To that end, we urge you to carefully consider the merits of the ‘Critical Commerce Corridors’ goods movement proposal developed by the ARTBA membership.”
Buechner concluded: “We are certainly aware of the difficulties facing reauthorization. But there are also grave consequences for failing to act. One example is that the stimulus act’s transportation investments will largely be tailing off rapidly by the end of this year. This means that absent a new infusion of capital investment, the hundreds of thousands of jobs being supported by these funds will also expire.”
