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Prioritizing Transportation
House Conservative Caucus Leadership
With the rapid population growth Utah is experiencing, we have serious transportation funding requirements to address the expansion of necessary transportation infrastructure. At the same time, we are in need of additional improvements in how we choose which transportation projects to build.
A few years ago, the Utah Legislature had the wisdom to empower the Transportation Commission to develop a process for prioritizing new transportation infrastructure. The objectives were to ensure that our limited transportation resources went to the greatest new capacity needs based of objective scientific criteria, regardless of region or political clout. Only through this type of process can we provide our citizens with the most cost-effective resolution to their transportation needs. This process also opened up the prioritization process, shining a light on how projects are selected, empowering our citizens and local government officials to have greater input into and understanding of the selection process.
These changes addressed new capacity state projects, but don’t address the inefficiencies of local and regional project selection. Unfortunately, the legislature has allocated various buckets of money for local governments (cities and counties) to use to fund various road and transit projects, selectively targeting specific funds to separate modes of transportation infratructure (local roads, local buses, fixed guiderail system). We need a single unified process whereby local officials can identify, prioritize, and fund key transportation infrastructure that will be most beneficial to their constitutents, regardless of the mode. This would demand using scientific and financial information to rank all transportation projects on a single list and funding projects from most important to least important. This will provide the greatest protection and assurance to the taxpayer that their hard-earned taxes are being invested wisely and prudently in the infrastructure, which will address both their immediate transportation needs as well as appropriate long-term transportation investment.
So here’s a recommended 3-step plan:
1. Develop the transparent, criteria-driven process for prioritizing regionally significant transportation projects (over a 50-year horizon) that will maximize congestion relief while simultaneously minimizing general taxpayer subsidies. This process could be managed either by local city and county officials or by the state under the oversight of the Transportation Commission.
2. Preserve critical transportation corridors based on a 50-year sliding window
3. Construct those projects that are ranked highest, providing the greatest benefit to the traveling public.
Piecemeal allocations of money and bandaid fixes are wasteful and don’t adequately address our transportation needs. A long-term focus and a unified process that focuses on directing our limited resources to those projects that provide the greatest benefit are essential if we hope to make up for lost ground and begin to get ahead of the infrastructure demands that a rapidly growing population expects.
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