What's more stimulating - roads or rails?

The fourth bore of the Caldecott Tunnel is one success of the stimulus package.

In 2009 California received $3.4 billion in federal stimulus for transportation projects. Of that, $2.6 billion went to highway infrastructure, and $0.8 billion went to public transit. That’s a 75 percent / 25 percent split.

You don’t have to be a anti-car partisan to see something wrong with those numbers. Recently three NGOs crunched the numbers to see which type of transportation money was more effective—that which went to cars, or that which went to buses and trains. (Here’s the report.) They found that for each billion dollars of highway funding, the government created 8,781 jobs. But for each billion dollars of public transit funding the government created 16,419 jobs.

Can that be right? A government dollar spent on public transit goes nearly twice as far? The authors of this report explain this by pointing our that highway projects spend more on land and less on people. That makes sense, I suppose. The groups involved—the Public Interest Research Group, Smart Growth America, and the Center for Neighborhood Technology—aren’t completely objective on this issue: they would all like to see us become less auto-centric. Then again, they took their data directly from government numbers.

But even if these conclusions were only partially true (say funding buses creates only 50 percent more jobs than funding cars) wouldn’t it make sense to go with the thing that provides the most bang for the buck? Sure, but that's not what Washington is doing. Kate Hinds, my colleague at WNYC who brought all this to my attention, says the new $85 billion job bill doesn’t look much different from the last stimulus – lots of money for roads, less for transportation. (Other's have criticized the bill's potential to create jobs for different reasons.)

Why, especially in this age of global warming, are we investing so heavily in roads? After spending a little more than a month talking to transportation people I’m starting to see a possible answer: We have created a lot of institutional bodies that build roads and not much else – like Caltrans. They are set up to make sure it’s easy to get somewhere in a car and they are pretty good at doing that. There are scores of Caltrans-like bodies out there, all trying to do their job, and that creates a certain inertia: set these road-builders in motion and they will build roads. They aren’t set up to ponder the greater good of society as a whole and make a determination about how money should be spent – they are programmed to find good road projects, seek funding, and build.

Of course, another shoe is about to drop: California is supposed to receive $2.3 billion for high speed rail, which evens out the roads versus rails discrepancy considerably. We are now building up rail institutions to push for their own funding and projects. Ideally we'd have some enlightened entity that would control all these automatons and divvy up the money not according to their demands, but according to the needs of the people. That enlightened entity is supposed to be government, but in California "enlightened" is a bit too charitable a modifier. "Catatonic" perhaps.