BILL ON ROAD TO NOWHERE; MORE IMPORTANT TRANSIT ISSUES GET LEAPFROGGED BY PORK PROJECTS.

Byline: Robert W. Poole Jr.

THE House of Representatives has passed by an overwhelming margin the massive $218 billion, six-year surface transportation bill approved unanimously by its transportation committee.

The bill is $26 billion over the budget caps agreed to last year, leading to opposition from deficit hawks in both parties. But the dissent was obviously not enough to stop the bill.

Key to its popularity on the Hill is the inclusion of $9 billion worth of transportation pork ``demonstration projects'' requested not by state transportation departments but by individual members of Congress.

Nationwide, 1,449 such pet projects - things like bike paths, walkways and repaving, in 350 of the 435 congressional districts - made it into the bill.

Aren't bike paths, repaving and walkways legitimate transportation projects? Yes, but the real question should be how we get the most bang for our bucks.

All you have to do is spend a few hours on any of our congested and potholed freeways to appreciate the unmet transportation need.

Despite increases in both federal and state gasoline taxes over the past decade, the purchasing power of these funds is not keeping pace with the soaring growth in American travel - in large part because today's cars go much farther on a gallon of gas, and the tax is charged per gallon.

Fortunately, every state has an organized, federally mandated system for setting transportation priorities, involving both a state transportation commission and metropolitan planning bodies.

Using this process, the states can evaluate proposed transportation projects, compare their costs with available resources and decide which will produce the most benefits. That way, limited funds can be targeted to the most valuable projects.

But congressional pork-barreling throws a monkey wrench into this priority-setting process.

Instead of having to compete with high-value projects, a politically favored bridge or bike path gets shoved to the head of the line, thereby using up funds that otherwise would have been used for the more important project.

But it's even worse than that, because these earmarked projects are never 100 percent federally funded.

Typically, Congress will provide only 25 percent, leaving the state to come up with the rest, thereby further depleting the pot of money available for truly vital improvements.

Getting shortchanged by the federal government is nothing new for many states. The 33 ``donor states'' in the federal highway program regularly pay more in federal gasoline taxes than they get back in highway and transit funds from Washington, sometimes resulting in the loss of billions of dollars.

This practice originated back in the 1950s when President Eisenhower launched the federal gasoline tax and Highway Trust Fund to build the interstate highway system.

The rationale was that states with small populations but long distances (Montana, for example) would never generate enough funds to build their portions of the interstate system, so the feds would redistribute funds in the interest of building a nationwide system.

The interstates have long since been completed, but the redistribution lives on. And as long as it lives on, high-growth, high-population states will continue to be shortchanged.

A centralized pot of money that Congress members can use to help themselves get re-elected is too overwhelming a temptation not to be regularly used in that way.

The 1998 bill marks a new high in outrageous pork, but it's the same game that has been played routinely since 1956. The only conceivable way to end the pork is to take away the money.

For the past two years, the House Budget Committee chairman, John Kasich of Ohio, and his Senate colleague, Connie Mack of Florida, have been pushing ``devolution.''

These two Republicans propose that nearly all of the 18 cent federal gasoline tax be phased out, with rvaesponsibility for highways and transit handed back to the states and urban areas.

States would be free to replace part or all of the federal gas tax, and their transportation planning efforts would no longer be undermined by political interventions from Washington.

A 1996 Reason Foundation study found that 33 of the 50 states would be better off if they were able to keep their gasoline tax money at home rather than send it to Washington.

And if the federal gas tax were eliminated and if all states increased their state gas tax by just enough to offset the loss of their federal highway funds, a study by Apogee Research found that 37 states would end up with a net reduction in the price of gas at the pump. (In other words, they would not have to replace the full 18 cents of the federal tax.)

Of the 13 states that would end up with increases, only three would have increases of more than 10 cents.

Despite the benefits of devolution, our elected representatives have opted to continue the highway-pork system and, in doing so, bust the budget with billions in pork.

If the present centralized system routinely wastes resources in this fashion, substituting low-priority systems for high-priority ones, how are we ever going to solve our growing transportation problems?

One ray of hope is the growing acceptance of toll roads and toll lanes.

If high-priority projects can't get funding via the centralized system, citizens of a state or metropolitan area can choose to build them directly via tolls.

In the past 10 years, 15 states have enacted laws permitting public-private toll-road partnerships. There is growing interest in other states for this type of system as they address their own transportation needs.

Perhaps six years from now, when the next federal transportation bill comes around, Americans will have wised up to the pork-barrel game.

But for the next few years, whenever you see a sign reading ``your federal gasoline tax dollars at work,'' you'll have the grim savatisfaction of knowing that too many dollars are doing too little work. For that, you can thank our elected representatives in Washington.