Headlines from the last several months tell a cohesive story. They tell the story of an ongoing experiment that has reached a point of excess, and needs to be re-examined. 

A local business closes its doors partly due to hospital bills from an auto accident. Port Orchard nears the completion of its 21-Million-Dollar-Mile on Tremont. Perhaps the most bizarre of all? Donald Trump and Nancy Pelosi are actually agreeing on something.

The two agreed that the federal government needs to spend at least $2 trillion updating the nation’s transportation network. If it’s anything like the initial push to build America’s highway system under Eisenhower, it will run wildly over that projected budget. Federal government aside, we’ve recently had a solid dose of transportation-oriented sticker-shock here at home: Port Orchard’s Tremont Avenue Gateway project cost an estimated $21 million dollars for under a mile of road.

Tremont is not a normal road, but I would argue that three things are simultaneously true about it: it is very expensive, we should be shocked by its cost and it’s worth it. We should have sticker shock when we look at the cost of auto infrastructure, and build roads with a sober understanding of their true cost.

We tend to assume that roads are naturally-occurring rock formations, not expensive engineering marvels. Perhaps if we do think about what goes into roads, we don’t think about engineering a stable surface smooth enough to handle high speeds and the punishment of semi trucks through decades of expanding with heat, contracting with cold, and cracking with freezes. We don’t think of runoff erosion, shifting foundations, labor, legal labyrinths, land purchases or logistics. We don’t think about inevitably reworking them every generation. We likely don’t think of everything below and above our roads, either: water, sewage, phone and internet. 

Hidden underneath Tremont are basketball court-sized cisterns to gobble up flood waters and buried power lines — a smart move that makes some of the city’s most important power lines immune to storms. $21 million is the cost of normalcy. It’s the cost of predictability. It might not be sexy, but it’s better than lead poisoning, power outages, or flooding. 

Unfortunately, every time we build a new road, we build an ongoing maintenance liability, and I’m not sure we can afford to maintain what we’ve built. Gas taxes and fees only cover 60-70% of roadway expenditures; the rest is subsidized through property and income taxes.

Washington charges a 49.4-cent per gallon fuel tax to fund roads, so when we pay at the pump, we curse high fuel prices rather than reckless infrastructure spending. That’s important. And as much as the state fuel tax has increased in the last 20 years, by WSDOT’s calculations it hasn’t kept pace with inflation and rising construction costs.

Washington budgeted $822,500,000 for road maintenance in its 2017-2019 budget - and spent $935,833,000. We’ve budgeted more for 2019-2021 ($879,690,000) in a transportation budget state Sen. Steve Hobbs describes as “bare bones.” WSDOT relies heavily on federal funds, from federal fuel taxes that haven’t been adjusted for inflation since 1993. We dipped into the general fund to supplement this shortfall with the FAST Act in 2015, but the federal government is $22 trillion in debt with a looming Social Security crisis. Washington is experiencing a $23 billion shortfall. A recent report by the National Road and Transit Builders Association claims it will take 80 years simply to repair the 47,000 American bridges deemed “structurally deficient.”

Say what you will about high taxes, we aren’t paying enough to maintain what we’ve already built. The money is going to dry up eventually. We need to view infrastructure as a platform for creating wealth, and judge it strictly by that metric. We need transportation systems that pay for themselves.

Things only get worse on the municipal level. Most American cities exhibit a pattern the group Strong Towns has dubbed the “Growth Ponzi-Scheme,” where cities chase the initial boost of tax revenue from new development to pay for yesterday’s bills. They keep opening the door for more and more new subdivisions, chasing the influx of cash without allocating funds to maintain everything they’re building. As these new developments stretch further and further out, however, they require more and more infrastructure to reach, while their low density provides less and less tax revenue. The losses get pushed onto another year, swept under the rug. It works so long as there’s plenty of undeveloped land and building continues. But what happens when the music stops?

The 2008 housing bubble demonstrated how fragile a low-density tax base stretched thinly over expensive roads and pipes is. Ten American cities since 2008 have declared bankruptcy, many at least partially due to crippling infrastructure maintenance costs. The most famous was Detroit, where “urban renewal” projects bulldozed productive black neighborhoods and replaced them with the freeways that enabled a white flight to suburbs that gutted the Motor City of its established middle class. In the similarly-dubbed “Vehicle City,” Flint’s wholesale neglect of its water system led to undrinkable water. Reuters recently reported that at least 3,000 communities in America are suffering the same fate — we don’t even know the full extent of the decay as budget cuts have hamstrung the EPA’s ability to collect data on water contamination. In cities like Lafayette, Louisiana, we see affluent, low-density new suburbs fail to raise enough tax revenue to cover their basic needs, while older, denser, and lower-income parts of the city put more into the city’s coffers than they require: the poor effectively subsidizing the rich. Thankfully, Kitsap generally seems to be avoiding this nationwide trend — but I’m uncertain what our margin for error is.

The cost of freewheeling road projects isn’t measured in dollars alone. The infrastructure of car dependence has some noxious side effects we encounter on a daily basis: plumes of black smoke billowing from a truck, or the smell of burning rubber from the clunker in front of us. For those who listen to the 97% of scientists who believe humans influence global warming, it has to matter that auto exhaust is the largest source of Washington’s harmful emissions (35% to 40%).

It’s a tragedy that Sweet and Smokey Diner had to close when the small business couldn’t cover the owner’s medical bills from a traffic injury. It’s a tragedy that the injury occurred. It’s a tragedy that this story is so common. Traffic accidents cost the U.S. economy about $230 billion every year. Over 2 million are injured, and 40,000 die in traffic violence annually — roughly the entire population of Bremerton unnecessarily dying every year, a rate on par with breast cancer and suicide. There was a time in American history when this fact affected us. Now I fear we’ve simply chalked it up to the cost of convenience.

Indirectly, the sedentary lifestyle of car-dependence takes an even greater toll. Despite being one of the wealthiest countries in the world, the American life expectancy is only 79.3 years, trailing the life expectancy of Costa Rica and barely edging out Cuba, but still 30 spots behind Japan. Far poorer countries (including China) are on pace to surpass us in the coming years. The reasons for this stagnation? Diabetes, high blood pressure and hypertension headline the list. We’re essentially dying of sitting.

Believe it or not, this is the short list of hidden costs, to say nothing of the ecological impact of sprawl, the dangers of aging behind the wheel, forcing the population into one of the worst personal investments possible, or other concerns. These truths underscore deeper, oft-unasked questions: Is new infrastructure adding value to our communities? Is it building wealth? Is what we’re doing actually working?

This is an assessment of the costs of roads, but it’s hard to quantify their benefit to us. The car has given Americans unprecedented independence of travel on an epic scale. I love my pickup; I don’t know how people own homes without trucks. Cars are extremely convenient, and they require roads which are extremely expensive to build and maintain. The American road system is a luxury, but if we’re going to pay for what we use, we need to be taxed considerably more — and I don’t think that idea excites anyone.

So what are our options? That’s next.

Kevin Walthall is a Bremerton resident and writes a regular column for the Kitsap Sun. Contact him at 

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