Challenges and Opportunities for Innovation in the Public Works ...

HOW EFFECTIVE IS OUR INVESTMENT IN ROADS, STREETS AND
HIGHWAYS?
T.D. White, Associate Professor
School of Civil Engineering
Purdue University
Introduction
States are making a significant annual investment maintaining, rehabilitating, and
constructing or reconstructing the highway and bridge infrastructure. However, there is still
concern about the overall level of serviceability and condition of these facilities. Similarly,
large cities have deteriorating roadway/street networks. These cities are population centers
and public service demands are taking a larger portion of available financial resources and
as a result reducing the resources available for the roadway/street network as well as other
important infrastructure components. Small cities and towns have generally not had the tax
base and do not now have taxpayer support to increase taxes to fund major construction or
rehabilitation. In many cases they do not have resources for effective pavement maintenance
programs.
Real improvement in the serviceability and condition of the highway transportation
infrastructure will require an innovative and long term perspective. A large part of the
problem lies with legislation, agency philosophy, and industry. In turn a large part of the
solution will come from these same parties.
Transportation Significance
By any measure, the impact that transportation has on the Nation's economy is
significant. Table I gives the relative percent that can be attributed to transportation for
several components of the nation's economy. This includes gross national product, federal
taxes, capital outlay and civilian employment.
The estimated freight bill for transportation of products produced by the economy
are shown in Table 2. The highway component of freight transportation, obviously is the
most significant of those listed. The total government expenditures at the federal, state and
local levels for transportation facilities are given in Table 3. The highway share of these
expenditures is the largest.
A measure of the innovation that might be applied to the transportation system
would be the U.S government R&D outlays for transportation that are shown in Table 4.
The interesting statistic from this table is that the outlay for highways is about 14 percent
of the total federal R&D outlay as compared to 66 percent for air transportation. Another
interesting fact from this table is that the federal R&D outlay for transportation as
compared to total government R&D outlay is 3.3 percent. The outlay for
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