Interstate funding key to development

The looming debate over a new national transportation policy makes clear that the prosperity of the interior states of the Rocky Mountain-Great Plains region is vitally linked to the great coastal cities of the Pacific region.

The 44,000-mile interstate highway system, authorized by Congress in 1956, will be 99% completed when the Interstate Highway Program ends Sept. 30, 1991. The interstate system, which makes up only 1% of the nation's highway mileage but accounts for 21% of the traffic, represents a $130 billion investment that would cost $500 billion to replace. It is one of the most spectacularly successful public works programs in U.S. history.

In 1989 alone, 19 western states, stretching from the High Plains across the Rockies to the Pacific, received more than $3.1 billion in federal highway funds to build and maintain roads. This generated more than 61,000 jobs and $8.9 billion in secondary impacts in those states.

But there are strong pressures by more than 100 public and private sector interest groups to reshape federal highway and mass-transit programs in the post-interstate era, including changes in the highway funding formula that has served the nation and the West so well. These changes could have a dramatic negative impact on western business because they would cut federal highway funds.

Here's what is at stake for the West. Since 1916, federal highway policy has emphasized the need for a national transportation system formula that included land area and population. Land area originally was included to achieve the national objective of building roads through underdeveloped and sparsely populated regions of the country, such as the West.

The West is a region where great, wide-open spaces separate the cities and towns in which most of its people live, much like an archipelago society. But new formulas now being proposed for distribution of federal highway funds would deprive many interior western states of millions of dollars for highway construction and maintenance.

This would cut federal support for primary and secondary roads at a time when parts of the West already are reeling from the consequences of broken bridges and railroad abandonments.

For all western states to participate in rapidly growing Pacific Rim markets and the rapidly integrating North American market-including Canada and Mexico - there must be a well-maintained, first-class transportation system, including airports and barge traffic, a sound interstate system and thousands of miles of good smaller roads that feed it.

Roads move much of the West's products, including those destined for West Coast ports, where the ports of Long Beach-Los Angeles have overtaken the ports of New York-New Jersey in the value of cargo and the number of containers shipped and received.

Among the many issues begging for western regional cooperation in the new decade, none is more urgent or more timely than the impending debate on national transportation policy.