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I have frequently likened the issues of road-tolling and recreation fees as well as the concepts of "congestion pricing" with recreation "differential pricing". I have claimed countless times that very purpose for the Recreation Fee Demonstration Program was to commercialize, privatize and motorize our public lands.
What I have never stated is that the purpose of Road-Tolling is also to commercialize, privatize and motorize. Perhaps I never stated that because it was so obvious. Then again, for a decade now, I've believed that the recreation fee issue was equally obvious. I've compared these issues largely to impress upon my readers the universality of the transformation that was occurring.
Pasted below is an Op-Ed recently published by two Washington Post staff writers. The headline under which this appeared read: "Letting the market drive transportation - Bush officials criticized for privatization."
Most people get the road-tolling issue and the appended article presents the road-tolling issue. The appended article also presents recreation fee issue, albeit without ever making reference to recreation . The reader simply needs to replace all references to "road-tolling" with a recreation equivalence. It's easy -- and I invite you to try it.
Here are a few quotes from this lengthy Op-Ed. Please, at least, read them and try substituting recreation equivalences. Discover how familiar this subject really is!
"They have a myopic view," said Rep. John L. Mica, R-Fla., ranking Republican on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. Pricing transportation to drive down traffic may make market sense, but it harms the public, he said. "This was a country based on some system of equality. People are paying their taxes and have representation. You can't exclude them from having a fair return."
"Everything they're doing is designed to drive things to privatization," said Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure highways and transit subcommittee. DeFazio said the nation long ago settled that roads are public goods. "They're just trying to undo 200 years of history and go back to the Boston Post Road."
"Tyler Duvall is a little pointy-headed neocon with grand ideas about the future of transportation, and they all involve tolling," DeFazio said. "He's bright, young, energetic -- just totally wrong, and has a bizarre, neocon view of transportation."
Last month, the Government Accountability Office warned that tolls on privatized roads are typically higher than if the roads remain under public control, because of the need to generate steady profits for private investors. The report said the federal government needs to better protect the public interest.
"This is all about making money," said Frank Busalacchi, the Wisconsin transportation secretary and a member of a congressionally chartered commission that last year studied transportation funding and supported raising the gas tax. "The financiers, bankers, people coming in -- the foreign dollars coming in and buying infrastructure in this country that American people [built]."
Scott
--- begin quoted ----
OPED / Letting the market drive transportation
Bush officials criticized for privatization
By Lyndsey Layton and Spencer S. Hsu •
Washington Post Staff Writers • March 23, 2008
It took a few moments for Tyler Duvall, the top policymaker at the
Department of Transportation, to digest the news from the Hill. But
when he realized what it meant, he was stunned.
Last year, Congress decided not to dictate how the department could
spend its discretionary funds. No earmarks, no strings, no arm-twisting
from lawmakers to direct money to bus systems or other mass-transit
projects in hundreds of communities nationwide.
Duvall and other top department officials were staring at nearly $1 billion. And they knew exactly how to spend it.
They used the money to seed five high-profile experiments, in New York,
San Francisco, Minneapolis, Miami and Seattle, that feature "congestion
pricing" -- tolls that increase when traffic is heavy. The idea is to
reduce traffic by discouraging some motorists from driving during peak
hours.
"It's almost sort of un-American that we should be forced to sit and be
stuck in traffic," said D.J. Gribbin, the department's general counsel
and liaison to the White House, who worked closely with Duvall on the
project.
For Gribbin, Duvall and Transportation Secretary Mary Peters, the goal
is not just to combat congestion but to upend the traditional way
transportation projects are funded in this country. They believe that
tolls paid by motorists, not tax dollars, should be used to construct
and maintain roads.
They and other political appointees have spent the latter part of
President Bush's two terms laboring behind the scenes to shrink the
federal role in road-building and public transportation. They have also
sought to turn highways into commodities that can be sold or leased to
private firms and used by motorists for a price. In Duvall and
Gribbin's view, unleashing the private sector and introducing market
forces could lead to innovation and more choices for the public, much
as the breakup of AT&T transformed telecommunications.
But their ideas and actions have alarmed transit advocates, the
trucking industry, states struggling to build rail projects and members
of Congress from both parties.
"They have a myopic view," said Rep. John L. Mica, R-Fla., ranking
Republican on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.
Pricing transportation to drive down traffic may make market sense, but
it harms the public, he said. "This was a country based on some system
of equality. People are paying their taxes and have representation. You
can't exclude them from having a fair return."
Critics such as Mica do not oppose all tolling, but they argue that the
traditional mechanism for funding roads and transit, the federal gas
tax, which has not been raised since 1993, must be increased so that
the nation's Highway Trust Fund does not run out of money in three
years. Some Democrats contend that the Bush administration wants to
starve the fund so that states will be forced to sell off roads to
private firms, charge tolls and ration the best access to those willing
to pay for a faster commute.
"Everything they're doing is designed to drive things to
privatization," said Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., chairman of the House
Transportation and Infrastructure highways and transit subcommittee.
DeFazio said the nation long ago settled that roads are public goods.
"They're just trying to undo 200 years of history and go back to the
Boston Post Road."
Even if the next president reverses its policies, the Bush
administration will leave a legacy of new toll roads across the
country, a growing number of public roads leased to private companies,
and dozens of stalled commuter rail, streetcar and subway projects --
including the $5 billion extension of Metro to Dulles International
Airport.
A new focus on tolls
Tyler Duvall was on his way to a departmental retreat in 2006 when he
hit 25 miles of traffic on Interstate 270. At the retreat, the Bush
administration officials agreed that congestion should be the focus of
their remaining time in office.
Since the 1990s, the Department of Transportation (DOT) has spent about
$10 million a year to study tolls. Inspired by the writings of
economist and Nobel laureate William Vickrey, considered the "father"
of congestion pricing, Duvall decided it was time to crank up that
work. Polling data said the public was fed up with traffic and willing
to try something new.
"We thought, let's expand and let every state try congestion pricing," he said.
When Democrats took control of Congress and stripped most earmarks from
last year's federal budget, Peters took $850 million that would have
been shipped to hundreds of municipalities and poured it into Urban
Partnerships, a pilot program awarded to five cities on the condition
that they test congestion pricing.
The focus on toll roads alarmed the transit industry, which argues that
public transportation is the best way to fight gridlock in cities.
Industry leaders say the DOT has made it increasingly difficult for
expensive rail projects to qualify for federal dollars. The number of
major new rail and bus projects on track for federal funding dropped
from 48 in 2001 to 17 in 2007, even as transit rider hit a 50-year high
last year and demand for new service is soaring.
William Millar, who heads the American Public Transportation
Association, says he set up three appointments with Duvall to try to
influence how the Urban Partnership money would be spent, but each was
cancelled. "They just see no role for transit," Millar said.
Duvall, 35, is a fourth-generation Washingtonian whose father is a
well-connected lawyer. He had no transportation experience when he was
plucked from his job handling corporate mergers and acquisitions at
Hogan & Hartson and was offered a political appointment at the DOT
in 2002. "It was a friend of a friend of a friend sort of thing," he
said.
Within four years, he was setting national policy.
Tall and lanky, Duvall is a kinetic intellectual who talks animatedly
about pricing theories and e-mails stray thoughts to colleagues in the
middle of the night. In his office, he keeps a bust of Dwight D.
Eisenhower, father of the interstate system. One recent day, he was
reading a paperback copy of Barry Goldwater's book The Conscience of a
Conservative, lent to him by Peters.
Fans say Duvall savors a good policy debate; critics call him an
ideologue who doesn't know how to compromise. All acknowledge his
influence on major DOT initiatives and statements.
'Pointy-headed neocon'
"Tyler Duvall is a little pointy-headed neocon with grand ideas about
the future of transportation, and they all involve tolling," DeFazio
said. "He's bright, young, energetic -- just totally wrong, and has a
bizarre, neocon view of transportation."
Soon after Duvall arrived at the DOT as a "schedule C" -- the
lowest-level political appointee -- Peters asked him to interview for
the job of general counsel at the Federal Highway Administration. He
lost out to another lawyer, D.J. Gribbin.
Duvall and Gribbin soon became allies, bonded by a shared passion to inject free-market theory into transportation policy.
Gribbin, 44, grew up well connected to the Republican Party. His father
was a longtime aide to Vice President Dick Cheney and a former head of
Halliburton's Washington office. The younger Gribbin worked as a
lobbyist for the National Federation of Independent Business and as a
national field director for the Christian Coalition under Ralph Reed.
For six months in 2005, he moved his wife and seven children to
Guatemala, where they performed missionary work.
A cautious man who leaves nothing on his desk at the end of the day,
Gribbin hatched the DOT's controversial plan to charge airlines a fee
for landing at New York's JFK and other busy airports during peak hours
-- a proposal the airlines say they will fight.
"Milton Friedman said 30 years ago you should price roads for users,
but you couldn't because you can't have a toll booth on every corner,"
Gribbin said, invoking the Nobel Prize-winning conservative economist.
But now, transponders and automatic toll collection have made
Friedman's prescriptions possible, Gribbin said.
The cities that won the Urban Partnership grants -- New York, San
Francisco, Minneapolis, Miami and Seattle -- are represented by
Democratic leaders and a key Republican. "Basically, they bought off
five urban areas," said Mica, who represents Miami. "I got the smallest
amount, probably because I squealed the most about what they were
doing."
Mica and other lawmakers curtailed the program this year by barring it
from using more than 10 percent of the department's bus money.
But communities on the losing side last year were hit hard. Without
funds for new buses, Dubuque, for example, had to rely on volunteers
such as Shorty Harris, who drove passengers around northeast Iowa in
his 2002 Chevy Cavalier.
"I couldn't believe they could get away with this, to just take that
money away," said Mark Munson, director of the Regional Transit
Authority in Dubuque, which has been frequently forced to deny trips to
the elderly and disabled because there are not enough buses and
volunteers can't fill all the gaps.
Duvall is unapologetic, saying the traditional pork-barrel process of
divvying up transportation dollars is bad policy. The proof, he said,
is the fact that increased government spending on transportation has
not slowed congestion.
None of the five Urban Partnership projects has opened yet, and several
face local opposition. New York faces a deadline this month for
approval from the state legislature and city council or it will lose
the money. Duvall hopes at least one project -- on I-95 in Miami --
will be operating by summer and will demonstrate the value of his
theories.
"There are 250,000 people a day sitting on I-95 in Miami," he said. "In
four months, thousands of people will have faster commutes, guaranteed
trip times."
Highways and Wall Street
By limiting the federal role in transportation, the Bush administration
has sped the growth of a new business: private investment in roads.
As they have crafted policy, Duvall, Gribbin and other Bush officials
have been working closely with private equity funds. The DOT persuaded
Congress to change the tax code to make $15 billion in tax-exempt bonds
available for private firms to build road and freight projects.
The department waived regulations to speed development of toll road
projects and wrote sample laws to help state legislatures permit the
lease or sale of their roads to private companies, with laws now
enacted in 23 states.
As a consequence, private equity funds focused on transportation
attracted an estimated $100 billion to $150 billion in 2006, according
to industry analysts.
The new opportunities for private equity have also created job
opportunities for government officials. In the past three years, nine
current and former top DOT appointees have worked for such funds or for
engineering or construction firms interested in tolling projects
subject to federal review.
Gribbin is one of those officials.
He came to the department in 2003 from Koch Industries, which has a
road-building subsidiary and is owned by a prominent donor to
Republican and libertarian causes. As general counsel at the Federal
Highway Administration, he wrote a report to Congress praising
private-public partnerships, citing a study he commissioned on the
benefits of tolling while he was at Koch.
That report also included ideas attributed to Macquarie Holdings, a
major toll-road builder based in Australia. Gribbin left the federal
government in 2005 to work at Macquarie, where he earned $265,000. He
returned to the DOT last year as general counsel.
Peters followed a similar path. She served as federal highway
administrator from 2001 to 2005, then worked as a senior vice president
at HDR, a construction firm with several tolling projects, where she
was paid a salary and bonus of $225,833 to craft its public policy. She
returned to federal government as transportation secretary in 2006.
Peters said she sees no conflicts.
"Having someone like D.J. Gribbin who has worked in the private sector
helping us decide what kinds of protections [are needed in tolling
deals] is a big advantage," she said. "I don't think the policies that
we're advocating are premised on the fact that it creates this
opportunity for people to go out and work in this industry at all.
We're doing so because we firmly believe these are in the best interest
of America." Public distrust is high
Public distrust of privatization, however, remains high. Republicans
lost control of the Indiana state legislature in 2006 partly because of
controversy over Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels' lease of a public
highway to Macquarie. Political opposition has also forced governors in
New Jersey and Pennsylvania to suspend plans to lease roads. Texas
lawmakers put a two-year freeze on the governor's strategy to privatize
a 4,000-mile network of tolled highways.
Last month, the Government Accountability Office warned that tolls on
privatized roads are typically higher than if the roads remain under
public control, because of the need to generate steady profits for
private investors. The report said the federal government needs to
better protect the public interest.
"This is all about making money," said Frank Busalacchi, the Wisconsin
transportation secretary and a member of a congressionally chartered
commission that last year studied transportation funding and supported
raising the gas tax. "The financiers, bankers, people coming in -- the
foreign dollars coming in and buying infrastructure in this country
that American people [built]."
For Macquarie, the Dulles Toll Road has enormous appeal. The company
approached Virginia in 2005 about leasing the road, pocketing motorist
fees and financing the rail extension to the airport. But Virginia
officials had other ideas. They wanted to keep the road in the hands of
a public entity -- the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority --
and let it build the rail line.
According to four former senior DOT officials, Virginia's decision
upset Duvall and then-DOT chief of staff John A. Flaherty. "They went
ballistic," one of the officials said. "[They] wanted that to be their
pet project in the nation's capital. Tyler would mention that
frequently . . . that it would be better for the project to go to
Macquarie."
Duvall said the DOT is not trying to steer Virginia toward a
public-private partnership for Dulles rail and that Flaherty was
angered because the state did not notify the department, not by the
substance of its decision. "My interest in this was solely to make sure
the taxpayer was getting the right deal," he said.
When the DOT said in January that it would not fund the rail project,
Macquarie repeated its interest to Virginia officials, as did another
private equity firm, the Carlyle Group, which created a $1.5 billion
fund to invest in U.S. infrastructure and has hired Flaherty to head it.
A final decision on the Dulles extension is on hold. But Duvall and his
colleagues have ignited a national argument -- the first real debate
about how to fund transportation in 50 years.
"This is as big as it gets in terms of policy changes in America,"
Duvall said. "It's clear that we've ruffled feathers -- right, left and
center -- in talking about new approaches. That said, I think the
public is really dying for new ways to do things. . . . The genie is
somewhat out of the bottle."
The writers are with The Washington Post.
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- Privatization 
