Road Warriors

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The $890 million in demonstration projects works out to just $2 million per congressional district spread over five years. Even though, to paraphrase the late Senator Everett Dirksen, a million here and a million there eventually add up to real money, that is a pretty meager sum alongside the public-works projects that used to be whooped through Congress in the days before the deficit doldrums. As Republican Congressman Jim Bunning of Kentucky cracked, "Calling this a pork-barrel bill is like calling a strip of bacon a luau."

The fuss over the pork-barrel issue masks a significant turnabout in the condition of the nation's highways. In 1982, the last time Congress passed a comprehensive highway bill, the debate was dominated by scare talk of decaying roads and crumbling bridges, complete with suggestions that the nation's transportation system would soon go the way of New York City's abandoned West Side Highway. Experts bandied around figures like $3 trillion for rebuilding America's decaying infrastructure. In truth, the Interstate Highway System was in trouble. Traffic had far outstripped the projections made when the system was initially planned in the 1950s. And the drive for fuel-efficient automobiles had inadvertently eroded the gasoline-tax revenues that pay for the Highway Trust Fund.

Congress responded by raising the gasoline tax by 5 cents per gal., with 1 cent earmarked for mass transit. Given the magnitude of the problem, it seemed the equivalent of pouring asphalt into a few potholes. But by almost every statistical measure, the quality of the nation's highways has improved somewhat. That is particularly true of the Interstate system, which carries 20% of the nation's traffic on only 1% of its road mileage. According to Federal Highway Administration figures, while only 30% of the pavement on urban Interstates was in good or very good condition in 1982, that figure had risen to 35% in 1985. "The rate of deterioration has been halted," says Joseph Rhodes, special assistant to the FHA administrator. "These conditions didn't arise overnight and they won't be corrected overnight."

Building highways will never be just another federal spending program. Few activities of government affect so many Americans daily, inspire such passion and profanity as those vast expanses of pavement stretching from horizon to horizon. That is why some White House aides believe Ronald Reagan was always doomed to lose last week's veto battle with the Senate. Was it the wrong war over the wrong issue at the wrong time? Wavering legislators, who once feared crossing the President, will not soon forget the day Reagan went hat in hand to the Senate needing one Republican vote and failed to get it. But it was also the highway bill that restored the fighting spirit the President will need in the coming Donnybrooks with Congress over the budget. As a senior Reagan aide put it, "We may have lost this, but goddammit, at least we're back in the game."