Transportation Funding: The Time is Now
By Roger Dickinson
When you’ve had a career in public policy as long and as varied as mine, certain issues rise above others in their significance. Long before I was elected to serve on the Sacramento County Board of Supervisors, safe, effective, and environmentally responsible transportation was one of those issues. Now, in 2017, we again have crucial policy decisions to make to ensure something as simple and basic, yet vitally central to our economy and quality of life, as fixing potholes.
Let’s be honest. In many places across California, we depend on a transportation system that is decades old. Streets and roads, transit buses and trains, bridges and highways, are 50 or more years old. Over time, we’ve invested far too little in maintaining our system. Deterioration and decay have reached epic dimensions in too many places. Each one of us knows where there are gaping potholes we steer around or hope our train or bus won’t break down on the way home.
Californians are paying an average of more than $750 a year in additional car maintenance because the roads are in such bad shape. Worse still, as the effects of this winter’s storms have shown us, by not spending enough to maintain our transportation system, we have experienced dramatic disruptions in our network.