TOTAL TRANSPORTATION GIBBERISH: WHY BOTHER TO MAKE A CASE WHEN YOU CAN SIMPLY ASSUME ONE?

Five years ago, the state of Missouri implemented a major program for highway and bridge improvements called the 15-year plan. It was incompetently drafted. its authors failed even to account for the effects of inflation. Last year, when Gov. Mel Carnahan created a study panel called the Total Transportation Commission, many assumed the body's main unstated mission would be to create political cover for a fresh start.

It was not to be. Carnahan has since voiced support for the 15-year plan, and the panel based its work largely on existing analysis and planing. There was no need to "reinvent the wheel," as its recent report put it. As for the specifics of the 15-year plan, it's difficult to tell what stance the commission has taken.

The panel's primary contribution seems to be what it calls a "statewide transportation framework," which would designate important corridors where major investments would be targeted. But in other respects, the document simply asserts "needs" while providing little supporting evidence -- beyond reference to previously developed plans -- for the huge expenditures it recommends. Its main suggested source of revenue is a 1 percent increase in the state sales tax, which would produce $575 million in the initial years of the levy. Final approval would be up to Missouri voters.

No such approval should occur, based on the fuzzy thinking reflected by the commission's final summation.

On the matter of highway spending, the commission reasoned as follows. The 15-year plan, it said, appropriately identified "priority corridors," but some of the specific "project concepts" may no longer be warranted. On the other hand, some "project concepts" in high-growth areas may not provide enough service capacity. This makes it tough to guess about the future, so the panel's consultants used what they called a "generalized, macroscopic methodology."

Got that? In any case, the macroscopic methodology coughed up a projected "resource gap" of nearly $14 billion. But that's only for highways. According to the study, all the transportation modes -- aviation, transit, railroads, ports -- face "resource gaps." If only the state will raise the sales tax, and revoke the scheduled 2007 sunset on six cents of the fuel tax, and do some other things to raise money, then these gaps will disappear and we will reach the promised land of transportation efficiency.

One can only wonder what the General Assembly will make of all this. Consider the section of the report called "vision statement." It features a little drawing of a temple, with the foundation labeled ACTION PLAN, and pillars marked FEDERAL/STATE, USERS, PRIVATE, REGIONAL/LOCAL. The pillars are supporting STRATEGIES and VISION. Vision, the report says, is, "The dream. The vision is what the citizens of Missouri want their transportation system to be." What is meant by strategies? "The long-term means to reach the vision." A couple of pages of this and we're ready for bearded figures in long robes. "Quality of life entails many aspects," says the report. Really?

The document is full of this gobbledygook. "Transportation infrastructure," it intones, "should be preserved or upgraded where it makes economic sense or as warranted by safety, environmental or historic considerations." So -- we should have safety upgrades that don't make economic sense?

The usual thing is to make a case and back it up: Our roads are falling apart. We're spending more, but it can't keep pace with the rate of deterioration, deterioration being defines as follows ... Or: Our ports are a disgrace compared with others states in the inland river network. Here's why. Or: Mobs of suburban transit riders are attacking public buses, outraged at the lack of seating space. They are demanding more service.

The commission's work; to put it mildly, falls well short of providing a basis for a half-billion-dollar increase in taxes, not to mention a departure from the user-fee concept. In transportation, improvements are usually financed by payments from users. Money from fuel taxes, for example, is the main source of support for highways. Even though the concept is not always followed to the letter, it provides a standard against which alternatives should be judged. Instead of making a case for its "vision," the commission simply assumed the effort was unnecessary.

-- The Kansas City Star