Apparently the road to perdition won’t be widened

I shed no tears if the TIME initiative doesn’t make the November ballot in Arizona. This misbegotten transportation measure, backed by Gov. Janet Napolitano and the "business leaders" somehow couldn’t competently amass enough legitimate signatures on petitions to make it through the secretary of state’s office.

The measure promised $42.6 billion in transportation "improvements" over the next 30 years, paid for by a one-cent hike in the sales tax. It’s difficult to find specifics; I could find no Web site by the supposedly "powerful" coalition backing TIME (Transportation & Infrastructure Moving AZ’s Economy). In newspaper articles, the measure promised rail service between Phoenix and Tucson, but apparently only 18 percent of the monies to be raised would have gone to rail and transit.

In other words, this would have been more roads and freeways to empower sprawl.

The "tell" about TIME came earlier this year, when Napolitano was accused of making a secret deal with the (genuinely) powerful Home Builders Association of Central Arizona, agreeing not to tax development in exchange for the association’s "support" of the measure. More sprawl, and paid for disproportionately by lower-income Arizonans.

Arizona’s Interstates are a mess — built for a state one-fifth the population that it is today. Driving from Phoenix to Flagstaff or Tucson is a trial. Meanwhile, roads are clogged in Pinal and Yavapai counties. But why is this? One reason is the state’s congressional delegation refused to get federal highway money to help build freeways (Thus, the freeway loop around Phoenix is not I-410, as you might see in almost every other city). Also, the Legislature consistently blocked efforts to build transportation projects that kept up with population growth, even as they green-lighted leapfrog development that planted huge developments far from employment centers or adequate highways.

But the biggest reason is the pattern of development. Land-use decisions were totally disconnected from transportation and infrastructure policy. Nor were outlying developers taxed for their projects that would impose huge public costs. Indeed, development never paid its way anywhere. The builders were adamantly opposed to adding the costs they were incurring on the public to the price of a new house, as taxes were passed along. This would "destroy the economy" by causing people not to move to Arizona, they said, even as they kept braying that "people will move here no matter what."

One consequence was the disastrous freeway system finally built in metro Phoenix. It was paid for by a sales tax, largely to fund freeways that would make farmland and desert viable for residential development. In other words, the working people of the region, who already lived there, paid to make land and development profitable for the rich, and to subsidize new people moving in. As part of the bargain, they lost the agriculture that not only added beauty and economic diversification, but helped keep temperatures down. The freeways destroyed views and instantly became congestion and smog generators. They also caused the older parts of the city collapse into blight, empty land and slums rather that seeing re-investment and new development.

Elsewhere, two-lane farm roads and rural interstates became choked with traffic as more development pushed into rural Arizona. Again, the costs to the public were pushed forward in time while the profits went immediately to the developers, speculators, builders, land owners and other chislers of the Real Estate Industrial Complex. As much as TIME was cloaked as a sensible initiative to backfill Arizona’s years of transportation neglect, it was continuing the Maricopa County pattern, including a hope to save Pinal County’s viability for more development and make additional sprawl more appealing into Yavapai County and the Verde Valley.

Take out the bauble of train service between Phoenix and Tucson, and the other result of TIME would be a continuation of Arizona’s 1965 transportation thinking as we enter an era of global warming, high gasoline prices and the blowback from auto congestion. Come to think of it, in 1965, Phoenix and Tucson had three trains a day linking the two cities. Now, even with America’s backward rail system, rail corridors are booming, and not just in the Northeast. Charlotte and Raleigh are adding service. Illinois has a robust network of passenger trains. The Cascades link Seattle with Oregon and British Columbia. California has a large array of trains. And this is on top of light rail. Phoenix is still stuck in traffic.

The sensible answer is to tax development, with the highest taxes for leapfrog projects. "But that will kill the state economy!" Sounds like the Real Estate Industrial Complex has done a fine job of that on its own.

Of course no change of course will happen, because the real power rests with the REIC, assisted ably by the right-wing machine in politics and a sun-numbed citizenry, many working three jobs just to get ahead and pay their sprawl taxes. In the meantime, paralysis may be good. That awful drive to the "cabin" on the Rim, which is really a subdivision like Maryvale in the pines, is a good thing. That two-lane road that makes the "master planned community" in Pinal or Buckeye less appealing is a good thing. Paralysis at least slows the rape of the state.