Question:
WASHINGTON, D.C. – A report released today by the Surface
Transportation Policy Project (STPP), Setting the Record Straight:
Transit, Fixing Roads and Bridges Offer Greatest Jobs Gains, found
that investments in road and bridge repair create 9 percent more jobs
per dollar than building new roads or bridges. In addition, for
public transportation, job creation jumps to 19 percent more than the
figure for new road and bridge projects. The full report is available
online at www.transact.org
Answer:
Translation: repair is less productive per labor hour than new
construction.
Another translation: Transit, Fixing Roads and Bridges usually don't need land
acquisition, meaning money isn't being spent on something that demands no
man-hours of labor.
The "full report" is two pages long, and doesn't provide the methodology
that was utilized to derive those figures. It mentions a "JOBMOD"
economic model that it claims was developed by FHWA and Boston
University, and claims that the model was utilized to provide the
results. However, running Internet search engines on 'jobmod fhwa'
reveal no hits on the FHWA website and only two hits on the entire
Internet (a Google search).
I'd like to see some independent verification that FHWA was indeed part
of an effort to build a model by that name. I'm not surprised that
STPP is finding some new way to make the above claims, after all those
are typical claims for them. The claim that road maintenance is
underfunded and therefore part of the road construction funding should
be shifted to maintenance, is an old claim of theirs
