Politicians love to talk about “infrastructure” and “quality of life.”

The terms are general enough to avoid offending anybody, yet their usage suggests deep thinking about serious issues.

In reality, our politicians have generally been degrading both for years, sometimes by design and sometimes by neglect. The future looks little better.

Take traffic congestion, for example.


You won’t hear this from so-called greens who vote to block road construction, but traffic is arguably the top environmental problem in San Diego County, which lacks a big industrial footprint.

Cars spew vastly more air pollution when they are prevented from reaching the speeds posted on freeways and parkways. In addition, stop-and-go traffic sends tons of heavy metals from brake dust into watersheds.

Then there’s the economic damage. The average commuter in San Diego County lost 42 hours a year sitting in traffic in 2014, reckons the Texas Transportation Institute.

Put another way, we each lose an entire work week every year. Such delay cost the region an estimated $1.7 billion, a low-ball figure that includes only wasted fuel and lost time (calculated at the median hourly wage).


Harder to measure is missing a kid’s first goal; all those spikes in blood pressure; the spiritual toll from hating a stranger just because he applied his brakes.

Coping requires leaving early, because roads are congested an average 5.8 hours a day. If a trip takes 20 minutes when San Diego County’s freeways are free-flowing, you’d better allow 53 minutes if you want a 95 percent chance of arriving on time, the institute suggests.

Yet the infrastructure crisis is even more serious than it looks through the windshield. In the best case, San Diego’s transportation plans imply a mere slowdown in the rate at which congestion gets worse.

And that’s only if key politicians don’t succeed in accelerating the decline.


Last month, San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer said he would oppose a half-cent hike in the “TransNet” sales tax that would raise $18 billion in local transportation funding over 40 years — and pay for more than $200 billion worth of infrastructure by qualifying for state and federal outlays.

The proposal is far from perfect. For one thing, it would allocate a paltry 14 percent of overall funding to freeways and 42 percent on public transit, which hauled a microscopic 3.2 percent of commuters in 2013, down from 3.6 percent in 2007.

As for the rest of the money, 11 percent would go for wildlife habitat, with the balance left to cities under a formula that requires yet more transit funding, beach sand replenishment, watershed management, and paths for biking and walking.

What’s all this have to do with reducing traffic congestion? Good question.


So I asked Faulconer why he was opposed. After all, tax hikes need a two-thirds majority for passage, so the mayor is probably killing the plan this November.

“Viewed in its totality, this proposal doesn’t warrant an $18 billion tax increase,” said Matt Awbrey, the mayor’s chief spokesman, declining to elaborate.

The likeliest explanation is political. Faulconer is running for reelection. Environmentalists — who also oppose the tax hike despite its billions for transit and habitat — have well-financed, full-time political organizations, while commuters do not.

A good example of the resulting asymmetry in power came in 2011, when then-state Sen. Christine Kehoe, D-San Diego, wrote a bill to kill or grievously delay the widening of Interstate 5, one of the nation’s most congested freeways. The bill was scaled back, yet the resulting law cut a potential eight-lane expansion to four, ensuring even worse congestion by the time it’s finished in 40 years.


So how do local politicians, faced with human misery and environmental degradation from traffic, get away with designing tomorrow’s infrastructure failures?

One answer lies in an academic fallacy called “induced traffic” that, through sheer repetition, has seeped into the public consciousness. Put simply, the anti-growth lobby argues that road construction causes more congestion, because people respond to free-flowing conditions by driving more.

The theory, which is like saying oxygen causes people to breathe, fails on common sense and evidence. Developers build houses (the source of commuters) when they perceive sufficient demand and after local authorities grant permission, not because they enjoyed the drive to their vacant lots.

And San Diego County, like most of the nation, has been diverting ever-larger fractions of funding from roads to transit since the 1970s, most of it to high-cost rail systems instead of flexible buses. If only we had bigger systems, the theory went, commuters would abandon their cars.


Statistics tell a different story, of transit supply growing vastly faster than demand.

As measured by vehicle miles, transit supply in the U.S. has grown by 190 percent since 1970, while total ridership has grown by just 45 percent, a figure that masks effectively zero per-capita growth. Last year, ridership declined by 1.3 percent, despite strong job growth.

San Diego did better: Trolley ridership grew by about 1 percent in 2015, for example. Full disclosure: I’m a transit warrior who commutes 75 minutes each way on the Coaster and Trolley trains.

Still, the absolute numbers of people like me remain tiny, with the entire Trolley system carrying the equivalent of less than two freeway lanes.


Such statistics make it hard for even zealots to believe that shunning roads for transit investment can solve our transportation problems. So planning officials and the environmental lobby have instead focused on discouraging housing construction, hoping that customers will warm to living in high-density apartments near rail stops.

Here the logic actually works: Families overwhelmingly prefer to buy detached homes with yards, so such restrictions ensure fewer houses get built. Ergo, less traffic growth.

Of course, the resulting housing shortage pushes up prices and cuts job growth — hurting overall quality of life for all but the wealthy.

And even successful high-density development doesn’t cut traffic. In condo-crazy downtown San Diego, for example, just 3.8 percent of the area’s 81,000 jobs are filled by people who live downtown.


There is a lone hero in this depressing policy story: Gary Gallegos, the longtime executive director of the San Diego Association of Governments, which governs regional transportation investment.

Despite the ever-declining share of funding for roads, Gallegos has convinced politicians to support toll lanes and rapid bus service to partially compensate. His approach really paid off in 2009, when President Barack Obama’s stimulus program favored “shovel-ready” projects.

Because of the 2006 TransNet tax extension, Gallegos had major projects engineered and ready to go. San Diego County snagged billions from larger, less-nimble regions. This bureaucratic victory explains why I-805 has two new lanes under construction today, and why work on I-5 is poised to start this summer on two lanes from UTC to Highway 78 for completion in 2020.

Those high-tech toll lanes, by the way, will be critical to the success of self-driving trucks and cars. Automation, which allows tighter spacing, represent the only real chance San Diego has to actually reduce traffic growth in years to come.


On the downside, SANDAG’s ephemeral success helps those politicians focused on short-term electoral prospects.

For example, Faulconer can oppose money for infrastructure that won’t materialize for a decade, signaling to environmentalists that he’s on their side, and still count on commuters feeling reassured by construction on major freeways.

There’s just one problem. Today’s traffic misery flows from the failures of politicians in power decades ago.

A sober state report noted in 2010 that although officials have made no substantial investment in I-5 since the 1970s from Camp Pendleton to Highway 52, the population along the corridor has increased 400 percent and the number of jobs increased 1,000 percent.


Countywide growth has slowed, but not enough to relieve pressure on already inadequate infrastructure. SANDAG predicts the region will have 1.3 million more people by 2050, or 40 percent more than the 2010 census.

Here’s a fact that political consultants may eventually notice: Foreign and domestic immigration has stopped in San Diego County, with slightly more people leaving than arriving.

Indeed, demographers expect local birthrates to set the pace of future growth, displacing immigration from its traditional expansionary role. In other words, nearly all these 1.3 million newcomers by 2050 will be our children.

Meanwhile, if fresh research by J.D. Power and Fannie Mae is to be believed, the vast millennial generation is showing a preference for buying cars and detached houses, just like all the unenlightened fogeys since the early 1900s.


Yet planners and key politicians seem determined to double down on the faith-based planning of the last few decades — this hope that misery on our roads and soaring home prices will convince people to ride bikes from fifth-floor apartments to their local, artisanal jobs.

Maybe it’s time to ask the kids how it’s gone so far. I suggest a survey at the nearest park-and-ride.

dan.mcswain@sduniontribune.com (619) 293-1280 ▪ Twitter: @McSwainUT