From the Archives: Heritage Foundation's Ronald Utt discusses commercialization of highway rest areas

Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on April 11, 2010. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site went dark on or about July 10, 2016.  I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

Heritage Foundation's Ronald Utt discusses commercialization of highway rest areas
April 11, 2010 3:01 PM MST

In 2009, the Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT) closed down about half of the rest areas along interstate highways as a cost-cutting measure. The decision was controversial, and as a candidate for governor, Bob McDonnell made reopening the rest areas one of his most emphatic promises. As governor, McDonnell followed through and the rest areas began to be opened again last month.

One of the issues raised last summer was a federal prohibition on commercial activity at interstate rest stops, which is not universal but nearly so and includes Virginia. On July 17 – just days before the rest areas were scheduled to close on July 21 -- Representative Frank Wolf (R-VA10) introduced an amendment to the transportation appropriations bill, which was killed in the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee on a vote of 26(Yea)-32(Nay).

After he spoke at a Cato Institute briefing on transportation issues on Capitol Hill on April 9, Dr. Ronald Utt answered a few questions about the history of this prohibition and the reasons that highway rest areas are closed to business activity.

Early History

The prohibition “literally goes back to the creation of the interstate highway system,” said Utt, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, “where you already had existing interstate routes, like Route 1 on the East Coast, that had a lot of commercial development around it that was dependent on the traffic.” There was a perception that “the creation of an alternative highway system right nearby would have threatened the business of those people if there were new commercial establishments started.”

In response, supporters of the interstate system tried to “neutralize opposition … from the existing commercial people” by deciding “that there would be no commercial activity on any of the rest stops. Nothing would be sold -- no gasoline, no food, no motels .... And that essentially bought them off.”

Utt pointed out that today, “most of those businesses that were protected have gone out of business a long time ago. Fast food restaurants didn’t exist back then but they tend to be the largest and most active opponents of commercialization of federal rest stops because they’re the ones who now own the land and the businesses at existing interchanges.”

Local Ownership

Asked whether local businesses could be given “dibs” on taking over the rest stops, Utt replied:

“Exactly. The right of first refusal could go to [anybody who] has something within, let’s say, 100 yards of an existing interchange. Whether it’s a gas station, a coffee shop, or a restaurant, the first round of bidding could be limited to them.”

Naming Rights

What about granting naming rights, where businesses could “sponsor” a rest stop?

Utt chuckled and said, “That’s a good question. I don’t know, given the state of the economy, how much people would pay for that. That’s obviously an idea.”

Then he continued with an illustration from a neighboring state.

“I’ve noticed at some of the North Carolina rest stops along I-95 that there is a certain amount of promotion by the people who provide free services or cut-rate services for those rest stops,” Utt said. “For example, in North Carolina I saw a brass plaque that’s displayed prominently that says ‘Landscape care and lawn care by such-and-such a company.’ So I’m assuming that they were either doing this for free for the exposure, or at a discount for the exposure.”

From the Archives: ‘Big Roads’ author Earl Swift brings interstate story to Charlottesville

Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on March 24, 2012. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site went dark on or about July 10, 2016. I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

‘Big Roads’ author Earl Swift brings interstate story to Charlottesville

By coincidence, on March 24, the same day that President Barack Obama used his weekly radio-video address to urge Congress to pass a transportation bill, pointing out that “after World War II, we connected our states with a system of highways,” author Earl Swift spoke at the 2012 Virginia Festival of the Book about his history of the U.S. interstates, The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways.

In his remarks, Swift noted that “movies do a bad job of showing what American life was like before the car.” Cities were notoriously dirty at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, and one reason people pushed for greater use of automobiles was that “they were less polluting than horses.”

Tons of manure

As an illustration, Swift pointed out that in New York City in 1900, there were “2.5 million pounds of manure deposited each day” as well as 60,000 gallons of horse urine. That amounted to 400,000 tons of horse manure each year in New York alone.

In an interview with the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner as he autographed copies of his book, Swift said that other cities were as bad or worse. Kansas City had a ratio of one horse for every 18 persons. Boston, he said, “stunk to high heaven and ‘had a rich equine flavor.’ That’s the way people described it back then.”

Before automobiles, Swift explained, “there was mud everywhere” and businessmen would show up for their meetings spattered with mud and excrement.

For that reason – and for many others – the “car has transformed society,” Swift told the audience of about 75 book lovers who showed up in the Charlottesville City Council Chambers on a rainy Saturday morning.

No mountains or rivers

Swift came to the idea of writing The Big Roads, he said, while watching a weather report on television.

The meteorologist, he recalled in an interview, “was standing in front of a map of the lower 48. As I watched, I realized that it featured no topography. It had been stripped of topography altogether. In place of mountains and rivers were the outlines of the states, a scattering of cities, and most prominently, interstate highways. The country had been reduced to a grid. I realized at the same time that that’s pretty much the way I had come to see the place, and this was a bit of revelation.”

Over the weeks that followed that morning, Swift said he had “a number of ‘mini-epiphanies’” that he came to see as related. For instance, he was able to find fresh asparagus, clementines, and strawberries in the supermarket at the same time of year, even though these fruits and vegetables have widely varied growing seasons.

“I realized that this was a relatively recent phenomenon,” he said -- a result of improved road transportation that could bring produce from farm to market quickly.

“One thing led to another,” he explained. “The effects of the roads, I guess, became more apparent to me than the roads themselves.”

Unique highway system

While other countries – even large ones like Canada, Russia, and China – have extensive road networks, Swift said, “no other region of the world has a system so damn big that required so much effort to build and that requires so much dedication to keep operational.”

While the legend is that President Dwight Eisenhower was inspired to build the interstate highway system after seeing the Autobahn in Germany during World War II, in fact the system's basic features were already in place, in terms of planning and legislation, long before Eisenhower was elected in 1952. What’s more, there was a cross-pollination of road-building techniques between the United States and Germany.

“It’s really a chicken-egg question as to which came first” with regard to the Autobahn or the interstate system, Swift explained, “because the superhighway network we have definitely was inspired by the success of the Autobahns but the Autobahns were built with the help of insights gained in tours of American engineering facilities. There’s a lot of shared parentage there.”

Swift traveled extensively around the country in the four years it took him to research and write his book. He naturally has thoughts about the best and worst stretches of interstate highways.

Good, bad, and ugly

I-77 and I-64 through Virginia and West Virginia, he said, are both “awfully pretty.”

Stretches of I-70 through Glenwood Canyon in Colorado and all through eastern Utah, he said, are “just phenomenal, while “I-80 across Utah and Nevada is beautiful in kind of a desolate, forbidding way” as is I-80 in Wyoming.

“There are lots of reasons to dislike stretches of highway,” he pointed out. I-35 between Fort Worth and Austin is “just trashy. It’s just ugly.” The Indiana Toll Road is an embarrassing eyesore.”

In addition, “pretty much all the interstates in Illinois are terribly maintained and just beat the crap out of you as you drive. The Long Island Expressway is the most harrowing three miles of road in America. Some people might like driving the Beltway but I-495 around D.C. is never pleasant. It’s a great highway but the people on it are nuts [and] it’s always crowded.”

Despite that, Swift has some grudging admiration for the Capital Beltway, one of the busiest roads in Virginia and Maryland.

“The Beltway was almost too easy to build,” he said. Building it “forced very few people out of their homes.”

One reason was foresight. “They bought it early enough,” he explained. “They bought the right-of-way way early,” about 1950. (The first stretch of the Beltway opened in 1961 and the road was completed in 1964.) As a result, “it predated the spread of D.C. into an ever-widening stain on the landscape.”

In addition to The Big Roads, the Norfolk-based Swift is author of Journey on the James: Three Weeks Through the Heart of Virginia, The Tangierman's Lament: and Other Tales of Virginia, and Where They Lay: Searching for America's Lost Soldiers. He has written for the Virginian-Pilot and other newspapers, as well as for Parade magazine, notably a 2009 feature on America’s decaying highway infrastructure.

Water Taxis and Eliminating Government's Transit Monopolies

Yesterday's Washington Post includes a front-page a Metro section story with the headline, "Water taxis in Washington could be viable, study finds."

The article begins:

A water taxi that would ferry commuters across the region’s rivers is economically viable given the area’s burgeoning population and the proliferation of jobs along the water, according to a consultant’s study.

The year-long study found that at least four of two dozen possible routes across the Potomac, Anacostia and Occoquan rivers have enough demand to support a daily water taxi service that would be operated by a public entity or as part of a public-private partnership.

Well, well, well -- it's about time.

On April 21, 1995, the Arlington Journal published an article I wrote about meeting mass-transit needs through creative, free-market solutions that included this paragraph:

■ Restore the Potomac's status as a highway. The cities of Washington and Alexandria lie where they are because the Potomac River was once a major transporter of goods and people. A water-taxi service between Old Town Alexandria and Georgetown, with stops at the Washington Marina and in Arlington, could make the Potomac once again a significant people mover.

Why did it take so long for local governments to pay a high-priced consulting firm to come to the same conclusion that I did -- for no charge -- 18 years ago?

The piece also included suggestions for permitting private jitney services and for instituting sliding-scale highway tolls based on passenger occupancy.  (Something like that latter idea has been adopted on the interstates in Northern Virginia and the Maryland suburbs.)

From the archives, here is the full text of "End the government monopoly on mass transit service":

- - -

Some local government officials are moving in the right direction as they discuss the future of Metrobus service (“N.Va. systems threaten transit giant,” April 11), but most see too wary to step toward creativity and market-based decision making.

These local government officials deserve credit for their willingness to consider privatization of Metrobus routes as a means to make the system more cost-effective. Unfortunately, it seems that to them “privatization” is still limited to a county- or city-owned bus system to replace Metro or – at best – a government-granted monopoly to a private company within a single jurisdiction.

Why not consider more and varied alternatives that, when used together, will have the ultimate effect of reducing costs, improving efficiency, increasing mass-transit usage, and alleviating pollution.

Here are some examples:

■ Legalize jitney service. Jitneys are vehicles smaller than buses, such as vans, that operate independently (like taxis) but on a predetermined route (like buses). The operators set their own fares, which they can base on distance traveled or on other factors. Different jitneys can compete for the same passengers along the same routes, or a fleet of jitneys can divide up territory. Jitneys could operate within and across jurisdictions, feeding into Metrorail or connecting Tysons Corner to Silver Spring.

Island Queen ferry docked in Bayfield, Wisconsin

■ Restore the Potomac's status as a highway. The cities of Washington and Alexandria lie where they are because the Potomac River was once a major transporter of goods and people. A water-taxi service between Old Town Alexandria and Georgetown, with stops at the Washington Marina and in Arlington, could make the Potomac once again a significant people mover.

■ Turn Interstates 66 and 395 into toll roads, with tolls based on the number of passengers. For instance, instead of the dreaded high-occupancy vehicle lanes, we could charge vehicles a toll based on a sliding scale, such as $2 for lone drivers, $1.50 for two-passenger cars, $1 for three passengers, 75 cents for four passengers, and no charge for more than four. Such a scheme would persuade some people to take Metrorail, some to take the bus, some to car pool, and some to bear the economic price of the toll, depending on their preferences.

■ End the government mass-transit monopoly. These three examples only touch the surface of creative, market-based solutions that are there for us to consider and to use. The best way to encourage more use of mass transit, however, is to make more types of mass transit available, and to give commuters and travelers more choices than they have today. Allowing private services to compete with Metro on the same routes will be a good first step.

After all, we would never think it proper to grant Giant a monopoly in Fairfax County and Safeway a monopoly in Arlington County, and not let them compete against each other – or against 7-Eleven. If consumers can pick a grocery story, why not let them pick a type of mass transit? And why not let entrepreneurs give them what they want?

Richard E. Sincere Jr. of Arlington chairs the Libertarian Party of Virginia.