Drop restrictive rules and let America build again

After the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed in Baltimore Harbor, every politician representing the area, at every level of government, promised plenty of money and the swiftest possible restoration.

They’ll probably succeed in cutting the time down to a fraction of what is typical in government construction. When the I-35 bridge in Minneapolis collapsed in 2007, the new bridge was opened in a little over a year. Likewise, in our own backyard, when part of I-95 collapsed in a fire in Northeast Philadelphia last year, traffic was restored in just 12 days.

A highway on land is a lot less complicated than a bridge over an active shipping channel, but both projects showed that things can still get built quickly and successfully in America if the political will — and the money — is there.

However, this is not the way things typically go in transportation construction. And it’s been this way for a while. The Key Bridge was already delayed and over budget when construction began in 1972. It was a further five years before it opened, the final piece in the 23-year struggle to build a Baltimore beltway.

One reason — the main reason, in my opinion — for continual delays in transportation construction is the National Environmental Protection Act of 1969 (NEPA). Despite the name, “the environment” as we usually understand that term is not the choke point here — a near-endless litigation and consultation process is.

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NEPA requires a federal review process of any change that might “significantly affect” the environment — with both “significantly affect” and “environment” being defined very broadly. Every bit of a highway or transit project or other federal action requires an environmental impact statement, with “federal” including many things you might think of as local because federal funding is involved.

The average environmental impact statement, according to a 2020 federal analysis of the problem, ran to 661 pages and took four and a half years to complete.

All of that analysis, the hearings about the analysis, and the court challenges to the analysis all have to be finished before the first shovel hits the ground. And it typically follows years of internal analysis that governments do even before proposing something to the public. The law says that “environmental impact statements shall not be encyclopedic,” but a new edition of the World Book encyclopedia would take less time and effort than the typical impact statement to complete.

This process even applies to things that aren’t really construction projects. For example: New York has been considering assessing a congestion charge on vehicles entering the most crowded parts of Manhattan. A bill to that effect passed the state legislature in April 2019. A New York Times article published that month said that “tolls are expected to start in 2021.” They didn’t. And now in 2024, they still haven’t.

That’s not because the legislature changed its mind and repealed the bill. It’s because the federal government required an environmental impact statement under NEPA, and it was only finished in June. The state of New Jersey then sued, saying the process wasn’t done correctly, and the wait continues. All this for some E-ZPass readers? It’s a ridiculous waste of time. And let’s not even get into California’s High-Speed Rail project: Authorized in 2008, after 16 years and $11 billion spent, not one passenger has ridden it, as it continues to clear bureaucratic hurdles.

Why do we do this? It’s because during the massive highway boom of the 1950s and 1960s, the system was arguably even worse. Massive projects were rammed through legislatures and planning commissions with little or no public consultation. Homes and businesses were condemned, and superhighways were built. Not coincidentally, these were typically built through poor neighborhoods, where residents lacked the political power to protect their communities from the government wrecking balls.

Where the federal government used to lumber through neighborhoods like a giant, it is now held down by a thousand strands of red tape. But unlike Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver, our government has, itself, built the restraints that immobilize it.

A government willing to limit itself is often a good thing, but we’ve limited it so much that it takes an emergency to get anything built in under a generation. NEPA shifts power from the majority who want a project built to the few residents — or even nonresidents — who want to stop all progress in its tracks. Anyone who can afford the litigation costs can delay a project for years, even decades.

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Whether you love congestion pricing or hate it, this is not the way a democratic republic should decide on policy. A lengthy environmental review process killed the Norristown High-Speed Line extension, and it will probably kill the Roosevelt Boulevard extension of the subway, should that project ever get funded. Again, love them or hate them, the fate of these projects should be decided after debates and votes in the legislature — the body of people elected to carry out the popular will — not in high-priced litigation and death by a thousand bureaucratic paper cuts.

This isn’t environmentalism, it’s sclerosis and national decline.

All the politicians around here patted themselves on the back when I-95 reopened, and the ones in Maryland and Washington, D.C., will do the same when the Key Bridge gets rebuilt in a faster-than-usual style. Then, they’ll go back to business as usual.

These emergency projects show us how efficiently things can get done in 21st-century America. We need to make that the standard, not a feel-good exception to the rule.

NEPA was an improvement over the lack of process that led to mass neighborhood destruction, but we need further improvement still — by repealing this self-defeating law and replacing it with one that lets America build again.