Governmental transportation policies aren’t limited to funding for capital construction and operations. Policies also involve legal and financial incentives which encourage people to choose specific transportation modes. Here is a sample of some of the policies that help produce a transportation biased toward driving cars.

Local policies

Municipal policies include zoning practices which require residential, retail, office and other land uses to be separated and spread out, making transit, walking and cycling unattractive to conduct the simplest of daily tasks. Municipalities also require businesses to provide a minimum number of parking spaces based on their peak number of visitors, such as during the holiday shopping season. This has financial implications, such as the need to spend more tax dollars on storm sewers to handle the water runoff from more impervious surfaces, such as parking areas, streets and roofs on buildings that are built horizontally rather than vertically.

State policies

State funding formulas have a measurable bias against urban roads while favoring exurban and rural highways. Counties and townships receive gas and vehicle registration tax revenues in equal shares without regard to population size, numbers of vehicles, the amount of vehicle miles traveled, or which jurisdiction has responsibility for the roadway network. Thus, rural Harrison County, with 15,000 residents, gets the same level of funding from the county share as Cuyahoga County, home to 1.4 million people. Another bias comes from the fact state highway funds are spent on interstate highways, state roads and highways only, which principally run through rural areas. This generally leaves municipalities responsible for maintaining their own roads while rural counties benefit from greater state investment.

Worsening the situation is Ohio’s Constitution, which makes it illegal to spend state gas taxes on anything other than highways. Even when transit or compact land uses are shown to be more effective in reducing highway congestion, providing greater access to job opportunities for people of all incomes, and improving air quality, new funding sources must be sought. These tend to come from local taxes, which artificially increases the cost of living in cities and urbanized counties.

While not specifically a pro-automobile policy, another state initiative encourages more driving. The state’s “enterprise zone” policy allows municipalities to grant tax incentives to businesses which create jobs in distressed areas. While the goal was intended to benefit older urban areas, it allows enterprise zones to include vacant land -- including that which exists in rural areas and wealthy suburbs. Even if a business leaves an older, poorer urban area for a newer, wealthier suburban one, state policy counts only the jobs created in the suburb.

When those jobs were located in older, more densely developed cities, employees could take the bus, train, walk or drive to work. Once those jobs are relocated to suburban, exurban or rural areas, their prescribed low densities make it impractical to walk or take transit to work. Worse, those job opportunities become inaccessible for low-income urban residents for whom the state’s enterprise zone program was intended to benefit.

Federal policies

At the federal level, gas taxes are kept artificially low, even though American motorists account for two-thirds of all oil used in the United States, and 10 percent of all oil consumed worldwide. Federal subsidies for oil exploration, production and military defense of oil transportation routes in politically unstable regions are borne by taxpayers every April 15th, rather than at the gas pump. If two-thirds of these costs were paid by motorists via gas taxes, the cost of gas would rise by more than $1 per gallon. If the social and environmental costs of our over-dependence on the automobile were included, several dollars of tax per gallon would be added.

Another factor is the issue of “donor states” versus “donee states” in which more populous states pay more gas tax money than they get back in highway and transit funding. There are micro versions of this, in which Ohio’s urbanized regions pay more gas tax money than they get back in terms of projects. For example, from 1998-2003, the region has gotten back only 83 cents in highway and transit funding per year from each dollar of gas tax paid by motorists in the Cleveland-Akron metropolitan area. In overall terms, it represents a shortfall to the region of $55 million annually, according to the Environmental Working Group report “Gas Tax Losers.”

The passage of a new federal surface transportation law in 2005 increases how much gas-tax money “donor states” like Ohio get back from the federal government from 90.5 percent to 92 percent. However, that may not necessarily guarantee that “donor regions” like the Cleveland-Akron metro area will see more favorable ratios and, thus, more funding. Ohio’s anti-urban transportation funding formula and constitutional restrictions on spending gas tax dollars complicate this.

Urban regions in the U.S. that received closer to 100 percent of the gas taxes contributed, or even exceeded 100 percent, tend to have more diversified transportation systems. For example, Portland-Salem, Ore. received 102 cents on the dollar; Minneapolis, Minn., 105 cents; Seattle-Tacoma, 116 cents; and St. Louis, 127 cents. The EWG report showed it wasn’t just the larger urbanized areas, like New York City, Chicago, San Francisco or Washington D.C. which got back at least 100 percent.

Having diversified transportation systems allowed those regions to tap federal funding sources for rail and bus transit, bike paths, and pedestrian facilities which the Cleveland-Akron area has chosen not to tap. Regions with which Northeast Ohio must compete are using those funds to rebuild their core communities with better access, provide amenities, and attract jobs and residents without adding to road congestion, energy waste, or air pollution.