Local leaders told a state Senate hearing this month that Pennsylvania should do everything in its power to move forward with the northern terminus of the Mon-Fayette Expressway – if federal infrastructure dollars become available.
But the big question remains WHY?
During a June 1 hearing before the Democratic Policy Committee in Harrisburg, the Post-Gazette says state Sen. Jim Brewster, D-Allegheny, who asked for the hearing, said the long-discussed final leg of the toll highway is vital to the region’s development.
“It’s important to understand we’re building for the future,” Brewster said. “This is part of that answer — that we can get from here to there.”
State funding for the final section of the highway – from Duquesne to the Parkway East at Monroeville — has dried up. Now, Brewster and others want “the feds” to pay for it.
That said, the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission expects to begin construction on another segment of the highway — the $1 billion stretch from Jefferson Hills to Duquesne — next year.
Never mind how that section is as economically dubious as the final leg, if not the entire highway.
Four years ago, shortly after the Southwestern Pennsylvania Commission decided to yet again include the expressway’s final leg in its priority projects, Jake Haulk, now president-emeritus of the Allegheny Institute, crunched the data and concluded building it would be public policy folly:
“In sum, the increasing cost of construction … has far outpaced both traffic and revenue collected (on the existing expressway),” Haulk said in June 2017 (in Policy Brief Vol. 17, No. 27).
Simply put, the project represents an exercise in failed cost-benefit analysis, the Ph.D. economist said.
The proposed northern leg’s 13-mile extension was projected to cost $2.2 billion in 2017. That price tag almost certainly has risen. And that old figure did not include yearly costs for maintenance and administration.
Proponents of building the Mon-Fayette’s final segment need to show — “with rigorous and credible analysis” — that the projected vehicle usage, toll revenue and economic impact on the community would be sufficient to warrant the massive use of tax dollars for the project, Haulk stressed.
They had not by late June 2017. They have not still as of this writing.
Nonetheless, Darrin Kelly, president of the Allegheny/Fayette Central Labor Council, insisted in the P-G that the project remains important, for both job-creation and its transportation connections.
“You can’t put a price on a project like this,” he said.
But that mindset is a recipe for another in a long line of highway public policy disasters. Nonsensical utterances and wishful thinking are not rigorous analyses – no matter the source of the disaster’s funding.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
