This past week, I was on vacation, first at Martha’s Vineyard and then in Mashpee on Cape Cod.  I have an I-Phone, which means that I have ATT cellular phone service, as was the case with my wife, my sister-in-law and brother-in-law, whom we visited on Martha’s Vineyard, and many of their other visitors.  Additionally, I rented a home that had all cordless phones.  The owners, whom we met Saturday morning, July 10, before leaving had Sprint cellular phones.

The telephone and Internet service were so bad for the eight days we were away that we were effectively cut off from communicating with others except for very brief periods when we could find a signal at a handful of locations.  Moreover, when there were power outages because of weather and horrific heat, we also were unable to use the landline phones in the rented house or the wired Internet service the owners had provided us.

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I am continually amazed by how experts who make excuses for why certain problems have remain unsolved overlook simpler and less expensive solutions to these problems.  For example, a whole population of advocates have pointed out that low-income people living in inner cities, particularly those lacking access to an automobile, are trapped in what are now called “food deserts,” that is, areas in which people lack access to affordable healthy food. Very often, the food deserts have abundant access to less-healthy junk foods, cigarettes, alcohol, and, of course, illegal drugs.

The usual solutions are to put supermarkets in the inner city, or to have farmers markets in the inner city or urban gardens in abandoned lots.  While all of these solutions are excellent long-term answers, all have problems or limitations.

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As I have thought about how to change human behavior to get people to do healthier things, I remember the 1984 movie The Karate Kid. In that movie, the lead character, Daniel LaRusso, played by Ralph Macchio, finds a master teacher, Mr. Miyagi, played by Pat Morita.  He believes that he is going to receive conventional instruction on how to be a karate black belt.  Instead, he gets assigned one chore after another, such as painting fences and waxing cars.  It is only after he is doing these chores for a while that he realizes that each task is also serving to strengthen him for karate.  He develops his capabilities while doing something else.

I believe that the only way we will change societal behaviors and get people to do things which make them healthier is to make healthy activity unconscious and fun.  For example, on the web site Thefuntheory.com, there is a video which shows the building, installation, and use of a stairway adjacent to an escalator in what appears to be a Swedish train station.  Because each step in the stairway looks like a big piano key and each one sounds a note as someone steps on it, the result is that stairway usage increases by 66%.

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Bob Herbert published an Op-Ed piece in the Saturday, July 11 New York Times entitled “The Human Equation,” in which he takes the Obama administration to task for not being more aggressive in addressing the unemployment crisis in this country.  He says:

“I’d like to see the president go on television and, in a dramatic demonstration of real leadership, announce a plan geared toward increasing employment that is both big and visionary – something on the scale of the Manhattan Project, or the interstate highway program, or the Apollo spaceflight initiative.”

He goes to propose a “Rebuild America” campaign to put people to work rebuilding infrastructure, including roads, schools, electric power grids, and mass transportation. 

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I welcome the opportunity to present testimony on transportation finance and funding issues.  Although I have served on this Board, and am chairing the Governor’s Reform Commission on the Reform of the Connecticut Department of Transportation, and am the Executive Chairman of Pitney Bowes, I am not speaking today on behalf of the Reform Commission or Pitney Bowes.

Before I provide my views and financing and funding strategies, I want to make several preliminary observations: (more…)

As a person who has been involved in providing advocacy and advisory services as a volunteer for over two decades, I find that public and political decision making relative to transportation shows our elected officials and the public in their least flattering light.

Clearly, we have a crisis in terms of traffic congestion, overburdened existing transportation infrastructure, too many bridges that are structurally deficient and functionally obsolete, and too many preventable safety-related problems.  In the July 28, 2008, USA Today, a federal transportation official was quoted as saying that we need an additional $225 billion in transportation spending to address this crisis.  Moreover, in the July 29 New York Times, an articled reported that the Federal Highway Trust Fund, the main source of federal dollars for road and bridge projects is in such dire financial straits that money may need to be borrowed from a federal mass transit fund. (more…)

On Monday, April 7, I was in New York City, and the subject of Mayor Bloomberg’s congestion pricing became part of several conversations. The depth of the discussion was clearly driven by the outcome of the plan that failed to gain popularity amongst the democrats who ultimately refused to put the bill to a vote on the floor of the state assembly, as highlighted in an article published by the New York Times. I believe that any discussion about infrastructure finance usually is explicitly more complex than publicized with regards to whether or not the public versus the users should be taxed for infrastructure-related capital projects. However, just below the surface of any discussion about raising taxes, fees, tolls, or implementing congestion pricing is a lack of trust about whether the money raised by the government will be spent for infrastructure improvement or absorbed into general revenues. (more…)

People who should know better, such as sophisticated investors, members of the media, or experts, are always surprised when a successful firm, or for that matter, a successful industry such as financial services, experiences a rapid and severe decline. I am not surprised, because virtually every kind of success contains within it the seeds of future failure. There are four reasons for this.

First, successful companies that achieve a dominant position in a market are most vulnerable to disruptive technologies precisely because they have the greatest stake in maintaining the business model that made them successful. Clayton Christiensen eloquently and cogently discussed this in his landmark book The Innovator’s Dilemma. Thus, even legitimate success can become a trap that prevents a firm from adapting to a threat. (more…)

One of my commitments to readers of this blog is to “see a different game.”  At times, that involves linking seemingly unrelated events and experiences.

Last week, we all watched the tragedy of the Minnesota bridge collapse unfold.  Unfortunately, although there will be a study that will detail the technical reasons the collapse occurred, a study that will be completed months or even more than a year from now, the fundamental reason underlying the collapse is that all accountable levels of government paid insufficient attention to preventive maintenance.

By the way, I reject the notion advanced by some political partisans that, if we were not spending so much in Iraq, money would be available for bridge repair and maintenance.  Neglect of preventive maintenance of our infrastructure has been going on for decades, and it long predated the Iraq war.  Stephen Flynn of the Council on Foreign Relations wrote a book called On the Edge of Disaster which detailed our long-standing neglect of vital infrastructure of all kinds. 

Why do we allow infrastructure neglect to happen?  Our experience here in Connecticut with the Mianus River bridge collapse along I-95 in 1983 tells the story.  Many government officials have defined success in governing by highly visible projects and accomplishments in which there is a great photo-op.  Thus, it is far more tempting to break ground on a new highway or bridge, or to celebrate the purchase of a new rail car or bus than to do the boring, low-visibility, but absolutely essential work required to repair and maintenance existing assets.  Not surprisingly, with this mindset, preventive maintenance is given a far lower priority than increasing capacity by new building activity.

In a seemingly unrelated story that appeared in the New York Post the French actress and environmental activist Julie Delpy was appropriately concerned about a truck idling outside a restaurant at which she was having a meal.  As the story goes, the driver explained that he had to keep the engine running because he was carrying perishable meats that required continuous refrigeration.

The question should have been: why was he there, rather than along a highway which had generators to which his truck could have been hooked up?  The answer again is that governments under-invest in amenities for truckers, such as rest stops which they need to make sure that they are not driving while fatigued, and generators that they can use to keep power flowing to their storage cabins, so they do not have to keep engines running.  Like bridge maintenance, the decision to spend money on truck stops is not the kind of event that gets politicians media coverage because it lacks the elements that get media people interested.  Additionally, few people want truck stops or weigh stations near them.

As a result, truckers end up eating or resting in more crowded residential and commercial areas off the major highways with their engines idling as they are eating or resting.

Likewise, one of the best techniques for reducing traffic congestion is to promote demand reduction strategies, such as increased use of mass transit, car pooling, and van pooling. In our area, rail station parking is a major constraint on rail usage.  In 1985, I got my start in volunteer work trying to get funding for rail station parking expansion, but there are other ways to expand rail station access, including the provision of bicycle storage areas, like Amsterdam does, encouraging smaller vehicle usage to increase available parking capacity, and building satellite parking lots at which rail commuters can park.  Unfortunately, none of these techniques create photo-ops.

Beyond the lack of media visibility many of these transportation programs entail, they also tend to cost money in the current year and hit operating budgets.  Big capital projects, like highway construction, can be financed by bonds and their cost is deferred.  The repayments on the bonds hit current-year budgets, but, very often, these have a smaller current-year impact than a much lower actual expenditure on maintenance or on upgrading a truck stop, or on a program to subsidize mass transit usage increases. 

Because of poorly-conceived balanced budget requirements, constitutional provisions and statutes, many politicians avoid spending money to avoid current-year hits.  They starve transportation departments of the staffing needed for maintenance projects.  They defer current-year maintenance expenses.  They also spend less money on smaller, but very important, transportation enhancement initiatives because they do not produce the political and media “bang for the buck” that larger projects do. 

Strong government leadership would organize stakeholders, define measurable goals for how to spend public money, make the achievement of the metrics the media event, and trust in the intelligence of the voters.  They would also balance the need for current-year budget discipline with investment in the future.  We also need to demand that governments do more life-cycle costing and explain to voters what it should cost to maintain infrastructure assets.  We do not demand enough disciplined thinking from government officials, and, therefore, we get short-term, high-media-intensity actions that do not constitute good government.

If the bridge collapse has any positive consequence, it will be to refocus governments on the need to do the boring, but necessary, current-year expenditures that will make our public infrastructure better and safer.