Accentuating the positives and veiling the negatives with TDOT
by Glenn H. Reynolds
It's not news to anyone who lives in Knoxville that they're always working on the roads. And what's more, they work on the roads during the daytime, when traffic is worst. They don't generally work at night, when there's less traffic. I often hear people wondering why they don't do all the highway work at night, or at least nonstop. Apparently we're not alone in wondering this, because the Tennessee Department of Transportation website includes this Q & A:
Construction sites need to be worked on at night when there is little or no traffic. Other states do it. Why doesn't Tennessee? Response: TDOT encourages night-time work, if it can be done safely for the workers and the motorists. Since visibility is much less at night than daytime, hauling with slow moving vehicles is often a preferred daytime work detail. However, many paving jobs have become night-time activities.
That sounds pretty good, but scroll down a bit and you read this:
Why can't TDOT crews work 24 hours a day to finish projects like they do in California? Response: Due to budget issues, we have reduced overtime to employees. However, highway projects are let to contract and therefore, working contractors 24 hours a day would result in costs rising considerably even though a project might finish sooner. There is a balance we must strike in funding and stretching a project out longer term.
Construction workers who work at night get overtime. "Stretching a project out longer term" saves the state money. But it probably costs society as a whole a lot more money than it "saves." Sure, the state isn't paying overtime. But the value of the time lost to construction delays, as tens of thousands are trapped in traffic, almost certainly outweighs the savings to the state budget many times over. If the projects were finished sooner, we would probably save millions of person-hours in lost time. Even if you value that time at minimum wage (which is low-balling things), it adds up to an enormous amount of money.
But the cost of all that lost time doesn't show up on the Tennessee Department of Transportation's budget. It shows up in the individual time budgets of thousands (millions?) of motorists who are delayed over the months (years?) that these construction projects go on. And even those motorists don't quite recognize the impact. If the state wanted to tax them, say, two bucks every time they drove on the interstate, they'd be up in arms. But if it instead imposes a hidden "delay tax" that costs them $2 worth of time, they're less likely to notice, or complain. Not surprisingly, that's what the state does. In a way, when you sit in traffic on I-40 you're just working off-the-books for TDOT. Er, except that you're paying for the privilege.
And this is what governments in general do. In fact, the highway construction example is an old chestnut, one of the classic examples used in courses on economics of government. Worse yet, lots of highway projects may actually cost more in delay-time than they save in swifter traffic once they're complete. And that's typical, too. Rather than saving time, they're just moving it around.
It's the same with job-creation. Though government projects are often touted as "creating jobs," they're more likely to move jobs around—taking away jobs where people aren't looking, and producing jobs (often fewer jobs than were destroyed) where people are looking, and then calling it "job creation." Bringing in new sports teams is an example of this phenomenon, with economist Robert Baade noting that adding sports teams "appears to realign leisure spending rather than adding to it and is, therefore, neutral with regard to job creation." Other economists say that these projects may actually make things worse, by crowding out improvements in infrastructure or education. But they look impressive, and politicians get to take credit for them, pointing to all the ushers and hot-dog sellers on game day and ignoring how empty the place is the rest of the week, or what might have been done with the money if it had been left in people's pockets instead of taken in as taxes.
Not every project is a bust, but it's easy to make a project look successful when you hide the costs and call attention to the benefits. My musical career is a good example: when I get a royalty check, I call it money that I've "made," and conveniently ignore the hundreds of hours of work that went into it, which—if you assigned my time any value at all—would make those projects huge money losers. Huge money losers.
But that's a hobby, done with my time and money—and whatever deception goes on is self-deception. When the politicians do the same thing, they're using other people's time and money, and they're fooling more than themselves.
Are they fooling you?
Glenn Reynolds is a law professor at the University of Tennessee, and writes for InstaPundit.com, MSNBC.com, and TechCentralStation.com.
December 4, 2003 * Vol. 13, No. 49
© 2003 Metro Pulse
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