Bridges and federal funding

This comes from an e-mail sent this afternoon by the Reason Foundation:

Reason Foundation's Robert Poole says in the aftermath of the Minneapolis bridge collapse "the first thing we should be looking deeply into is how we spend the highway money we have. If the current system is seriously flawed, it makes no sense to simply pour more money into it, unreformed. I fault the current federal highway funding system on two key points. The first is its long tradition of, and recent major uptrend in, allocating money to congress-members’ pet projects--rather than to projects that yield the most bang for the buck in addressing real transportation needs. A system that spends lavishly to build bridges to nowhere, while over 75,000 bridges are in danger of collapse and another 79,000 can’t handle today’s demand, is a system that cries out for fundamental change. The other basic problem is that the federal funding system, by design, shifts resources from populous, fast-growing states to low-population, low/no-growth states. You can understand why this was done originally: to make sure that Interstate links got built through rural states where there wasn’t enough traffic to generate enough fuel-tax revenue to cover the cost. But that was then, and this is now. Today we have massive needs in specific locations: to expand urban expressways to alleviate congestion and to expand the capacity of key Interstate routes to keep commerce flowing. Yet the federal funding mechanism still takes funds from the states where these needs are greatest and sends them to places like Alaska and North Dakota. We couldn’t have designed a more perverse approach to solving our highway investment problem if we tried."

Political clout. It's why Cabell County has about three miles of rural four-lane road (not counting Interstate 64), and that is the Merritts Creek Connector, which opened, what, three years ago? And it's why there's a fancy highway being built in Logan County between Logan (population 1,537) and Man (population 712). That road came about after high school kids were killed on a bad spot on the old road, but still, it's far more elaborate than necessary. Has anyone here seen the bridge built over downtown Man?

For years, Cabell County's elected representatives at the state and federal level have funneled lots of earmarks to Marshall University. That's probably why we don't have better roads and bridges than we do. You can put more politicians' names on campus buildings than you can on one road or one bridge, and you get more groundbreaking and ribboncutting photo ops.

Cabell County has slipped from being the second most populous county in West Virginia to third. Any connection?