A ticking clock for cities

Hard-right lawmakers are threatening to let the federal gas tax expire on Sept. 30. In any normal year, Congress would schedule a perfunctory vote, extend the life of a tax that funds highway and mass transit projects across the country, and move on. Clearly, this isn’t any normal year.

At worst, lawmakers aligned with the Tea Party could force Washington out of the transportation business entirely; more likely, they’ll use the ticking gas tax clock as a tool for extracting deep spending cuts, as they did with the debt ceiling, and the federal budget before it.

In transportation funding, Congress’s anti-tax crowd is targeting an especially sensitive section of the federal budget. It goes far deeper than a set of numbers on a spreadsheet, or an abstract debate over the relative merits of a strong federal government. Federal transportation policy shapes, in a profound way, the way Americans connect to their communities and to the economy. When the feds get it right, cities flourish. And when they get it wrong, the consequences can last for decades.

That ramp to nowhere in Charlestown, the mess in Jackson Square, and the gash running through lower Roxbury all speak to bad transportation decisions in Washington. The three are remnants of the Inner Belt and the Southwest Expressway - 1960s-era federal highway projects that were pitched as urban revitalization projects, but which were ultimately scrapped, in the face of a sustained public uprising, as wasteful and destructive.

The Southwest Expressway would have extended Interstate 95 north from Milton, through Hyde Park, Jamaica Plain, and Roxbury; there, it was supposed to connect to the Inner Belt, which was to have plowed through Roxbury to the Fenway, through the middle of Central Square in Cambridge, and over to the Somerville-Charlestown line.