OAKLAND — Years before last week’s frightening collapse of an Interstate 880 overpass guardrail and chain-link fence onto evening rush-hour commuters, the state had declared the overcrossing outdated and dangerous.
But the $105 million project to replace it and an overcrossing just to the south has been slow to materialize, representative of the estimated $57 billion worth of backlogged state highway repairs and replacements that has become a subject of partisan impasse in the state Capitol.
The 23rd Avenue overcrossing was built in 1947 and looks its age. Construction of its replacement, planned since 2009, is expected to begin next year as a contractor finishes rebuilding the 29th Avenue crossing.
With gas-tax revenues drying up as more fuel-efficient cars take over the roads in California and across the nation, the race to repair critical highway infrastructure before tragedy strikes is becoming more pressing. Two people were hospitalized in the Oct. 20 collapse.
Infrastructure renewal is a nationwide problem that raises political hackles and is inextricably linked to economic health. In Sacramento and Washington, D.C., Democrats and Republicans cannot agree on how to pay for public works.
U.S. Rep. Mark DeSaulnier, D-Concord, and others point out that highway work largely depends on gas taxes, but fuel-efficient cars use less gas and falling gas prices further crimp state and federal highway revenue.
If electric vehicles took over the highways tomorrow, maintenance costs would still grow as the gas-tax take disappeared.
In the meantime, state engineers set priorities and close dangerous roads and bridges for immediate repairs but put others on the waiting list.
Caltrans reported Friday that the 23rd Avenue bridge had been inspected in February, and though the railing was rusted, “the review by field engineers did not reveal a threat to public safety.”
So how did sections of the bridge come tumbling down? One possibility: The bridge is too low, and big trucks have struck it repeatedly, a Caltrans report noted.
“The fence had been leaning for some time,” said Ian Steplowski, who was on the freeway when falling guard rail and chain-link fencing hit the car in front of him.
“One section of it fell first and pulled the rest … down like a zipper until it crossed the entire freeway,” he said in an online post.
It made him wonder, he said later, what would have happened in an earthquake.
Gov. Jerry Brown called the Legislature into special session this year to get transportation funding on track.
He estimated last year that California’s deferred maintenance needs for its core highway infrastructure is $8 billion annually, compared with $2 billion available each year.
Significantly, that was for one department among eight in his five-year plan for $66 billion in overall deferred maintenance.
In the special session, the governor and the Democrats sought to increase fuel taxes and fees. Anti-tax Republicans preferred to redirect existing revenue, millions of it transportation money the state diverted to other uses.
“We can go a long way toward addressing California’s infrastructure problems if we use the money for what it was originally intended for — transportation projects,” state Sen. Jean Fuller, R-Bakersfield, said after a special hearing Oct. 16 in Sacramento.
Nothing happened before legislators went home Sept. 11, although the Oct. 16 hearing and another this week were scheduled.
DeSaulnier, who worked on transportation funding while in the Legislature, says redirecting existing money won’t work. It depends on an obsolete revenue model, he said, essentially taxing the gas-guzzling car.
The state’s base 18-cent-per-gallon excise tax has not changed since 1994 and is a fading factor. Adjusted for mileage and inflation, the tax was worth 9 cents last year, according to Caltrans.
It estimates that the $2.5 billion generated in the 2014-15 fiscal year will fall to $1.7 billion in 2015-16.
Federal support for state transportation also has waned.
Congress has approved only stopgap transportation funding. In July, it OK’d an $8 billion, three-month measure.
“It is long past time for Congress to end the … short-term patches and chronic underinvestment in our infrastructure,” DeSaulnier said in May, after another interim measure won approval.
The problem remains as persistent as the debate.
“Forty-one percent of our highways need some work,” Caltrans Director Malcolm Dougherty said at a transportation funding forum last week in Oakland. “If nothing is done, it gets worse and more costly.”
Jim Wunderman, president and CEO of the Bay Area Council, said the Bay Area’s economic resurgence is driving job growth, and that puts more workers onto the Bay Area’s jammed roads and transit systems.
He says the state needs the kind of action he sees in Silicon Valley business: “Respond quickly to the dynamism of the marketplace or become a thing of the past.”
“It shouldn’t take a decade to add a traffic lane,” he said.
Money remains the root of all solutions.
The state will test a mileage fee to replace the gas tax, a program DeSaulnier proposed while he was in the Legislature, but paying at the pump isn’t dead yet.
“Somebody needs to raise the gas tax,” Steve Heminger, executive director of the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, told the forum last week.
If the state won’t, he said, his agency has the authority to ask Bay Area voters to approve a regional increase.
Contact Andrew McGall at 925-945-4703. Follow him at Twitter.com/AndrewMcGall.
