Inquirer Editorial: Must a bridge fall down?

If nothing else, motorists and mass transit users across Pennsylvania are learning a great deal about patience from Gov. Corbett.

While setting out his latest budget proposal last week, the governor deferred yet again on mapping out his strategy to repair the state's crumbling highways and prevent its 5,000 structurally deficient bridges from falling down.

Corbett even trimmed transportation funding by about 9 percent, slashing several hundred million dollars from the $6.43 billion being spent this year.

But for the fact that the governor said it's "critical that we address our transportation issues," it looked like he might be headed the wrong way down the road.

Without question, it's time for Corbett and Republican state legislative leaders to start their engines, and map out a route to deal with a funding crisis that's only gotten worse in the year that Corbett's been in office.

The crisis stems from years of deferred maintenance, as well as the collapse of a 2007 highway and transit funding plan that called for tolling Interstate 80. The tolls never went up. As a result, road and bridge work has been deferred and such critical transit projects as the overhaul of the Philadelphia City Hall subway station are on indefinite hold.

A task-force study pegged the state's annual funding need at $3.5 billion to repair roads and bridges across the state. SEPTA's capital needs dictate that the transit agency should be spending twice what it receives each year from Harrisburg.

It's certainly the governor's prerogative to carve out transportation from the budget process, as he explained on Tuesday. As long as that's followed by decisive action, and soon, it won't really matter - provided that the end result is a long-term solution for rebuilding the state's infrastructure.

The puzzling aspect of the governor's approach, though, is that he has had in hand for months a perfectly workable strategy to boost transportation funding.

A panel appointed by Corbett offered a plan last summer to raise $2.5 billion for highways, bridges, and mass transit through hikes in vehicle and license fees, and a bump in the state's wholesale gasoline tax.

There was no way that Corbett's panel would recommend anything resembling a general tax increase, given the governor's no-new-taxes pledge. But an even better strategy would be to add a few pennies on the gasoline tax paid at the pump, with the cost being shared fairly by all motorists. They would hardly notice it.

For now, motorists have the assurance from PennDot that the state is "not going to let a bridge fall down or be unsafe." But practicing triage with such critical public-safety projects hardly seems like a workable approach in the long run.

Indeed, the fact that Pennsylvania has more structurally deficient bridges than any other state demonstrates the urgency.

In his budget message, the governor appealed to state lawmakers for "input, assistance, and support" on a transportation plan. It's Corbett's leadership, though, that will play the greatest role in determining how much longer the state's motorists and transit users have to be patient.