Letting the Market Drive Transportation

Duvall and Gribbin soon became allies, bonded by a shared passion to inject free-market theory into transportation policy.

Gribbin, 44, grew up well connected to the Republican Party. His father was a longtime aide to Vice President Cheney and a former head of Halliburton's Washington office. The younger Gribbin worked as a lobbyist for the National Federation of Independent Business and as a national field director for the Christian Coalition under Ralph Reed. For six months in 2005, he moved his wife and seven children to Guatemala, where they performed missionary work.

A cautious man who leaves nothing on his desk at the end of the day, Gribbin hatched the DOT's controversial plan to charge airlines a fee for landing at New York's JFK and other busy airports during peak hours -- a proposal the airlines say they will fight.

"Milton Friedman said 30 years ago you should price roads for users, but you couldn't because you can't have a toll booth on every corner," Gribbin said, invoking the Nobel Prize-winning conservative economist. But now, transponders and automatic toll collection have made Friedman's prescriptions possible, Gribbin said.

The cities that won the Urban Partnership grants -- New York, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Miami and Seattle -- are represented by Democratic leaders and a key Republican. "Basically, they bought off five urban areas," said Mica, who represents Miami. "I got the smallest amount, probably because I squealed the most about what they were doing."

Mica and other lawmakers curtailed the program this year by barring it from using more than 10 percent of the department's bus money.

But communities on the losing side last year were hit hard. Without funds for new buses, Dubuque, for example, had to rely on volunteers such as Shorty Harris, who drove passengers around northeast Iowa in his 2002 Chevy Cavalier.

"I couldn't believe they could get away with this, to just take that money away," said Mark Munson, director of the Regional Transit Authority in Dubuque, which has been frequently forced to deny trips to the elderly and disabled because there are not enough buses and volunteers can't fill all the gaps.

Duvall is unapologetic, saying the traditional pork-barrel process of divvying up transportation dollars is bad policy. The proof, he said, is the fact that increased government spending on transportation has not slowed congestion.

None of the five Urban Partnership projects has opened yet, and several face local opposition. New York faces a deadline this month for approval from the state legislature and city council or it will lose the money. Duvall hopes at least one project -- on I-95 in Miami -- will be operating by summer and will demonstrate the value of his theories.

"There are 250,000 people a day sitting on I-95 in Miami," he said. "In four months, thousands of people will have faster commutes, guaranteed trip times."

Highways and Wall Street

By limiting the federal role in transportation, the Bush administration has sped the growth of a new business: private investment in roads.