‘California needs its high spending to translate into better system quality’

Highways

Continued from Page A1 condition (50th), and maintenance disbursements (44th), contributing to its overall poor performance.

Baruch Feigenbaum, the lead author of the Annual Highway Report and senior managing director of transportation policy at Reason Foundation, said California needs to make significant changes if it wants to have a competent highway system.

“To improve in the report’s overall rankings, California needs its high spending to translate into better system quality,” Mr. Feigenbaum said in the report. “For example, the state is in the bottom 20 in all four of the spending categories yet is also in the bottom 10 in all four of the pavement categories. It also ranks in the bottom 15 in two of the three fatality categories. Finally, the state also needs to find a way to decrease its traffic congestion somewhat.

“While it may be challenging for California to reduce its spending, it needs to improve its pavement quality, fatality rates, and urbanized area congestion,” he added. “The state has a lot of work to do. But if it is able to improve system performance, it could move up significantly in the rankings.” Hawaii (48th), New York (49th), and Alaska (50th) were the only three states to fare worse than California in the rankings.

The top-performing states were all in the South: Virginia (first), North Carolina (second), Tennessee (third) and Georgia (fourth).