Are we ready to retire the old bugaboo that any American mayor better think twice before visiting a foreign city — that the press back home will pillory him or her for “junketeering”?

Just possibly. “Gotcha” stories about foreign travels are still feared by mayors. But they’re dangerous anachronisms. Our cities’ economies and wellbeing actually require inventive foreign connections. Trade opportunities and enriching local economies still top the list. But new considerations are flooding in — for example the well-advertised global competition for the footloose young professionals, looking for “live” local scenes and cultural diversity.

The hands-down American regional leader on learning from abroad has been Seattle with its array of highly export-oriented firms. For 17 years Seattle has sent sizable delegations (70 or more) of business, political and civic leaders to see first-hand how a major foreign city and region really “clicks.” I’ve personally accompanied three of those visits — to Sydney, Hong Kong and Berlin — and discovered they’re significant eye-openers. Recently Seattle delegations have visited such cities as Fukuoka and Abu Dhabi — hardly our grandparents’ world city list.

In contrast to yesteryear’s idea that we Americans “know it all” and don’t need foreign input, there’s growing awareness — appreciated by boardrooms and city halls, growing more slowly in popular awareness, that today’s global standard for successful leadership is “go look.”

Last year my colleague Tim Campbell, board chair of the Urban Age Institute, conducted a survey of 16 high-income world cities. Every one of them had sent out high-level delegations to metropolises in other countries. All the cities were engaged in at least nine visits a year, with some making as many as 30.

A top example — Chicago. In a special blue ribbon report, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs ranked global engagement, along with continued infrastructure improvement and building human capital, as keys to securing and keeping position among the top ranks of competitive towns worldwide.

The report touted Chicago’s success in global business services, corporate headquarters, worldwide transportation links, attracting the “creative class,” and strong public-private partnerships. But it said the city and region had to keep hustling on such problem areas as public schools, traffic congestion, and the region’s fragmented governance (at least 1,200 separate units with taxing power). Reform moves were urged in all those areas — plus the emerging issue of climate change, in which outside experts rate Chicago’s programs among the best in the world.

The panel also looked forward by calling for a Mayor’s Office of International Affairs to receive visiting delegations and to set priorities for overseas travel by the mayor and other officials. It also urged a distinct budget focused precisely on foreign travel by the mayor and other city officials.
Atlanta is another city gung-ho for international connections — a tradition begun by Andrew Young when he was mayor (1981-89). Returning last year from a trip to Chile for the Americas Competitiveness Forum — an event hosted frequently by Atlanta itself — Mayor Shirley Franklin boasted of her city’s international outreach efforts:

“We’ve established a perfect example of partnership that other cities, even other countries, want to emulate.” Franklin asserted that Atlanta has become “an important gateway for the America’s, and provides a perfect entry point for companies from Europe and Asia to enter the United States.”

But again, success means facing up to serious challenges– among them, in Franklin’s words, “foreign language instruction, improving multi-cultural awareness and diversity, and increasing our focus on math and science.”

An unsurprising set of most globally connected cities — among them New York, London, Paris, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Singapore and Chicago — emerged in a “Global Cities Index” developed by the journal Foreign Affairs, the consulting firm A.T. Kearney and the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.

But you don’t need to be “mega” in size to benefit substantially from foreign contacts, Campbell notes in a new report for the German Marshall Fund of the U.S. He cites Barcelona, Charlotte, Portland and Turin as examples of cities that have used foreign travels to gather learning and ideas to help them register major gains over the past generation.

Campbell notes Barcelona’s post-Franco flowering including the 1992 Summer Olympics, Portland’s urban growth boundary and building a street-friendly, transit-oriented setting, Charlotte’s banking advances, and Turin’s strategic planning exercises and economic advances. That doesn’t mean anything’s guaranteed: witness Charlotte’s current crisis of banking shrinkage including the disappearance of Wachovia, one of its top anchors.

But a city that’s “learned to learn” in this global age is far better positioned to recoup, to adapt and move forward. The media and the general public need to take note: face-to-face learning by a city’s leaders isn’t some luxury; rather it’s a competitive imperative.

Note to readers — an excellent companion commentary, by Bill Barnes of the National League of Cities, may be found at the NLC website. The article has a mega-view of U.S. competitiveness in these times, and also pays appropriate credit to our Citistates Group colleague, Bill Stafford, for his years of foresight articulating the need for American urban regions to position themselves for the challenges of the new global economy.

For reprints of Neal Peirce’s column, please contact Washington Post Permissions, c/o PARS International Corp., WPPermissions@parsintl.com, fax 212-221-9195. For newspaper syndication sales, Washington Post Writers Group, 202-334-5375, wpwgsales@washpost.com.

Here’s the good news: The economy may be turning the corner thanks to a heavy dose of government stimulus. And since March stock and bond portfolios have rebounded and at least house prices have bottomed after a three year freefall.

But lots of problems remain — not just slowness of job recovery. Just check the corner I watch for a living: commercial property. This sector continues to sink, buried in hundreds of billions of dollars in bad loans to overleveraged owners, who paid too much during a frenzied 2004-2008 transaction binge. Representative of these toxic assets, half-built condo projects, see-through floors in office buildings, and papered-over mall store fronts stand on view from coast to coast.

Commercial real estate usually lags post-recession upturns. But continuing declines in office, shopping center, hotel, apartment and warehouse markets strain the nation’s still-fragile banking sector and threaten to temper prospects for sustained economic recovery.

Out of mutual self-preservation, property owners and their lenders obfuscate the extent of losses in a dance of mutual convenience called “extend and pretend.” Banks don’t foreclose on defaulting borrowers so the financial institutions can avoid booking losses, which could spook resuscitating credit markets. Government regulators encourage this kabuki theater and pump money into banks helping them build up loss reserves so they can eventually take write downs and reconcile balance sheets. Everyone has been hoping that the economy can recover quickly enough to bridge some of the declines. But the gloomy jobs picture and burdensome household debt (all those mortgage, credit card, car, and student loans) combine to hobble demand for office, retail, and apartment space as well as hotel rooms.

So “extend and pretend” will likely turn into a bridge to nowhere — at some point this year commercial properties will inevitably crash land, after losing on average 40 percent to 50 percent in value. Premium locations in the nation’s important gateway cities will fare better — investors already circle properties in New York, San Francisco, and Washington, looking for bargains. That may well keep a floor on prices in such cities — but not in secondary and tertiary markets not directly linked to global pathways. Office rents in many cities have retreated to 1980s face rates as occupancies continue to decline. Apartments and industrial properties are registering record vacancies and rent erosion.

Finally facing reality, tapped out owners begin to turn back the keys to lenders — they don’t want to maintain debt service payments in projects without hope of generating expected revenues or recouping lost value. That’s what happened to the Peter Cooper Stuyvesant Town complex in Manhattan late last month. Bought at market highs for $5.4 billion in 2006, the apartments may be worth about $1.8 billion today. Savvy investment pros like Tishman Speyer, Black Rock, and their pension fund clients take hundreds of millions of dollars in losses on their equity investments, but non-recourse loans pin most of the write downs on lenders (including Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) and an array of bond holders, who could land in extended and messy litigation scraps over who has rights to what remains.

Out of necessity, more banks will start to drop the foreclosure hammer, taking control of troubled assets and pushing out owners who can’t or won’t maintain properties. Each such action risks permanent diminution in value. More regional banks will fail under the weight of bad real estate debt (15 so far in 2010 after 130 last year) and the FDIC will take over, then foreclose and try to sell property assets. As lenders start to recognize losses, buyers and stressed owners will gain greater confidence about pricing levels, helping revive moribund transaction markets. But few investor players expect any chance for a robust comeback unless the economy starts to generate large numbers of jobs.

Developers, meanwhile, will be dead in the water for several years, tamping down demand for construction jobs and materials — commercial building pipelines across all property types register their lowest volumes on record. Most recent vintage projects, especially condominiums and hotels, head directly into default — tenants continue to economize and expect generational low rent terms not the record highs anticipated by builder pro formas at ground breakings.

All these setbacks delay recovery in the financial sector and the overall economy — banks must reserve for losses instead of lending to businesses to help stimulate hiring. State and local governments suffer declines in tax revenues from depreciating property values and lower sales volumes. Beyond lost construction jobs, the real estate sector collapse also vaporizes tens of thousands of high-paying “middlemen” professionals — lawyers, brokers, investment managers, appraisers, mortgage bankers, and analysts who had gorged in the fee fest from frenzied property buying, financing and flipping. The vanishing value mirage dissipates an important industry and destroys paper wealth on which credit markets staked enormous investment bets.

Any good news here? Yes. From all this carnage, expect cash buyers to make opportunistic purchases and eventually reap outsized profits. But how many cash buyers are left at all?

Swimming in red ink, deficits rolling in as far as the eye can see, what are America’s state governments to do?

The “realists,” notes government reform expert Ted Kolderie, “tell us the only options are to cut and to tax.” Their clear message, he suggests: “With more we can do more; with less we have to do less. We don’t do ‘different.’”

But they’re bitter consequences, especially in a recession. Budget cuts reduce vital services. Increased taxes just take money out of peoples’ pockets, perversely making economic recovery all the tougher.

Raymond Scheppach, executive director of the National Governors Association, hears lots about the monstrous budget dilemmas the 50 state governors face. The time’s at hand, he believes to “to look at new and different governance models for the delivery of services.”

I asked him for examples and he didn’t hesitate.

A top idea: Curb our states’ “endless incarceration” practices — failed logic in a nation that already imprisons more people than any other on the planet. At a January meeting, Scheppach relates, one governor proclaimed: “I’m not going to build any more prisons from now on. We have to find a different way.”

Ask criminal justice specialists, and big majorities cite reasonable solutions running from residential programs to electronic monitoring, drug decriminalization to community service.
Next on Scheppach’s list: higher education. “States have to stop putting money into new buildings and campuses. We need to move to a high degree of undergraduate education online.”

A top example: Western Governors University, an online institution created by 11 Western governors 13 years ago and administered from Salt Lake City. It now has 17,000 students from 50 states and is the nation’s largest supplier of urban math and science teachers.

Says David Osborne, coauthor of “Reinventing Government” and “The Price of Government in an Age of Permanent Fiscal Crisis”: “We should quit paying for higher education except for research, and give the money to the students, letting them choose the universities that meet their needs.”

As for public schools, Osborne would transform local school boards into “chartering boards” that would contract with independent groups, like charter schools, to run schools, regularly renewing or discontinuing contracts based on their performance in educating children. Teacher unions are adamantly opposed. But cities such as Washington, D.C., Milwaukee and Houston, aiming for better student achievement for public dollars invested, are moving toward the new model.

But the biggest fiscal savings, says Osborne, can be won on health care. Medical bills are already 35 to 40 percent of states’ budgets and rising rapidly. Yet studies by experts at Dartmouth College show the more doctors and hospital beds per capita in a region, the higher the cost and, amazingly, often lower average health outcomes.

So what should states do? Decree a shift, says Osborne, from fee-per-service to a competitively determined total flat fees for a given procedure — a knee replacement for example. Typical expense-compounding billing for each separate step, from diagnosis to X-ray to anaesthesia to recovery care, would be ruled out. Likewise, primary care physicians would get flat fees for caring for a person of any given age for a year — again discouraging unnecessary procedures. There would be coordinated statewide electronic record keeping and a new system of health courts set up to contain malpractice costs.

Longer-term, Osborne adds, states need to save health dollars by curbing the obesity epidemic — “Americans eating themselves to death.” Fiscal sanity demands curbing highly expensive long-term care for diabetes and heart conditions. How? Tax junk food. Champion exercise and sound diets. And then, with increasingly older populations consuming some 25 percent of health care dollars in their last year of life, institute more end-of-life care — avoiding, for example, heart bypasses for weakened 89-year-olds.
So what about the hundreds of billions of dollars that state governments owe in unfunded pension obligations and retiree health care? Scheppach has one answer: the so-called “defined benefits” system, with its lifetime guarantees, “just has to go.” State workers — at least new ones — would have to manage their own 401-k or comparable plans.

Perhaps, says Scheppach, states should “hire private sector people willing to come into government for three to five years.” They’d be paid competitive salaries, bring in fresh blood and ideas, and provide a clear alternative to the prevalent pattern of retaining state workers for 25 years or more and then owing them high lifetime defined benefits.

Put another way, state workers would be job-mobile (like most of us), and not receive retirement benefits superior to the taxpayers who support them.

Are all these ideas practicable? Maybe not all. Each would trigger political battles. But if we can’t pass imaginative reforms in today’s fiscal storm, then when? Inaction means prolonged fiscal misery, deep deficits, and a less competitive United States.

For reprints of Neal Peirce’s column, please contact Washington Post Permissions, c/o PARS International Corp., WPPermissions@parsintl.com, fax 212-221-9195. For newspaper syndication sales, Washington Post Writers Group, 202-334-5375, wpwgsales@washpost.com.

An Indianapolis-area ex-CEO of a hospital group called me the other day — not about health care policy, but rather regional planning in central Indiana. He wasn’t interested in some way to force unified regional government — to expand the geographic scope of Indianapolis’ Unigov system, which Dick Lugar (now Indiana’s senior senator) founded in 1969-70 and I later led as mayor for 16 years. This ex-CEO’s concern was different: How do we get the region’s top players on the same page when it comes to such critical issues as land use, transportation and housing.

The call was heartening because it demonstrated to me how America’s business leaders are starting to grasp that in this new, mobile, wired age of ours, boundary lines are relatively meaningless and obsolete. And that some are willing to take the lead to create new ways of approaching regional problems–quite far ahead of most political leaders, I might add, who too often are little more than self-protecting institutionalists, or so rigidly ideological that pragmatism has fled them.

But the new light’s not just coming from business leaders. President Obama “gets it,” even though between understanding and implementation, between the cup and the lip, slips can occur and good ideas can die. But in remarks made to a delegation of the U.S. Conference of Mayors last week, the President talked about the importance of rebuilding and revitalizing our cities and metropolitan areas. This was not a point he made in his State of the Union address, having other pressing matters he had to deal with. But to the mayors he did outline his administration’s urban vision of creating “economically competitive, environmentally sustainable, opportunity rich communities that serve as the backbone for our long term growth and prosperity.”

The president outlined three important components of the strategy, which will be backed up with dollars in the new budget he presents in a few weeks. First, “build strong regional backbones for our economy by coordinating federal investment in economic and workforce development.” He pointed out that what’s good for a central city is also good for the region: “Today’s metropolitan areas don’t stop at downtown.” A strong Denver means a strong Aurora and Boulder in Colorado, he said. “Strong cities are the building blocks for strong regions, and strong regions are essential for a strong America.”

Second, the president talked of creating livable, sustainable communities through smart growth policies that discourage sprawl, congestion and pollution: “When it comes to development, it’s time to throw out old policies” that lead to sprawl and the isolation of communities from each other. “We need strategies that encourage smart development linked to quality transportation that bring our communities together.” And he pledged partnership between federal agencies (HUD, EPA and DOT) and cities so that “when it comes to development, housing, energy and transportation policies go hand in hand.” He commented to applause that “we will build on the successful TIGER (“transportation investment generating economic recovery”) discretionary grants to ‘put people to work and help our cities rebuild their roads, their bridges, train stations and water systems.’” (In the same week he announced his $8 billion federal high-speed rail grants–also a plus for connected metro areas.)

A third administration strategy, the president told the mayors, is to “create neighborhoods of opportunity.” He acknowledged that the causes of economic distress in many neighborhoods are “deeply rooted and complicated,” but he also spoke of “simple” things that could address neighborhood needs: “access to good jobs, affordable housing, convenient transportation that connects both, quality schools, health services, safe streets and parks, and access to a fresh, healthy food supply.”

I like that approach–encompassing, as it does, the “efficacy of the little good.” Because, truly, it is the “little” things that count, not so much big endeavors like a sports stadium or convention center (which I also believe in, and supported as mayor). The fact is there’s no magic bullet for urban revitalization. The best strategy is to mind the store well, to focus on the the basics—street lighting, sidewalks, trees, trails, corner grocery stores, pubs, police horse and/or bike patrols, newspaper stands, parks and green space, and on and on–that can make a neighborhood livable and sustainable. Combine those strategies with sensible and conserving regionalism, and you have a really powerful package.

So will the comprehensive, connected urbanism–the urban vision the president articulates–ever become reality? Will Congress and the American people support the urban vision and program? Some will say it’s too much, some say it’s not enough. Everyone wonders where the money will come from. But–if the urban initiatives the President Obama speaks of are supported in the new federal budget, the vision will be furthered, maybe historically. Let’s hope so.

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“This may be the most calamitous fiscal year states have known in decades,” reports Rob Gurwitt in Governing magazine, the 23-year old bible on coverage of state and local governance across the continent.

And the coming fiscal year, experts are predicting, may be almost as grim as the states run out of budget gimmicks, rainy day funds and the infusion of federal stimulus money that helped them, finally, to balance their current budgets. The states’ cumulative 2010 and 2011 budget shortfalls may be about $350 billion–a third of a trillion dollars–estimates the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Why such grim news? Sales and personal tax receipts, which soared in the last decade because of the hot, credit-driven consumer economy, cratered with the recession. The pre-recession revenue levels, Governing reports, “will either take an unusually long time to recover, or never do so.” Indicators of prolonged fiscal migraines run from the ravages of industrial decline in the Great Lakes states to the mortgage crises that have tripped the Sunbelt’s perpetual growth machines.

All states face increasing health care costs for their needy. And then there’s the long-term debt that states have incurred–in bonds they’ve sold, in pensions and post-retirement health benefits, in replacement or maintenance of physical infrastructure that can’t be permanently ignored. Governing columnist John E. Petersen comes up with a startling $2.4 trillion of “aggregated indebtedness” the states carry. And they’re unlike the federal government, which with an accumulated debt of some $12 trillion, can at least print money and borrow (up to a point) at will.

Ironically, if crisis has hit the states, it’s also hit Governing magazine itself. Its former parent corporation, the St. Petersburg Times, late last year insisted on unloading it for cash. And there’s fear the magazine itself may never again be what it was in its heyday under founder Peter Harkness. The top bidder and buyer, e.Republic, does publish credible trade magazines such as Government Technology. But, as the New York Times reported, the fact that its top managers are members of the Church of Scientology has caused some uneasiness.

E.Republic’s first move was to slash Governing’s staff including more than half the magazine’s top brain trust of such editor/writers as Alan Ehrenhalt, Christopher Swope, Penny Lemov, Ellen Perlman and Alan Greenblatt, plus deputy publisher Elder Witt–almost anyone earning a high salary.

I recall hoping through the ’70s and ’80s that someone would start up a quality magazine focused on states and cities. Then Governing, a class act, appeared. Now there’s just hope–and little more–that the junior writers and free-lancers the new management relies on will be able to keep up the quality.

And hope, to be candid, may be all we can harbor for the states too. “The realization has started to dawn,” Gurwitt reports, “that fundamental assumptions about how state government operates needs rewiring.” Or in the words of Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, “that we’re facing a near-permanent reduction in state revenues that will require us to reduce the size and scope of our state governments.”

California, with its monstrous deficits, its emblematic issuance of IOU’s instead of real money, its furloughs of state workers, has received the most national attention. But Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm warns that her state budget may need another 20 percent cut, after last year’s 10 percent gouge. Granholm suggests shrinking the state government from 18 departments to eight. Florida’s budget is down 28 percent from its peak in 2006. Illinois faces a yawning $12 billion hole in a $26 billion budget. Check New Jersey, New York, Arizona, Georgia, Oklahoma–indeed all but a few resource-rich states like Wyoming–and you find more of the same fiscal agony.

And money’s not the only problem. Fierce partisanship and prolonged legislative standoffs–reminiscent of today’s Congress–have impacted states nationwide (as Alan Greenblatt describes in another Governing article). The legal progeny of California’s infamous Proposition 13 of 1978–requirements of super-majorities to pass tax increases, either state or local–make accords in tough times incredibly hard to forge.

“I’d like to see see states think a lot more strategically–where they can and should be in ten years,” says Scott Pattison, executive director of the National Association of State Budget Officers. But too little is happening, he acknowledges. States don’t yet have the political will to extend sales taxes to services–the growth area of their economies. America is dramatically “overincarcerated” by world standards, but legislators fear political kickback if they release even low-level offenders. The new talk is of cutting seriously into school and university budgets, where there are clearly inefficiencies–but also the danger of a society failing to seed its future.

Bottom line: state governance in America is in for an incredibly rough ride. And all of us with it.

For reprints of Neal Peirce’s column, please contact Washington Post Permissions, c/o PARS International Corp., WPPermissions@parsintl.com, fax 212-221-9195. For newspaper syndication sales, Washington Post Writers Group, 202-334-5375, wpwgsales@washpost.com.

It may be in bad timing when the Republican Party is now in the ascent and so protective of Ronald Reagan’s legacy to argue that Washington National Airport should remove the former president’s name, but that is exactly what I suggest. The reason is not to slam Reagan, who even president Obama acknowledges “changed the trajectory of America.” Rather a name change is needed to recognize the president who created National Airport–Franklin Delano Roosevelt. I can already hear the shouts from the GOP that such a switch would be nothing more than a naked display of power akin to the constant renaming of places that follows regime change in other, less stable parts of the world. Yet the case for “Roosevelt National Airport,” on merit is compelling. Roosevelt’s efforts were instrumental in every phase of the project–from funding, to site selection, to construction, to design.

Early 20th century, Washington was served by perhaps the worst airfield of any major city. In the 1930s, an airport located near the site of the current Pentagon had one runway and it was intersected by a busy street that had to be closed for takeoffs and landings. From 1926 to 1938, Congress debated building a new airport, but the proposal bogged down and it looked as if the project was dead. That is when Roosevelt took charge. He used the 1938 Civil Aeronautics Act, which transferred authority over civil aviation to the Commerce Department, as the basis for building National Airport. Roosevelt rolled out the plans for the project at a press conference and two months later ground was broken. Roosevelt even dug the first shovel full of dirt. Two years later, he laid the cornerstone on the main terminal. Roosevelt also personally intervened so that the terminal’s design paid homage to President Washington via a stylistic reference to Mount Vernon.

In modern parlance, Roosevelt made National Airport a “shovel-ready project.” In an era before environmental review or organized NIMBY resistance, Roosevelt overcame the one real barrier he faced–Congress. Speaking in 1941 at the airport’s opening, Roosevelt chided Congress on its inaction declaring “there has been a long dispute about the plan for this airport–a dispute that occupied twelve years; and, finally, the present head of the nation [i.e., Roosevelt] had a dream.”

Ironically, Franklin Roosevelt, who “built or renovated 2,500 hospitals, 45,000 schools, 13,000 parks and playgrounds, 7,800 bridges, 700,000 miles of roads, and a thousand airfields” according to economist Marshall Auerback, has no U.S. airport honoring him. There is just one Roosevelt Airport–a small airfield for St. Eustatius in the Dutch Antilles. Of all thousand airfields that the Roosevelt administration built National was the most significant. Upon its completion, National was a state of the art facility at the doorstep of the capital. It was also the only airport that the President took a direct and personal interest in, even describing as his “dream.” It is Roosevelt’s airport. We need to recognize this fact.

In the process of naming National for Roosevelt, we should not forget Ronald Reagan nor overlook how his name was attached originally to the airport. After the Republican takeover of Congress in the mid 1990s, the “Reagan Legacy Project” emerged. The group aggressively sought to put the ex-president’s name on virtually anything it could. Some efforts failed, such as having Reagan’s image carved into Mount Rushmore, or put on the dime. But in 1998, the Reagan Legacy Project succeeded in attaching Reagan’s name to National Airport. Observers at the time noted that Reagan was not exactly a fan of Washington, which he regularly disparaged as the home to “big government.”

Why then name National Airport for Reagan? Why not, for instance, name Los Angeles International Airport for him. Los Angeles is the city where Reagan found his fame and fortune. Reagan was also a two-term California governor, which launched his run for the White House. LAX is the world’s sixth busiest airport and a giant hub for international travel–not a mostly regional, non-hub facility such as National. Perhaps in a bipartisan swap–similar to the DC voting rights proposal to add a U.S. House seat in the Democratic-dominated District and one in reliably Republican Utah–LAX can be named for Reagan while National is switched to Roosevelt. Unlikely yes, but such a deal would result in both these notable presidents honored in way that does justice to their true legacies.

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WASHINGTON — Most everyone agrees that efficient roads, rails and air service are vital for our economy and our quality of life. Most of us see that without them, America will have a hard time competing against rising powers worldwide.

So why is Congress stalling? Representatives and senators know well that the federal transportation program expired last September. They keep passing temporary extensions without facing up to core issues–for example the federal gas tax stuck at 18.4 cents a gallon, unchanged for 17 years, despite escalating asphalt and concrete prices.

And why do we keep on paving over more and more of our landscape instead of embracing a “fix it first” strategy? Can’t we make our roads and transit investments match our housing choices in a “post-sprawl” era? Why aren’t regions being told that they had better link roads, rail and available air service for a smarter “intermodal” future?

The easy answer is always that Congress is too busy with the health bill and other crowded agendas. Bridges aren’t collapsing very often. Road congestion is bothersome, but we have little faith in expanded roadways either. Plus, people are more excited by the Obama administration’s embrace of a national “high-speed” rail system than more miles of asphalt.

So there was scarcely a ripple when Felix Rohatyn, respected and veteran civic leader, warned that “America’s roads and bridges–the country’s entire infrastructure–is rapidly and dangerously deteriorating.”

Steve Heminger, director of the Bay Area Metropolitan Transportation Commission, is quoted as bemoaning: “Is anyone listening out there?” Transportation expert Kenneth Orski even warns that the second jobs stimulus measure the Obama administration is likely to recommend could be a “death warrant” for full-scale transportation reform because it will likely include some quick road repair funds.

Most transportation experts think the gas tax is not only on its last legs, but should be replaced by some kind of electronically monitored system measuring how many miles a car is actually driven. But the idea likely needs lots of testing and the White House, in a recession economy, is opposed.

So what do we get? A series of short-term program extensions, forcing Congress to make up for declining gas tax proceeds with general revenue funds–i.e, deficit spending. In the process most dollars are left flowing through traditional transportation “stovepipes” that are tilted heavily to roads over transit, traffic “throughput” over community livability.

Where we ought to be heading, says John Robert Smith, president and CEO of the reform group Reconnecting America, is an “intermodal” future in which road, rail and air service are all tightly connected rather than disjointed and competing.

And Smith, a Republican who built a high quality multimodal downtown terminal as mayor of Meridian, Miss., then served as chairman of the Amtrak board of directors, has high hopes that transportation reauthorization can avoid the bitter partisanship that now infects Congress:

“For Republicans, this is a national security issue, freedom from foreign oil and more Chinese debt. It’s brick and mortar and steel that will bring a return on investment, promoting business opportunities. On the Democratic side, it’s about equity, connecting people, broadening transportation choices.”

Transportation hasn’t typically been a partisan issue, notes Emil Frankel, former Transportation Department official and currently transportation policy director of the Washington-based Bipartisan Policy Center. But Frankel cautions that this time party differences might surface if climate and energy issues start to play a significant role.

“An even bigger obstacle to reform,” he says, “could be opposition of existing stakeholders–from construction firms and unions to transit operators–all trying to protect and expand funding they receive under current programs.”

Add up the potential pitfalls and it’s indeed hard to see Congress acting early, despite a comprehensive reauthorization bill introduced last year by Rep. James Oberstar (D-Minn.). What’s more, members may flinch at daring to pass a multi-billion dollar authorization measure just before the midterm elections.

Alas! Rohatyn and others are right–our infrastructure is crumbling. We do need a system that values performance over special interest protection. We need state transportation departments to place a priority on maintenance and cater to fewer politically-motivated bridges–or roads–to nowhere.

And for the future, in this overwhelmingly metropolitan nation, we need explicit, clear transportation choices made in and for our city regions. The existing MPO (metropolitan planning organization) model for transportation choices needs a serious shakeup–starting with fair apportionment and demanding only one MPO in each metro region, not the splintered structures some regions now exhibit.

It’s only at the metro level, notes Smart Growth Leadership Institute chairman Parris Glendening, that there can be truly effective links of transportation with housing, economic competitiveness, carbon reduction, reducing vehicle miles traveled and promoting national security by reducing energy consumption.

It’s a massive challenge. The consequence if we miss it: a less livable, less prosperous America.

For reprints of Neal Peirce’s column, please contact Washington Post Permissions, c/o PARS International Corp., WPPermissions@parsintl.com, fax 212-221-9195. For newspaper syndication sales, Washington Post Writers Group, 202-334-5375, wpwgsales@washpost.com.