East-west investment

The Maine State Planning Office and Department of Transportation won’t have a final report on their study of an East-West Highway across the state for a couple of weeks, but the interim information they have offered and advances in other states suggest that Maine must makes its transportation infrastructure more efficient and better connected to the nation’s largest trading partner, Canada.

By 2015, according to the state agencies’ commodity forecast for the region, Maine will see dramatic growth in freight movement from Atlantic Canada and the total amount of commodity movement will grow substantially. That is, a lot more trucks and a lot more businesses moving goods are expected. The question is whether this is just increased traffic or an economic opportunity for Maine, one that should be encouraged with a highway that allows businesses to ship goods less expensively.

Maine is not alone in asking these questions, and some states already have decided highway investment was very much in their interest. States in the middle of the nation are assembling with federal support a NAFTA Superhighway — a north-south route that connects Canada, the United States and Mexico. The Iowa General Assembly, for instance, recently supported a resolution to match state and private funds to leverage federal money for the project. The reasoning there was straightforward: “Public investment in transportation infrastructure historically yields direct benefits to the economy in the form of private sector investment, which is the most desirable and long-lasting benefit of all.”

Closer to home, just across the New York border in Ontario next month, U.S. and Canadian officials will be reviewing prime connections for trade between the two nations. Some of opportunities they see link Detroit with Toronto, New York with Quebec, Manitoba with Minnesota, British Columbia with Washington and Montana with Alberta. The Trade Corridors Conference, as it is called, would be a great chance for Maine to demonstrate a commitment to becoming part of this trade network.

In the computer age, geography doesn’t matter, unless you are trying to ship computers or anything else larger than a microchip. Then geography matters immensely, and if Maine policy includes bringing down costs for manufacturers already here and for those it would like to attract, if it includes expanding trade with the partner that surrounds much of the state, it will make it easy to drive across the center of Maine.

Arthur Jacoby of the Federal Highway Administration was in Bangor last spring to talk about the connection between good roads and a strong economy. While cautioning not to apply general outcomes to specific circumstances, he concluded that the results of effective road-building programs change the way industries organize their production, “point toward an important role for public capital spending in contributing to investment-led economic expansions and imply that highway capital may be a prerequisite for growth in private capital investment.”

And, as they say in Iowa, apparently, that’s the most desirable and long-lasting benefit of all.