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March 10, 2010

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Coming Soon: Reason Saves Cleveland With Drew Carey

Reason.tv series examines how to rejuvenate Cleveland and other cities

Coming March 15-19: Reason Saves Cleveland With Drew Carey, an original Reason.tv series featuring The Mistake on The Lake's most famous native.The six-part series comes just as Cleveland has been dubbed "the most miserable city" in America by Forbes magazine.

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18th Annual Highway Report

The Performance of State Highway Systems (1984-2007)

David T. Hartgen, Ravi K. Karanam, M. Gregory Fields

North Dakota continues to have the nation’s most cost-effective state-owned highway system, according to Reason Foundation’s 18th Annual Highway Report. The study finds over half of all state-owned highways across the country are congested and 25 percent of bridges are deficient or functionally obsolete.

Since 1984, per-mile total disbursements on state highways have increased by 262 percent. In 2007, U.S. states spent over $109 billion on state-owned highways, a 10 percent increase over 2006. But not everyone is getting their money’s worth. Taxpayers in New York, Hawaii, New Jersey, California, Rhode Island and Alaska have the worst-performing highway systems in the nation.

The Reason Foundation study examines state highway systems in 11 categories, including congestion, pavement condition, fatalities, deficient bridges and total spending. The annual report is based on information that each state reported for the year 2007.

Top-ranked North Dakota, which has had the best performing system each year since 2001, scored well by having the least interstate and rural mileage in poor condition and ranking first in maintenance spending. New Mexico continues its impressive improvement. The state was 27th in 2000, but now ranks 2nd in overall performance and cost-effectiveness. Kansas is 3rd overall, South Carolina, with one of the largest state-owned highway systems in the country, is 4th and Montana rounds out the top five.

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