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Five similar jolts hit the white and red 18-wheeler in quick succession as Mr. Fuselier, a driver for Saia Motor Freight Line of Houma, bumps along a 12-mile stretch where alligators sometimes float within view. But he is a veteran of I-10, and he is prepared. On the ceiling of his cab Mr. Fuselier has installed an inch-thick strip of red foam rubber padding.

As part of its smoke-and-mirrors act to make the budget deficit smaller, Congress doesn't even want to spend the surplus money built up in the federal highway fund. So, except for some piecemeal -- and, critics say, mostly pork-barrel -- projects, little is being done to arrest the highway system's decline. What's more, some of the repair projects under way are being bungled, causing even more problems.

What can happen instead is a hangup such as Rocky Smith ran into, as the independent hauler was traversing Chicago with a load of machinery that just had to get to a factory by morning. "There was this truck in front of me carrying giant steel coils, and potholes all over the place," he remembers. "This guy swerves all of a sudden to avoid a big hole." He hit it anyway. "The coils go bouncing off the truck onto the highway, and the truck almost jackknifes," Mr. Smith recalls. "We sat there in traffic for two hours while they cleaned up the mess. I couldn't make the schedule."

Trucker Wilbert Fuselier and 45,000 pounds of coffee are headed down Louisiana's Interstate 10 when -- boom -- a shattering jolt throws his rotund body upward and slams his head up into the top of his cab.

Five similar jolts hit the white and red 18-wheeler in quick succession as Mr. Fuselier, a driver for Saia Motor Freight Line of Houma, bumps along a 12-mile stretch where alligators sometimes float within view. But he is a veteran of I-10, and he is prepared. On the ceiling of his cab Mr. Fuselier has installed an inch-thick strip of red foam rubber padding.

Everyone with a car knows that the interstate highway system has a pothole problem. In fact, it's a whole lot worse than that. This vast public-works project -- by some reckonings the biggest such project in history -- is literally falling to pieces. And the money it would take to fix it simply doesn't exist.

The Federal Highway Administration, which now spends about $13 billion a year on repairs and construction, figures that bringing the roads up to "minimum engineering standards" would cost a stunning $565 billion to $655 billion over the next 20 years. For comparison, the huge bailout of the nation's failed savings and loans, perhaps the biggest financial debacle in history, is expected to cost about $166 billion.

As part of its smoke-and-mirrors act to make the budget deficit smaller, Congress doesn't even want to spend the surplus money built up in the federal highway fund. So, except for some piecemeal -- and, critics say, mostly pork-barrel -- projects, little is being done to arrest the highway system's decline. What's more, some of the repair projects under way are being bungled, causing even more problems.

This is no mere nuisance; some economists consider it a threat to the nation's productivity as the U.S. relies ever more heavily on highways to move its goods. David Aschauer of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago goes so far as to argue that highway deterioration is "a root cause of the decline of American competitiveness."

The two trillion miles that Americans annually travel by car, truck, bus and mass transit is expected to double in three decades. And increasingly, this travel is economic in nature. Low trucking costs have persuaded companies to entrust more than 75% of their freight to the highways, up from two-thirds in the 1960s. They do so assuming the roads will get it there in time.

What can happen instead is a hangup such as Rocky Smith ran into, as the independent hauler was traversing Chicago with a load of machinery that just had to get to a factory by morning. "There was this truck in front of me carrying giant steel coils, and potholes all over the place," he remembers. "This guy swerves all of a sudden to avoid a big hole." He hit it anyway. "The coils go bouncing off the truck onto the highway, and the truck almost jackknifes," Mr. Smith recalls. "We sat there in traffic for two hours while they cleaned up the mess. I couldn't make the schedule."

The irony is that the sprawling interstate system is crumbling just as it finally nears completion. President Eisenhower launched it in 1956, envisioning a time when the nation's resources -- or armies -- could move swiftly about much as the Germans could along the Autobahn in World War II. Now, the 42,798-mile system is only 794 miles and three years from its goal.

But its planners designed the roads to last just 20 years, the best they could do with the technology at the time. And that figure was only good at one-third current traffic levels.

"You can't build these roads and expect them to last forever," shouts engineer Albert Alberts as cars whiz past him only two feet away. Clad in tie, white hard hat and work boots, he is walking the construction site that is the last unrestored mile of Pennsylvania's Schuylkill Expressway. "Sooner or not much later, every major city in the country is going to have to rebuild their interstates like this," Mr. Alberts claims.

If so, the $225 million Schuylkill project may offer a glimpse of the future. It is not an appealing prospect.

Running 18 miles from the Pennsylvania Turnpike through the affluent Main Line suburbs and into Philadelphia, the Schuylkill is one of the busiest stretches of highway in the country, at its peak carrying three times the 48,000 cars a day it was designed for. The potholes, cracks and buckled pavement "had gotten so bad you had to drive 45 {miles per hour} or less if you didn't want to rattle yourself to death," says Mr. Alberts. Locals took to calling it the "Sure Kill."

Now, motorists are trading one kind of disruption for another. Crumbled piles of discarded concrete sit among neat rows of new plastic-coated steel supporting rods ready for use in new paving. A sunburnt man resembling a fly fisher stands knee deep in green goo spraying artificial filler with a large hose. The passing trucks combine with the construction work to send dark clouds of dust into the sky.

"It's not so bad, if it weren't for all the traffic getting in the way," foreman Robert Layton yells over the sound of jackhammers and car engines. Motorists no doubt would say the same about him. Reconstruction, now in its fourth and final year, cut traffic volume by 50% and often caused delays ranging up to 30 minutes. Stretching back to the horizon, cars wait their turn at the one lane left open.

The disruption might have been less severe, some suggest, if not for the kind of mismanagement and poor workmanship that have dogged many federal highway projects. In 1986, for instance, the state department of transportation removed a major contractor from the project, charging it was months behind schedule. The affair delayed completion of the project by a year, and isn't over yet: The contractor is suing the state. The state, in turn, has hired a construction consultant solely to guard against irregularities and further delays in the project.

Trucking companies, which pay special federal taxes to help fix the roads, have long been the most vocal lobby for more federal spending on highways. Experts say, however, that their extra tax assessment doesn't come close to compensating for what the big rigs do to roads. The Transportation Department estimates that a single 80,000-pound truck does as much damage to an interstate as 9,600 cars.

While the truckers haven't proposed raising their own contribution, they are increasingly being joined in their lobbying for more spending by other parts of American business, especially manufacturers. Some manufacturers in recent years have sought to curb costs by keeping their inventories of materials low. Such "just-in-time" production schedules require precise delivery schedules that the failing highway system is taking a toll on.

Robert Cowie, a vice president of Dana Corp., an Ohio maker of engine and transmission parts, says that "we're already beginning to experience highway delays here in Toledo. But the only way you can ship reliably and get deliveries on time is by truck. That means you've got to have good roads."

Richard Dines, transportation director for Latrobe Brewing Co., maker of Rolling Rock beer, says the poor highway conditions in eastern Pennsylvania amount to a kind of hidden tax. "We've got weight restrictions on some roads, which limit how much we can ship," he complains. "We've got the wear and tear on the trucks. Worst of all are the delays from potholes, traffic and construction. This costs us profits, because the truck and driver are just sitting there in traffic for an hour and a half, not moving, eating up wages and gas."

The Federal Highway Administration estimates that truck costs shoot up by 6.3 cents a mile when road conditions drop from "good" to "fair," or "barely tolerable for high-speed traffic."

Economists at the Department of Transportation have also tried quantifying the costs. They calculate that if the highways are allowed to continue deteriorating, the economy by 1995 will have missed out on increases of 3.2% in GNP, 5.9% in disposable income, 2.2% in employment and 2.7% in manufacturing productivity.

That would come as no surprise to planners who can't expand operations in Plaquemine, La., home to Dow Chemical, Occidental Petroleum, Georgia Gulf and Copolymer Rubber & Chemical plants. The roads there just can't accommodate the increased truck traffic that bigger plants would call for. "It's very constricting," says Dwayne Smartt, senior production planner at the Dow plant, which ships 30 trucks of chemicals a day. "People down here are very frustrated."

So is Glenn Victor, a bus driver of 45 years' experience. Waiting for his passengers outside Washington, D.C.'s Air and Space Museum, the veteran driver agrees that the highways "have gone to hell." Mr. Victor has just traveled from New York down I-95 and is walking around the bus to look for any damage. "It was so bad sometimes I had to drive with the bus halfway on the shoulder," he says. Gesturing toward the nearby Capitol building, he asks, "What's going on over there?"

Congressmen sitting in Rayburn House Office Building 2358 -- the appropriations subcommittee on transportation -- could provide the answer. This particular day, a long line of lobbyists and observers waits in the hall outside the committee room to no avail: The panel has voted to close its meeting to the public, and now is in the process of negotiating which projects get funded and which ones don't.

It is a process, many say, that is governed more by politics than by practical considerations. A big chunk of money that has already been earmarked for road spending doesn't get spent, for example, because keeping it in the government bank account makes the budget deficit smaller.

The Highway Trust Fund, which collects gasoline taxes and other user fees to pay for federal highway work, currently boasts an unspent cash balance of more than $14.5 billion. "That money should be put to use maintaining highways and making them safer, instead of letting it sit there gaining interest . . .," argues Henry Jasny of the Center for Auto Safety, a Nader-affiliated watchdog group.

President Bush's Transportation secretary, Samuel Skinner, is working on his own highway repair plan, but it is still in the information-gathering phase and department officials haven't been willing to comment on it.

With the money Congress is willing to allot to road repair limited to even less than the highway fund takes in in a year, politicians have spent the last decade fighting over "demonstration projects" that funnel money out of the highway fund to specific undertakings. Federal highway administrators oppose these tactics because they bypass the standard system of allocating money, a formula based on a state's area, population, and highway mileage. Other critics, notably the Highway Users Federation and the American Trucking Associations, charge that such projects represent unfocused federal policy and detract attention from the larger problem of crumbling highways.

"What we've got is the triumph of parochial interests that push and shake and push and shake to get special favors," says Robert Farris, a former head of the highway administration.

Nevertheless, congressmen managed to slip 157 of these projects into the last highway authorization bill -- to the tune of $1.4 billion. Pennsylvania, with two members on the House Appropriations transportation subcommittee and others on the full House and Senate bodies, landed 12 such projects, compared with just three for New Jersey and seven for New York.

Often, such projects are the result of legislative log-rolling: For instance, Pennsylvania Democratic Rep. John Murtha won $13.7 million for a 5.1-mile relocation of U.S. 219 in his district in return for his defense subcommittee's support for $300 million for the Coast Guard. His district boasts another project as well, a 1.3-mile access road enabling tourists to visit the Johnstown Flood National Memorial.

"There's nothing wrong about it," says an aide to the congressman. "We're trying to fund projects for the welfare of our constituents."

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States with the highest percentages of Interstate Highway miles deemed "deficient"

Credit: Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal