Coming from a family where bridges were everything, the collapse of the I-35W Bridge in Minneapolis hit especially close to home. My father, L. Ernest Tessitor, came to the "city of bridges" to become a design engineer with Allegheny County after the second great bridge-building era.

When he left the county government after being in charge of its bridges for six years after World War II, it was the end of an era of in-house engineering during which bridges received the attention they deserved.

I've spent much of the past two decades working to expose problems and change the way we have ignored our infrastructure since that time, hoping to prevent a tragedy here such as the one that struck the Twin Cities.

The calamity and loss of innocent lives in Minneapolis has captured the media's attention and given public officials a stage to clamor for more money. But funding is not the main problem. There's been plenty of money available over the years which should have provided for adequate maintenance of our highways and bridges. At the heart of the problem is what our public officials have done with that money.

This latest bridge collapse was no great surprise. As a founding member of the Citizen Advisory Panel of the Southwestern Pennsylvania Regional Planning Commission, I and others uncovered egregious abuses and improprieties in the allocation of federal transportation funds during the CAP's existence from 1994 to 1998. Our numerous complaints to Federal Highway Administration officials were rebuffed with, "It's going on everywhere."

We found maintenance being ignored here and elsewhere, with the money instead being used to subsidize suburban real estate speculation -- billions of dollars worth of new, unnecessary highways opening more farmland and natural habitat for speculative conversion into spread-out residential and commercial construction. It's called "suburban sprawl." The entire process so permeates American society that it's widely considered a given. In our region, it has drained our traditional communities of people and investment and dispersed our decreasing population ever more thinly.

"Advance the project!" is PennDOT's unofficial motto, with new construction taking precedence over maintenance. For years during the 1990s, the state and county ignored a bridge-inspection report calling for immediate emergency repairs to the then-structurally deficient 16th Street Bridge. Millions of dollars in federal bridge-repair funding allocated for its rehabilitation was instead shifted to unessential new construction.

As a CAP member, I interviewed the PennDOT District 11 engineer in charge of bridges at that time. The agency's policy was to forgo maintaining bridges when it could, figuring it was cheaper for the state to let them deteriorate until they could be replaced, mainly with federal dollars.

After years of repeated requests, we finally got the SPRPC to identify how much was necessary to meet minimum maintenance needs. It would have required all of the region's federal transportation funding, yet the SPRPC was allocating 40 percent of that money to build or expand highways, effectively subsidizing more sprawl. Diversion of maintenance money to new construction not only leaves existing infrastructure to deteriorate at an accelerating rate, it also increases and extends the maintenance deficit by adding each new highway's future maintenance needs to our total liabilities.

Legal or not, many accept this as simply the way things are. But we cannot afford to do so any longer.

As the chair of the CAP when it was eliminated by the SPRPC in 1998 for telling federal officials of the abuses we discovered, I can tell you that most of the changes needed are well understood and do not need to be invented -- they've simply been ignored.

As a citizen who is currently assisting Allegheny County Council in drafting a transit reform proposal to present to the state Legislature, I can say that it will do no good to make one or two little corrections and think the problem is solved -- real solutions will need to be comprehensive.

Before we toss more taxpayer money around, we must rethink transportation at the regional, state and national levels. Transportation is at the nexus of many of our most threatening problems. More efficient transportation can reduce greenhouse gas emissions, energy usage and our oil dependency.

Eliminating the influence of real estate speculation, currently the controlling factor in transportation planning, can combat suburban sprawl, help preserve and revitalize existing communities, and stop unwarranted consumption of valuable farmland and natural habitat.

Restructuring the way we do transit can mean more and better public transit, not less. Establishing new capabilities for regional and intercity rail service, including a rapid rail connection to the airport, can increase our economic competitiveness and create more job opportunities.

Most importantly, a well-integrated approach can ensure that each component of our transportation system will be well-maintained and operate at its intended level of service.

Pennsylvanians must make clear to their legislators that we expect nothing less than complete transportation reform. If that happens, we will be surprised to find there is less need to throw more money at the problem than is now thought. We may have to pay a little extra, but the public will be pleased to see that for once we will be getting full value for our money.