The Washington Post reported recently that Rep. John Murtha has diverted millions in federal funds in recent years to a local airport in his district… aptly named John Murtha Johnstown-Cambria County Airport. He’s even earmarked over $800,000 in federal stimulus money to repave a runway that gets only three commercial flights each day, all bound for Dulles International Airport.

It’s a colossal waste of money for a congressional district that that has an aging (read: immobile) population and a rate of growth somewhere between declining and stagnating. I’m sure Murtha says that this pork will improve the infrastructure of this region and spur jobs, but any objective observer will tell you it’s a foolish way to spend so much taxpayer money. If he wanted to spend stimulus money to improve the infrastructure of his district, why not improve the decrepit Pennsylvania Turnpike?

But I have a better suggestion (especially since I try to stay as far away as possible from the miserable den of the Pittsburgh Penguins): Use the Murtha Airport funds to redesign the air control system and navigation networks over the Northeast. “More than 2 million flights pass over” metropolitan New York every year, according to Wired, and the traffic above the city and its back-log “clogs the skies clear back to LAX.”

I happened to stumble upon this Wired article and the Washington Post article on Murtha in the same week, and so it really hit home that we’re grossly and inefficiently allocating federal stimulus dollars. Of course, I’m probably not telling you anything new, but I think when you can point to an isolated example of the problem and a specific suggested alternative, the whole big mess comes into focus. But right now, the allocation of infrastructure funds is as about as clean and efficient as the skies over the Big Apple.

This map from Wired shows the air traffic in the Metro area: