Streetsblog Los Angeles

Back in February, the Department of Transportation requested a two percent budget increase for next year (FY 2011). [PDF] The extra $2 billion would pay for things like a new Distracted Driver Prevention Program, high speed rail, and livability grant programs.

They’re finally getting an answer from Congress, and it’s a resounding “no.”

Congress has been unable to make any progress on an omnibus spending bill, in no small part because of top Senate Republican Mitch McConnell’s declaration that “Americans don’t want Congress passing massive trillion-dollar bills thrown together behind closed doors.”

The fiscal year began October 1. An interim continuing resolution was passed to keep the government open at current spending levels until December 3. On December 3, Congress continued it until December 18. Now they’re just throwing in the towel on the whole exercise. Today, the House is expected to pass a year-long continuing resolution, basically enacting a FY2011 budget that’s almost a carbon copy of the FY2010 budget.

Democrats are betting that this will lead to a better outcome than passing another interim CR and letting the Republicans draft the spending bills once the new Congress is seated.

Still, Appropriations Committee Chairman Dave Obey (D-WI), who is in his last weeks in Congress, betrayed his frustration in this statement:
Read more…

The U.S. DOT today released its first round of guidance for the
so-called "TIGER II" program, a $600 million pot of competitive
transportation grants considered a quasi-sequel to the popular $1.5
billion merit-based fund included in last year’s stimulus law.

Perhaps
the biggest news in today’s announcement was the U.S. DOT’s intention
to marry its decision-making on the new TIGER-esque grants with the
process for allocating $40 million in land-use aid at the Department of
Housing and Urban Development (HUD). If the two agencies can sustain
that goal past the period of public comment on the new grants that
begins this week, their move would take the cooperative ethos that has
defined the Obama administration’s sustainable communities effort to the next level.

In
its preliminary TIGER II guidance, published in today’s Federal
Register, the U.S. DOT wrote that officially linking its grant
decision-making with HUD’s would ideally "encourage and reward more
holistic planning efforts and result in better projects being built
with federal dollars" by recognizing the inextricable connection
between transportation and local planning.

The U.S. DOT’s
criteria for choosing TIGER II winners differ in several notable
respects from those for the original program. At least $140 million of
the new grants are required to go to rural areas, and localities
selected to receive federal funding would need to provide a 20 percent match — a requirement that had been waived for the original TIGER competition in view of the economic downturn.

The element of urgency that defined TIGER bids is also easing up for the new round of transport grants.

Read more…

Conservative columnist George Will's angry screed against the Obama administration's transportation policy is worth digging into this morning -- not just to bring one's blood to a healthy boil, but also to provide a window on the lack of coherent opposition to expanding transit options and diminishing auto dependence.

Will writes of his horror at discovering that Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, a fellow Republican, is committed to giving Americans the choice of commuting by bike or train:

[LaHood] knows what plays in Peoria, and not just figuratively: He is from there. Peoria is a meatloaf, macaroni-and-cheese, down-to-earth place, home of Caterpillar, the maker of earthmoving machines for building roads, runways, dams and things.

LaHood, however, has been transformed. He says he has joined a "transformational" administration: "I think we can change people's behavior." Government "promoted driving" by building the Interstate Highway System—"you talk about changing behavior." He says, "People are getting out of their cars, they are biking to work." High-speed intercity rail, such as the proposed bullet train connecting Los Angeles and San Francisco, is "the wave of the future." And then, predictably, comes the P word: Look, he says, at Portland, Ore.

Will depicts LaHood as a traitor for daring to believe that "0.01 percent of Americans will ever regularly bike to to work" (actually, George, the real percentage of bike commuters is more than 100 times that) and that inter-city rail is possible for cities more than 300 miles apart (er, the Midwest Regional Rail Initiative has mapped out a 10-state rail network with a 400-mile reach).

The saddest aspect of Will's critique, however, isn't his lashing out at LaHood. He willfully ignores the fact that the highway industry benefits from unprecedented government intervention and an uneven playing field that discourages transit projects while subsidizing roads.

The Witherspoon Institute explored this theme last month in an essay that asked conservatives to re-think their longtime resistance to transit. Even the right-leaning Free Congress Foundation has done the legwork to show that transit powerfully expands individual freedom -- a central tenet of the brand of conservatism that Will espouses. One wonders why he can recognize government intervention on behalf of domestic automakers but ignore the same gesture when it's made on behalf of the road lobby.

It seems that Will would rather complain about Lyndon Johnson's 45-year-old Great Society, which brought us Medicare and Medicaid, than consider an America where technology can be harnessed to improve both our health and our planet's. But there's an upside: If Will's arguments are a preview of future congressional opposition to expanding transit, high-speed rail is headed for victory.

The New York Times reports this morning that the Obama administration’s $787 billion economic stimulus package has hit a few snags:

Some states and cities are beginning to complain that the money has yet
to reach them. Others have been slow to get their paperwork to
Washington; Virginia has yet to send the Transportation Department its
list of road projects.

The article credits the federal Department of Transportation (DOT) for allocating
$10.5 billion — nearly one-quarter of its $48 billion slice of the
stimulus pie — but only about $34 million of that, or 0.07 percent,
has been paid out so far. Two-thirds of the $34 million came in the
form of a grant to Amtrak.

Those numbers stand in contrast
to Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood’s claim yesterday in a speech to
the National Retail Federation that "nearly all"
of his department’s stimulus money has been disbursed.

The
Times’ evaluation comes a bit early in the game, given that the
stimulus bill became law less than three months ago. Most economists
have pointed to 18 months as the window in which the money should be
spent in order to maximize its economic impact; even using that far-off
marker, however, the current rate of stimulus spending is falling short.

Nevertheless,
the administration is preparing to tout its progress on spending the
money. Vice President Joe Biden will submit a quarterly report to the
president today that credits the economic recovery effort with saving
or creating 150,000 jobs.

Though that may not yet be
the case, the DOT reports that more than 2,000 transit projects have
been identified for funding. And the $8 billion set aside for transit,
while far less than what was truly needed, is starting to be spent on projects in cities such as Seattle, Denver, and Phoenix.

You can view the AP’s interactive map of local transportation projects receiving stimulus cash right here.

Over at NYC Streetsblog, Ben Fried reports that the "Livable Streets Vibe" that’s coming out of Washington is becoming part of how President Obama’s USDOT presents itself when it takes its act on the road.  Reporting from the New York Metropolitan Council’s annual meeting, Fried caught Vice Admiral Thomas Barrett, Deputy Secretary at U.S. DOT talking about the role that USDOT can take in creating stronger communities:

The one-size-fits-all transportation project is going to have to give
way to one that’s more tailored to preserving and enhancing the
qualities — the sustainability, the environmental qualities, the
community values — that make each city, each county across this
country special. We’re looking to sustain and build communities –
reinforce them in ways that work.

Let’s hope that LADOT and Caltrans don’t look at the call to change from a "one-size-fits-all" approach as an excuse to widen more highways.