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While House Budget Committee Chair Paul Ryan grabbed headlines with the release of a fiscal plan that would severely constrain the federal transportation program (more on that later), the theme of the day at the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee was the desperate need to invest in infrastructure, as members of Congress provided their own proposals to the House Subcommittee on Highways and Transit.

Committee members noticed that Rep. Blumenauer did not mention bicycling infrastructure in his testimony. "But I am silently advertising before you," he quipped.

In his opening remarks, Chairman John Duncan (R-TN) attempted to lay a framework for discussion that underscored his official stance that no new revenue streams for transportation should be considered. He asked representatives to present proposals that first considered the “more than 100 highway safety programs, many of which are duplicative or don’t serve a need” and provide ideas that “review and reform what we already have.” However, ranking member Peter DeFazio (D-OR) cut straight to the revenue problem, calling American infrastructure “fourth-world in terms of the percentage of GDP that we are investing.” DeFazio was not optimistic that real solutions to the nation’s infrastructure funding crisis could exclude new funding sources.

About 20 representatives from both parties testified, and their recommendations ran the gamut from returning to a more earmark-centric funding scheme to selecting projects based on concrete performance measures. While not everyone mentioned pedestrian, bicycling and transit infrastructure, many did.

Members frequently made the case for specific projects in their districts, but rarely did this rise above a call to simply invest Congress with more power to allocate funding. (Alaska Republican Don Young took this stance to the extreme, calling for the elimination of state DOTs and a renewed priority on Congressional earmarks.)

One exception was California Democrat Judy Chu, who endorsed beefing up the TIFIA loan program, as outlined in the America Fast Forward [PDF] proposal. Such a proposal would specifically benefit Los Angeles’s 30/10 transit plan, but could also be generalized to help any metro region that passes a local tax measure to fund transportation. “Our region is too congested and polluted to wait 30 years for a 21st century transportation system,” said Chu. “We can do this in just a decade by boosting TIFIA by reforming six provisions.”

Another was Oregon Democrat Earl Blumenauer, who focused on picking projects based on their outcomes and switching the federal funding mechanism from the gas tax to a mileage-based model. He asked the committee to “reframe the regulatory debate [by asking] what is actually the outcome? Can we make this more performance driven?” The gas tax, he said, isn’t going to cut it anymore, because “using a fee based on consumption puts us on a downward spiral that cannot support our transportation needs.”

Read more…

Last week’s stakeholder extravaganza in the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee brought out the best and worst ideas about how to reform the transportation sector. We highlighted some of the good stuff earlier. Now for the bad and the ugly.

Sharon Calvert

Really, out of 40 (count ‘em!) witnesses at this mother of all transportation hearings, only one put forth the really, really bad idea of taking away transit’s dedicated funding. Maybe we could have ignored it and allowed her idea to disappear into the ether. Indeed, when I asked Secretary Ray LaHood and Rep. John Mica recently how they respond to calls to take transit out of the Highway Trust Fund, they both looked at me like I’d grown two heads. People really suggest that?

Yes, people really suggest that. So we thought we’d give her a special shout-out to the one who did, just so she knows we were listening.

Sharon Calvert represented the Florida Alliance, a Tea Party group with no clear transportation mission. It’s not entirely clear why she was there, except that she’s from John Mica’s home state and when he stopped by the hearing, he paid her many compliments, saying hers was one of the “most activist groups we’ve ever seen influencing national policy” and that “the Tea Party folks are well represented by her presentation.”

Her presentation began with the assertion that taxpayers want input into the bill because “we are the users and the funders of the transportation projects.” She said limited resources should be reserved for “the must-do needs, and not the nice-to do expenditures.” And so the Highway Trust Fund has to revert to its “core functions.”

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Editor’s note: These are the highlights from hearings on the upcoming transportation bill, where people made the case to Congress for sustainable transportation options. I’ll follow up with the Bad and the Ugly (like a whole lineup of people who want to kick transit out of the Highway Trust Fund).

This week’s stakeholder hearings in the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee started with impassioned pleas to preserve transit funding, as well as some recommendations for how to make it work better.

Larry Hanley of the Amalgamated Transit Union. Photo: ATU

Bill Millar of APTA struck a moderate note, appealing to some of Republicans’ favorite themes: high gas prices, streamlining to reduce waste and speed up projects, and Ronald Reagan.

Millar gave Reagan credit for his foresight in creating the mass transit account within the Highway Trust Fund – a move some conservatives criticize today – which has provided steady and predictable funding (and underfunding) since 1983. He reminded lawmakers that high gas prices drive people out of their cars and onto transit, meaning that budget cuts and service reductions now have especially disastrous effects.

Larry Hanley, president of the Amalgamated Transit Union, went right after Millar but took a more combative tone. Recent transit cuts – the deepest since World War Two – are “a criminal act against the people of our cities,” he said, and it’s “unconscionable” to cut funding to systems that take people to work in the midst of an economic crisis. Janitors sometimes have to stay in the buildings they clean for hours after their shifts end to wait for the next bus, he said.

The irony, though, is that “service has been cut and fares have been increased at a time when the federal government has spent more money in the last year on transit than any year in history,” he said. Hanley asked for more flexibility in the way transit dollars are spent, pointing out that New York was experiencing painful service cuts while at the same time continuing to build new projects that won’t be operational for years to come. If capital funds were available to help cover gaps in operational spending, he said, that wouldn’t happen.

Read more…

From left: Chamber of Commerce President Tom Donohue, Mesa Mayor Scott Smith, Rep. John Mica, LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, Sen. Barbara Boxer, AFL-CIO President Rich Trumka. Photo: Senate Photographic Studio

The “Tom and Rich Show” continued on Capitol Hill yesterday. Chamber of Commerce President Tom Donohue and AFL-CIO President Rich Trumka joined up for yet another event to show that business and labor, which don’t agree on anything, agree on a major infusion of federal investment for infrastructure.

They weren’t the only strange bedfellows there. Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer and Republican Congressman John Mica were practically holding hands through the entire press conference. Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa (a Democrat) found common cause with Mesa Mayor Scott Smith (a Republican).

“We have Democrats, Republicans, House, Senate, labor, business, lambs, lions, cats, dogs lying down together,” said Mayor Smith. “But there’s no apocalypse on the horizon. There’s a new dawn.”

In the past, even as other leaders in Boxer’s party have called for an infrastructure bank, she has hesitated to join them, expressing support for a strengthened and expanded TIFIA loan program instead. She’s said that rather than create a new federal bureaucracy, she’d rather stick with an existing program with a proven track record. But now she’s saying those approaches can each work in conjunction. “They’re definitely complementary,” she said yesterday. “I’m supporting the infrastructure bank, a strengthened TIFIA, and the Wyden approach [to renew the Build America Bonds program]. They’re all complementary. It’s all about leverage, leverage, leverage.”

Tom Donohue’s persistent, at times strident calls for strong federal infrastructure investment have been at odds with the calls from the fiscal conservatives the Chamber helped elect. While many in the House are bracing for a smaller reauthorization bill than hoped for – possibly even smaller than the last one, passed in 2005 – and calling for increased public-private partnerships to pick up the slack, Donohue knows that’s not going to cut it. He’s calling for a big bill, funded with a significant increase in the gas tax, which everyone in the transportation industry supports and everyone in Washington shuns.

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The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee just spent two days listening to 40 experts from different aspects of the transportation sector and advocacy community, from engineers to environmentalists to the Tea Party. Each person had just four minutes to speak and they crammed as much as they could into their time: observations, demands, recommendations for a better transportation bill. Their ideas were widely divergent on many points, but on one, they found unity: This should not be a smaller bill than the one that came before it.

Raymond Poupore of the National Construction Alliance II asked for robust investment in infrastructure.

The specter of a new reauthorization that starves the transportation sector for the next six years has become a very real possibility, as the fact sinks in that Congress is not willing to overspend the Highway Trust Fund, and neither Congress nor the White House is willing to get behind any new revenues for the fund.

Here are just a few of their pleas for a renewed commitment to a viable funding source for transportation.

Kathy J. Caldwell, P.E., President, American Society of Civil Engineers

ASCE remains concerned with the increasing and continued deterioration of the nation’s infrastructure. In our 2009 report card, the nation’s roads received a grade of D-, bridges a C and transit a grade of D. A multiyear surface transportation bill with increased funding levels is necessary to address this documented gap.

Raymond Poupore, Executive Vice President, National Construction Alliance II

Congress should focus on shoring up the trust fund to meet the nation’s surface transportation deficiencies and revive the ailing construction economy… For Congress to enact a reauthorization that falls short of our demonstrated transportation needs would, in our judgment, lead to weaker economic recovery, persistent high unemployment in the construction sector, unstable Highway Trust Fund, more dangerous bridges and highways, and American economic vulnerability in the face of unrelenting global competition. Yet as you well know, the revenue question remains. That is most politically challenging issue facing reauthorization.

Paul Diederich, President, Industrial Builders

When Eisenhower signed the first highway bill in 1956, the user fee was three cents a gallon and a first-class postage stamp was exactly the same amount. Today the user fee stands at 18.4 cents per gallon, which is about six times the rate of 1956. On the other hand, a first-class stamp costs 44 cents, which is roughly 14 times the amount it was in 1956. It is critical that we continue to invest in our nation’s infrastructure in order to maintain the integrity of what we have as well as to improve in areas of need.

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Highways and Transit Subcommittee Chair John Duncan (R-TN) can’t stop mentioning that this kind of hearing has “never been done before.” The subcommittee is hearing from 20 witnesses a day for two days in an effort to satisfy every interest group’s need to speak before the committee gets to work crafting the next surface transportation reauthorization bill.

As I write, we’re on Witness #7 for Day Two. We’ve hearing a lot of frustration about the government’s hamstrung ability to invest in infrastructure because of unwillingness to raise the gas tax or shift to a vehicle-miles-traveled fee. (In fact, Adrian Moore of the Reason Foundation just made a passionate plea for a VMT fee, despite what Duncan thought was the irony of a libertarian, usually so concerned with privacy issues, advocating for a system some have worried would be overly intrusive.)

Some made suggestions on how to do more with less and some said they’re already doing way too much with way too little. Transit advocates said the service reductions that transit agencies have been forced to undertake were “criminal” and highway advocates said transit should be kicked out of the highway trust fund.

We’ll post the details when today’s session is over. Meanwhile, you can watch the proceedings live here.

This morning, House Transportation Committee Chair John Mica told transit professionals gathered at the American Public Transportation Association’s legislative conference that he’s still hoping to pass a bill out of the House by May in order to get it signed before September 30, when the current extension of SAFETEA-LU expires. “It’ll be very difficult after that,” he said. “Because of the presidential ‘happy season,’ major legislation sometimes gets left behind.”

Photo: Joe Burbank/Orlando Sentinel

As he’s said before, Mica doesn’t have a bill in his “back pocket.” It’s hard to say if he was praising or criticizing his predecessor, Rep. Jim Oberstar, when he told the APTA audience, “He had waited 32 years to become chair. He knew exactly what he wanted in the bill, and he hand-wrote it out and projected it up on a screen and everyone was to march, and I did, until we started to get picked off by the administration and other folks who had other ideas, and it never happened.”

Mica also announced a series of stakeholder meetings to be held in the last week of March to supplement the field hearings the committee has been holding around the country. The meetings will help lawmakers craft a transportation reauthorization bill. Mica told the APTA members that they will be among those invited. It will include “all the Washington folks that haven’t been heard.”

Then he’ll “buy beer and pizza” (and fruit smoothies, as requested by Sen. Barbara Boxer) and lawmakers will sit down and hash it all out, he told reporters after his speech.

As for the broader budget fight, Mica alluded to the current deal to pass another extension for three more weeks – “Then, my advice and counsel would be, grab a hold of your shorts and hang on,” he said. “It might be a wild ride.”

He said it’s “above his pay grade” to guess whether more extensions will follow. “It’s not the way to fund the government, but a lot of people were sent here with a mission to cut spending.”

Mica got in his usual jabs at Amtrak, which he likes to call a “Soviet-style” train operator, incapable of developing real high-speed rail. It’s a sad time for high-speed rail proponents, like him, who were excited about the president’s vision, he said, “It’s like trying to celebrate and you’ve got a box of cigars and the first three cigars explode in your face.”

Read more…

Senator Barbara Boxer got down to brass tacks on transportation funding in a committee hearing yesterday, even as DOT Secretary Ray LaHood remained vague on how to pay for the president’s ambitious proposal. Boxer said she’s not in favor of raising the gas tax, but she’d like it to be indexed to inflation. “We don’t even know if the president would go that far with us,” she said, but clearly something needs to be done.

Barbara Boxer wants to see TIFIA strengthened, the gas tax indexed, and TIGER maintained. Photo: Tanya Snyder

Boxer: It’s a good news, bad news story. Good news, because people are getting better fuel economy; bad news because the Highway Trust Fund is slipping. And I’m looking for ways to get more money in there but they’re hard to come by. And because I drive a hybrid I’m not paying my fair share.

Ranking Member James Inhofe: That’s all right, you ought to see what I’m driving. We average out.

Boxer: I’m sure we average out. But you’re paying more for the roads than I am. I may be on the road as long as you are but I’m getting 50 miles to the gallon. So I’m not filling up the car and you’re paying more than I am. So it’s not fair to him [Inhofe] – I mean I think I’m wise to this, but we all should pay our fair share. So I think vehicle-miles-traveled is the way to go but I don’t seem to get much excitement when I mention it. I think we could do it easily, when you re-up your registration, this is how many miles I have now, then – but I don’t have any takers. Indexing the gas tax – indexing, not raising it – I could do that.

Boxer started the hearing with a ringing endorsement for a major expansion of the TIFIA loan program. She said both she and House Transportation Committee Chair John Mica “embrace a much more robust TIFIA program.”

She said the federal government is almost entirely shielded from risk with TIFIA. She alluded to the leveraging that is possible when federal funds are used right, using as an example the Crenshaw/LAX Light Rail project in Los Angeles, which made more than $500 million available at a cost of just $20 million to the federal government.

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The Senate has passed the Surface Transportation Extension Act, extending SAFETEA-LU for the seventh time and keeping the transportation program going at current spending levels. The House passed the bill yesterday.

Senator Barbara Boxer, chair of the Environment and Public Works Committee, released a statement expressing her satisfaction that the bill has passed both houses. “With the construction season upon us, this extension is especially important because it will give states the certainty they need to award contracts and get projects underway,” she said. “This will help ensure that jobs are saved and created in California and across the country.”

She said that she and her colleagues have a goal of finishing a new surface transportation authorization “by the end of this year.” (Perhaps she means the end of the fiscal year — she, along with John Mica and Ray LaHood, have been saying they plan to have a bill finished before the August recess.)

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, Rep. John Mica, and Sen. Barbara Boxer at the podium, at the recent field hearing in LA on transportation. Photo: Darrell Clarke

Dr. Richard J. Jackson is Professor and Chair of Environmental Health Science in the UCLA School of Public Health. We’re happy to host opinion pieces from academic and other community leaders. Contact damien@streetsblog.org if you’re interested.

On February 23, Senator Barbara Boxer and Representative John Mica held a congressional hearing here in Los Angeles to discuss the federal transportation bill. The dominant theme of the hearing was expanding and establishing federal financing programs to provide capital for major infrastructure projects such as Los Angeles’s 30/10 plan, an initiative to build 12 major transit projects in 10 years. The elected leaders and assembled experts lauded the proposed programs for their potential to rapidly stimulate job creation and economic growth. Very little was mentioned, however, about the need for transportation investments to also be guided by other objectives, such as reducing air pollution, investing in biking and walking networks, and improving safety – all critical elements for improving the economy and public health. Transportation has immense impacts on human health, both positive and negative. Current policies fail to consider and value these impacts, but they must.

Traditionally, federal transportation funds have been given to states according to formula and with little accountability for how they are used. In Los Angeles the results are staggering. The annual health impacts from air pollution in our region alone are conservatively estimated at $22 billion, or $1,250 per person per year. Also, while pedestrians or cyclists account for 12 percent of all trips, they suffer 25 percent of all traffic fatalities. And as we have become more dependent on cars as a way to get to our jobs, to the store, to our doctors’ offices, and to every place else, our physical activity has declined, and coronary heart disease has become the number one killer of LA County residents.

To the credit of many public health leaders, elected officials, local policymakers, and engaged citizens, cities throughout the region are investing in biking and walking infrastructure to address these issues, revitalize local economies, and increase the effectiveness of transit systems. Planners in numerous cities — including Pasadena, Long Beach, Culver City, Glendale, Santa Monica, and Los Angeles — are setting strategic long-term goals and formulating plans to expand biking and walking networks, make them safer, and integrate them into existing and future public transit networks.

California is moving forward with its SB 375 law to reduce emissions by focusing on the communities we build and the types of transportation we use. This landmark law has initiated a process where planners, regulators, and the public have come together to set long-term goals and plan to achieve them. One purpose of this law is to comprehensively evaluate how different projects — including public transit, bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure, car-pool lanes, and roads — contribute collectively to achieving these goals.

But federal transportation bills have not set these strategic goals. As a result, despite continuous increases in federal funding, public health has not been a major factor as transportation projects are selected. Los Angeles, for example, has seen its air quality improve significantly but not as a result of more public transportation or communities where people can bike and walk safely and efficiently, but rather because cars are cleaner. At the same time, sprawl has continued to increase to a point where, in Los Angeles alone, we spend 490 million hours annually stuck in traffic. The combined weight of the health impacts from air pollution, traffic accidents, and lack of physical activity along with the costs of wasted fuel and time is a collective drag on our health and economy. Read more…