The disjointed state of "New Starts," the Federal Transit Administration's (FTA) program to fund new rail and bus lines, is well-known
on the Hill -- in fact, House transportation committee chairman Jim
Oberstar (D-MN) recently quipped that it ought to be renamed "small
starts, low starts, and no starts."
With
Oberstar's six-year transportation re-write bill in limbo for the
moment, however, there appears to be scant political urgency to fix the
program. But a report released today by the non-partisan Government
Accountability Office (GAO) could help change that picture.
It can take as long as 14 years for transit planners to secure a
full-funding New Starts grant agreement (FFGA), the final stage
required before starting construction. Yet when GAO auditors set out to
break the process down by its stages (which are depicted in a comically
complex chart after the jump) they found the FTA could only provide
complete information for 9 out of 40 New Starts projects approved since
1997.
"We were unable to obtain complete and reliable
project milestone data from FTA," GAO auditors wrote. An attempt to
confirm records for a random sample of 10 New Starts projects found the
information to be "unreliable and, in some cases, inaccurate."
The GAO report then outlined the FTA's explanation for its inconsistent data:
First,FTA told us that it does not have records on when a project beginsalternatives analysis because this phase is conducted at the locallevel, generally without FTA involvement. Second, FTA told us that itdoes not record when a project sponsor submits an application forpreliminary engineering, final design, and FFGA because projectsponsors almost never submit complete applications.
The
bureaucratic hurdles that transit planners must clear to win federal
aid stand in stark contrast to road projects' usually unobstructed path
to approval. But without solid data to make the case for fixing New
Starts, transit advocates' already arduous political fight for fairer
treatment is likely to get even harder.
The GAO report can be downloaded in full here.
