Transportation For America » Governors call for new approach to transportation

Governors call for new approach to transportation

October 15, 2008
By Andrew Bielak

Sarah Karush of the Associated Press examined Transportation for America’s plan to rebuild our economy with smart investment in infrastructure, and found support from Virginia Governor Tim Kaine, Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell, and former Maryland Governor Parris Glendening. The entire article is printed below.

The governors of Virginia and Pennsylvania joined a coalition of environmental, housing and urban planning groups Tuesday in calling for a new federal transportation policy that focuses more on mass transit and repairing deteriorating infrastructure and less on building new roads.

Virginia Gov. Timothy M. Kaine, Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell and former Maryland Gov. Parris Glendening, who currently heads the Smart Growth Leadership Institute, endorsed the agenda of Transportation for America, a coalition formed to influence the debate over the transportation bill that Congress is due to deal with next year. All three are Democrats. The current transportation legislation expires in September 2009.

“What we’re seeing is vehicle miles traveled are declining and demand for transit is going up,” Kaine told The Associated Press. “The key is to provide choices, so you invest in everything.”

Democrats have recently proposed investing heavily in transportation projects as a way to create jobs and stimulate the economy, and the House passed an economic stimulus measure in September that included that idea. Transportation for America endorsed that concept in its plan released Tuesday, but said such investments should not be spent primarily on highways.

“Make sure that infrastructure really builds for the future,” Glendening said in a conference call with reporters. “That’s about transit, that’s about walkability, that’s about ‘fix it first.’“

At the same time, good transportation infrastructure is key to emerging from the economic crisis, Kaine said.

The plan calls for restoring infrastructure before building any new roads and for eliminating projects in the pipeline “that could deepen, rather than relieve, our oil dependence.”

Rendell said his state has been adhering to the “fix it first” motto, refraining from building new bridges and roads before the maintenance backlog is cleared.

“That’s always difficult politically,” he said. But he added, referring to the deadly 2007 bridge collapse over the Mississippi River: “How many more Minnesotas do we have to have as a country?”

The coalition — which includes groups as diverse as American Institute of Architects, the National Association of Realtors and the American Public Health Association — is calling for parity in the way transit and highway projects are funded. While highway projects currently get an 80 percent match from the federal government, transit gets an average of 50 percent, said Shelley Poticha, president of Reconnecting America, a group that advocates for transit, and one of the coalition leaders.

Jeffrey Solsby, a spokesman for the American Road and Transportation Builders Association, said the next transportation funding program should be “mode-neutral,” instead of favoring transit over roads.

He also said waiting until the maintenance backlog is addressed before building new roads would not work, given the expected increases in freight traffic.

“We don’t just have a maintenance challenge; we have a capacity challenge,” he said. “They need to be undertaken simultaneously.”