Transportation For America » Breaking Down the Blueprint: Economic Competitiveness, Efficiency, and Opportunity

Breaking Down the Blueprint: Economic Competitiveness, Efficiency, and Opportunity

June 11, 2009
By Andrew Bielak

The T4 America Blueprint has six overarching national objectives to provide a new vision and guide our federal transportation policy. If our transportation system is in need of a clear purpose, these six objectives are like the rudder that will steer the ship. To ensure that we can meet these objectives and measure our progress, we created 10 performance targets — clear, quantifiable goals for the next 20 years that are tied directly to the six national objectives.

When President Dwight Eisenhower laid the groundwork for the interstate highway system in 1956, he understood that an efficient, interconnected, well-functioning transportation system is absolutely essential to building a strong national economy.

A successful transportation system ensures that we arrive to work on time, moves goods quickly and efficiently, and employs millions of Americans in well-paying jobs. With our nation facing some of the greatest challenges in recent history, it’s particularly important that we make the right investments now to promote long-term economic growth for the future.

For this reason, one of our six national transportation objectives is to improve economic competitiveness, transportation system efficiency, and workforce development opportunities.

As we’ve discussed in this ongoing series breaking down the blueprint, our six objectives are tied to 10 performance targets — which should be met by 2030 — to help guide our program into the 21st century. While laying the groundwork for a more efficient and competitive economy through better infrastructure is a complex, multi-faceted goal intertwined with our whole transportation system, we believe that two of our performance targets are particularly relevant to this objective:

Traffic congestion puts a huge burden on our nation’s economy, draining $78 billion in production annually through 4.2 billion lost hours and 2.9 billion gallons of wasted fuel, according to the Texas Transportation Institute.

Those of us who have to deal with mind-numbing commutes every day, or see the impacts of endless pile-ups on the movement of goods and freight, know that these numbers don’t begin to tell half the story. While the federal government has historically focused on solving traffic issues and increasing economic output by simply expanding road capacity — a method proven time and time again to fail — Transportation for America advocates fighting some of the root causes of traffic, like highway crashes caused by a lack of focus and accountability on improving safety, limited capacity for public transportation and rail movement, and subsidization of sprawling, outward development.

Flickr photo originally uploaded by Atwater Village Newbie

Improving our economic performance is also about providing Americans with good-paying, green jobs in the transportation sector. Research from the United States Department of Transportation has shown that each billion of federal dollars invested in transportation creates approximately 34,000 jobs.

Congress and the Obama administration acknowledged the role of transportation projects to create jobs in the federal stimulus and invested more than $45 billion in public transportation, highways, high-speed rail, and walking and biking paths as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

While elected officials have often seen the federal transportation legislation as a “jobs bill,” we believe the next transportation bill needs go beyond the status quo by expanding existing provisions to recruit, train, and retain underrepresented workers in transportation construction. The numbers of women and minorities in transportation construction don’t reflect the percentages of those populations in the workforce at large in most regions of the country. Apart from simply creating jobs, this next bill should help create a more diverse, equitable workforce.

Obviously, improving economic performance and competitiveness goes far beyond making our roads less congested or training our workforce for jobs in transportation. It means creating better technology to make infrastructure more efficient; it means connecting small towns and metro areas through vastly expanded high-speed rail; and it means promoting economic growth in towns and cities by creating incentives for transit-oriented development.

In our next post on the Blueprint, we’ll tell you how some of our proposals can help make our transportation system more efficient and competitive to meet these targets.