Transportation For America » Breaking Down the Blueprint: Economic Competitiveness, Efficiency, and Opportunity, Pt. 2

Breaking Down the Blueprint: Economic Competitiveness, Efficiency, and Opportunity, Pt. 2

June 17, 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.

How can the proposals in our Blueprint help strengthen the economy and create jobs? As we noted in the last post in this series, making our economy more competitive, increasing workforce development opportunities, and improving the efficiency of our transportation system represents one of our six national objectives that must guide our national transportation program.

As a quick refresher: while many of our 10 performances targets line up with this objective, there are two that we believe are particularly important:

Reduce delay per capita by 10 percent by 2030
Lower congestion costs by reducing traffic crashes by 50 percent by 2030.

Meeting these goals won’t be easy — it requires us to rethink how we approach our transportation investments, to create an integrated system that balances investments in highways, public transportation, rail, and walking and biking, and to use state-of-the art technology to manage our existing transportation infrastructure.

To see what programs and policies in our Blueprint will help us reach this objectives, keep on reading below the fold.

Reduce congestion with smarter policies and smarter infrastructure

In some of our earlier posts, we’ve talked about how “intelligent transportation systems” — computerized communications networks that feed through our infrastructure — will be essential to improving our transportation system. To support and bolster these efforts, Transportation for America has proposed a new Smart Communities Innovation Program (page 43 in our Blueprint) which would promote the deployment of efforts like congestion pricing or a driving-tax pilot program to help make our system more efficient without simply building more.

Instead of attempting to solve congestion with the construction of more highways, T4 America is also looking to greatly expand investments in public transportation, walking, and biking — through our Multimodal Access Program (pg. 87) and Major Transit Capital Program (pg. 39) — and shift a portion of our freight from highway to rail through our Green Frieghts and Ports Program (pg. 36).

Finally, while an improved safety program is absolutely critical for reducing deaths and injuries on our roads, it can also play an important role in cutting down on congestion and improving the efficiency of our transportation systems. For this reason, we propose a revitalized federal safety program that holds states accountable for demonstrating measurable reductions in deaths and injuries and invests in safety where it’s needed most, for all users of the transportation system.

Develop our transportation workforce

The transportation sector is a critical contributor to our national economy, employing millions of Americans who build and operate the highways, bridges, and transit systems that keep Americans moving.

Though the transportation bill has often supported hundreds of thousands of jobs by paving the way for construction projects across the country, Transportation for America believes that the next bill must help us train the next generation of workers in the transportation sector and provide economic opportunity to populations underrepresented in the workforce.

While current federal law mandates that 1/2 of 1 percent of transportation funds from five separate programs can be used for training, education and workforce development, T4 America supports raising that ceiling to allow states and metro regions to use as much as 1 percent of all federal transportation dollars for these purposes.

Invest for the future

We don’t need to travel across the world to know that countries like China, Spain, or India are building modern, 21st century rail systems and other large-scale transportation projects — we hear about these stories from our own transportation secretary. If the U.S. expects to create strong local economies and remain competitive in the global economy, we need to think big about our transportation system and jumpstart investment in efficient, technologically-advanced projects of the future.

Transportation for America is supporting two essential programs that will lay the groundwork for these investments: our Intercity Passengers Transportation Program (pg. 35) is designed to give people options for quick and efficient travel between large cities by rail or bus by the year 2050 through investment in the corridors that have the greatest demand for travel.

And our Transportation Projects of National Significance Program (pg. 40) will provide targeted funds for the “mega-projects” that cross regional boundaries and bring truly national benefits without favoring any specific mode of transportation over another. To help fund this program, we support the plans by the Obama administration to create a National Infrastructure Bank, a government-owned corporation that could fund these large-scale projects by leveraging private investment.

We’ll return — other big Capitol Hill news permitting — to our Blueprint later on this week with a look at a new objective. Stay plugged in as we unpack T4′s policies for a renewed transportation system.