Last week, the US House of Representatives took a bold step in passing sweeping legislation that rethinks the US transportation framework towards fixing it first, safety over speed, connecting people to jobs and services, and going a step further towards addressing climate change plus equity and inclusion. All eyes are now on the Senate on how they package their existing subpar work on highways, decent work on passenger rail and safety, the bipartisan infrastructure framework, and the House’s INVEST Act.
The US House of Representatives took up the INVEST Act for floor consideration on June 30th, with major movement on the 149 amendments. Wrapping up amendment considerations by July 1st, the House took a vote on the INVEST Act, with a roll call vote of 221 yeas to 201 nays (with 8 not voting). With the bill’s passage, the House made a clear declaration towards fundamentally recalibrating America’s transportation program to work for the people and for the future.
Now as the House has taken their bold step towards transportation reauthorization, all eyes are on the Senate. To date, the Senate has released a highways title and a rail and safety title, but has yet to release a transit title. Adding into the reauthorization mix is the bipartisan infrastructure framework negotiated by 21 senators and the White House. What comes next for the Senate regarding transportation reauthorization is anyone’s guess at this point in time, but the clock is ticking towards the expiration of the FAST Act on September 30th, a mere 85 calendar days away.
As the focus turns to the Senate, we remain hopeful that their legislation will include concrete policies that address climate change, safety, maintenance and equity. Merely providing lip service to repair, climate, and equity while still building projects that produce the opposite would be an unjust use of taxpayer dollars, especially in our small towns plus rural and marginalized communities.
We congratulate the House of Representatives for passing the INVEST Act, a transportation bill that commits to a fix it first approach, prioritizing safety over speed, and connecting people to jobs and essential services—whether they drive or not,” said Beth Osborne, director of Transportation for America.
“Chairman DeFazio’s leadership has produced a bill that acknowledges needs—like repair, climate and equity—and seeks to fix past problems while updating the underlying programs to ensure we don’t just continue to make those problems worse. The bill commits to expanding and improving intercity rail, promoting vehicle electrification and providing more charging stations, making all users safer by establishing Complete Streets policies and approaches, and reconnecting communities divided by transportation infrastructure.
“We also want to recognize and thank Rep. Hank Johnson, who led the effort to extend transit into areas with little or no service and to provide new flexibility for transit agencies to use federal dollars to run more trains, more buses, in more places, to serve more people. We hope to work with champions like Rep. Johnson and Rep. Chuy García to strengthen our commitment to transit, invest in repairing transportation infrastructure, and make the transportation system cleaner, more efficient and more equitable.
“As the focus now turns to the Senate, we remain hopeful that their legislation will include concrete policies to address climate change, safety, maintenance and equity in the core parts of the program—not only in new add-on programs. Merely providing lip service to repair, climate, and equity while continuing to build projects that produce the opposite would be an unjust use of taxpayer dollars, especially in our small towns, rural places, and marginalized communities.”
The INVEST Act, which hits all three of Transportation for America’s three principles, is being considered this week on the House floor ahead of a final vote. There are a few key amendments being offered that could jeopardize these improvements, or further improve the already strong bill in support of our principles.
We heartily support the INVEST Act and encourage all representatives to vote for its passage, but well over 250 amendments were submitted to the INVEST Act to be considered before that final vote. We will be tracking the most notable amendments in a table below, but we want to draw your attention specifically to the seven amendments we will be paying careful attention to.
Transportation for America strongly supports five amendments to be included in the final bill:
Amendment #15 (Moulton): this amendment increases the PRIME passenger rail program funding by $5 billion total, to modernize and develop passenger rail service (especially critical and affordable interstate travel options) while also expanding existing rail corridors throughout the country.
Amendment #86 (Garcia (IL)): This amendment ensures that the street design manual used by all traffic engineers (the MUTCD) equitably accounts for all transportation users, especially cyclists and pedestrians. It furthermore directs the Secretary to update guidance on updating the MUTCD, targeting a four-year update cycle to ensure it stays current with evolving transportation needs.
The three following amendments from Rep. Hank Johnson would make changes to new and existing programs in the INVEST Act to help transit agencies run more buses and trains to serve more people. Rep. Johnson was proposing an amendment that would have created an entirely new program to fund transit operations, but it became clear that leadership is not allowing amendments to create entirely new programs at this point for the INVEST Act.
Amendment #133 (Johnson (GA)): This amendment increases the eligible funding for transit operating expenses from the Carbon Pollution Reduction Program up to 20 percent, allowing states to use these funds to make transit service more frequent and reliable—which has a notable impact on carbon reduction.
Amendment #139 (Johnson (GA)): This amendment prioritizes transit operations expenses in the Reducing Transit Deserts grant program by removing construction of maintenance facilities as an eligible expense. Maintenance facilities projects could swamp this small program and are eligible for funding elsewhere, while transit operations are harder to fund.
Amendment #148 (Johnson (GA)): This amendment makes expanding transit service hours and/or days an eligible expense for the Reducing Transit Deserts grant program. The underlying program only focuses on improving frequencies, but extending service hours is just as important for reaching more riders who need transit the most.
Transportation for America also strongly opposes two amendments and urges all reps to vote against these short-sighted proposals:
Amendment #144 (Perry (PA)): This amendment prohibits the use of funds to expand the Amtrak passenger rail network. At a time when communities across the country are clamoring for more connections and more options of all kinds—especially in places not well connected to airports or other interstates—this amendment is especially out of touch with the needs of Americans, both urban and rural alike.
Amendment #247 (Gibbs (OH)): This amendment allows state DOTs—such as the Ohio DOT in Rep. Gibbs’ home state, which spends next to nothing on transit service statewide—to seize transit funding and spend that money on highways, overriding local control and eliminating funds from documented local multimodal needs. It also prohibits using transit funds for art, non-functional landscaping, and sculptures—or for paying the cost of including an artist on the design team. This might seem pennywise but it’s incredibly pound foolish. Allowing a small amount of transit funding to support artists’ involvement leads to projects that are more responsive to their surrounding communities’ needs, better incorporate the desires of riders, and avoid a one-size-fits-all approach. Additionally, these funds support local artists’ small businesses, further benefiting the communities adjacent to transit projects.
Full table of amendments
Amendment Number
Sponsor(s)
Description
Theme
Our Position
Vote Format
Outcome
1
Langevin (RI), Titus (NV)
Requires the Department of Justice, in addition to the Secretary, to adopt the U.S. Access Board's Public Right-of-Way Accessibility Guidelines as enforceable standards. This will strongly influence the built environment to be designed and built to be more accessible and inclusive for persons with disabilities.
Equity / Accessibility
Support
En Bloc 1
PASSED
3
Espaillat (NY), Nadler (NY), DeSaulnier (CA)
Allows local transportation agencies, in addition to MPOs, to be direct aid recipients of Metropolitan Performance Program funding. This allows direct, local and regional deployment of federal funds towards transportation needs.
Local Control
Support
En Bloc 4
PASSED
10
Norcross (NJ)
Requires all Electric Vehicle Supply Equipment (EVSE) projects funded directly through the Federal Government to be performed by qualified electricians with Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Training Program certification.
Increases the Passenger Rail Improvement, Modernization, and Enhancement (PRIME) program funding by $5 billion over the life of the bill, helping to modernize and develop passenger rail service (especially critical and affordable interstate travel options) while also expanding existing rail corridors.
Passenger Rail
Support
En Bloc 4
PASSED
18
Velázquez (NY)
Revises the Climate Resilient Transportation Infrastructure Study to guarantee that residents of public housing and of other HUD-designated affordable housing programs are considered and benefit from resilient infrastructure investments. Further revises the study to consider the needs of and create opportunities for individuals registered with a one-stop career center in the climate resilient workforce.
Equity / Resiliency
Support
En Bloc 1
PASSED
28
Ocasio-Cortez (NY)
Revises SEC. 1309(g) of the Active Connected Transportation grant program to direct the Secretary of Transportation to consider the extent to which a project would serve low income residents of economically disadvantaged communities when making grants.
Equity / Active Transportation
Support
En Bloc 1
PASSED
30
Nehls (TX)
Strikes Division D of the bill (rail title). This would in essense, defund all rail infrastructure investment.
Passenger Rail
Oppose
Standalone
Not offered
33
Auchincloss (MA), Huffman (CA), Moulton (MA)
Provides municipalities with the ability to create and expand new mobility options, including on-demand public transportation projects.
Local Control
Support
En Bloc 1
PASSED
46
Perry (PA)
Strikes section 1303, which establishes a clean corridors program to provide formula funding for EV charging and hydrogen fueling infrastructure. This would in essence, would keep us running a status quo on transportation energy sources that focuses exclusively on fossil fuels.
Electric Vehicles
Oppose
En Bloc 3
Failed
55
Titus (NV), Moulton (MA)
Amends the Railroad Rehabilitation and Improvement Financing program to add rail carriers engaged in high-speed rail activities under the eligible entities for credit risk premium subsidy payments. Much like buying a home with little money down, there is a mortgage insurance premium paid; this amendment helps to provide financing to offset that insurance cost to finance passenger rail infrastructure projects.
Passenger Rail
Support
En Bloc 1
PASSED
84
Levin, Andy (MI), Ocasio-Cortez (NY)
Amends eligible project considerations under Sec. 1303 Clean Corridors Program to include considerations for promoting efficient dwell times and amends Sec. 1303 Clean Corridors Program to include requirements for the provision of information on charging station placement through mapping applications. In essence, this amendment looks to ensure that charger turnover needs are considered in the design and placement, while also publicizing location information through consumer mapping tools.
Electric Vehicles
Support
En Bloc 1
PASSED
86
Garcia, Jesús (IL)
This amendment ensures that the street design manual used by all traffic engineers (the MUTCD) equitably accounts for all transportation users, especially cyclists and pedestrians. It furthermore directs the Secretary to update guidance on updating the MUTCD, targeting a four-year update cycle to ensure it stays current with evolving transportation needs.
Safety / Equity / Standards
Support
En Bloc 4
PASSED
87
Castor (FL)
Expands the Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality Improvement (CMAQ) program to allow funding to be used to offset the incremental cost of zero-emission medium- and heavy-duty vehicles, related zero-emission operations equipment, battery electric charging or fuel cell electric refueling infrastructure, and related infrastructure investments.
Electric Vehicles
Support
En Bloc 4
PASSED
103
Torres, Norma (CA)
Raises authorization level of the Transportation Equity Research Program to $8,000,000 and gives DOT flexibility to conduct research. This will fund needed research to better understand and develop best practices on incorporating equity and inclusion into the transportation program.
Clarifies that projects to deck over a limited-access highway are eligible for funding under the Reconnecting Neighborhoods Program, a program focused on remediating economically-disadvantaged and historically excluded communities and emphasizes projects that provide for inclusive economic development.
Equity / Connectivity
Support
En Bloc 1
PASSED
118
Crow (CO), Torres, Ritchie (NY), Moore (WI)
Ensures historically excluded communities are considered in the expansion of electric vehicle charging infrastructure deployment.
Equity / Electric Vehicles
Support
En Bloc 4
PASSED
133
Johnson, Hank (GA)
This amendment increases the eligible funding for transit operating expenses from the Carbon Pollution Reduction Program up to 20 percent, allowing states to use these funds to make transit service more frequent and reliable—which has a notable impact on carbon reduction.
Public Transit
Support
En Bloc 4
PASSED
139
Johnson, Hank (GA)
This amendment prioritizes transit operations expenses in the Reducing Transit Deserts grant program by removing construction of maintenance facilities as an eligible expense. Maintenance facilities projects could swamp this small program and are eligible for funding elsewhere, while transit operations are harder to fund.
Public Transit
Support
En Bloc 4
PASSED
144
Perry (PA)
This amendment prohibits the use of funds to expand the Amtrak passenger rail network. At a time when communities across the country are clamoring for more connections and more options of all kinds—especially in places not well connected to airports or other interstates—this amendment is especially out of touch with the needs of Americans, both urban and rural alike.
Passenger Rail
Oppose
En Bloc 3
Failed
148
Johnson, Hank (GA)
This amendment makes expanding transit service hours and/or days an eligible expense for the Reducing Transit Deserts grant program. The underlying program only focuses on improving frequencies, but extending service hours is just as important for reaching more riders who need transit the most.
Public Transit
Support
En Bloc 4
PASSED
151
Perry (PA)
This amendment would strike the FTA Capital Investment Grant Program, which is used to provide funding for fixed guideway
investments such as new and expanded rapid rail, commuter rail, light rail, streetcars, bus rapid transit, and ferries, as well as corridor-based bus rapid transit investments that emulate the features of rail. This would starve public transit system of much needed capital funding to replace their assets and expand their transit network.
Passenger Rail
Oppose
En Bloc 3
Failed
157
Moore (WI)
Increases the percent set-aside for Low and Moderate Community Grant program within the Zero Emission Bus Grant Program from 10 percent to 15 percent. This will help communities tight on resources to be able to afford to purchase zero emission buses and charging infrastructure with additional federal support.
Promotes the domestic manufacture and use of advanced, fuel-efficient vehicles and zero-emission vehicles, and encourages electrification of the transportation sector. This will help promote electric vehicle technology as an augmentation of the existing vehicle experience (and getting people to touch, feel, and experience electric vehicles), while bolstering a growing domestic manufacturing industry.
Strikes Section 1201's requirements that states prioritize state of good repair needs over constructing new highway capacity. Outright bad policy to keep on building new roads while the existing roads continue to fall apart. Talk about a huge safety risk and a hit on our wallet with congestion and accelerated vehicle damage. A new road in a sea of crumbling infrastructure, it won't get you far.
Maintenance
Oppose
En Bloc 3
Failed
237
Jackson Lee (TX), Espaillat (NY)
Provides local governments more control over where the funds for the new "Safe Streets" program are spent, by requiring state Departments of Transportation to consult with the local governments before carrying out these complete streets’ projects. The “Safe Streets” program uses sets aside safety funds to reduce fatalities and serious injuries on public roads, with a focus on vulnerable road users such as pedestrians, bicyclists, scooters users, and motorcyclist. Very often, funding is steered by State DOTs without recognizing or consulting the on-the-ground local experience. This amendment looks to get local governments at the table as to where this funding is spent towards complete streets.
Local Control / Safety
Support
En Bloc 4
PASSED
247
Gibbs (OH)
This amendment allows state DOTs—such as the Ohio DOT in Rep. Gibbs’ home state, which spends next to nothing on transit service statewide—to seize transit funding and spend that money on highways, overriding local control and eliminating funds from documented local multimodal needs. It also prohibits using transit funds for art, non-functional landscaping, and sculptures—or for paying the cost of including an artist on the design team. This might seem pennywise but it’s incredibly pound foolish. Allowing a small amount of transit funding to support artists' involvement leads to projects that are more responsive to their surrounding communities' needs, better incorporate the desires of riders, and avoid a one-size-fits-all approach. Additionally, these funds support local artists' small businesses, further benefiting the communities adjacent to transit projects.
Placemaking / Local Control
Oppose
En Bloc 3
Failed
251
Brady (TX)
Revises the Railroad Rehabilitation and Improvement Financing program to add new conditions of assistance for loans and loan guarantees issued through the program. This only will add burdensome hurdles and complicate a critical program aimed to help finance rail infrastructure.
Passenger Rail
Oppose
En Bloc 3
Failed
261
Tiffany, Thomas (WI)
Stipulates that no funds made available from the Highway Trust Fund may be expended for any purpose other than road and bridge construction. This short-sighted amendment would starve off funding from a significant portion of our transportation system, including our rail network, public transportation, active transportation infrastructure. Additionally, this amendment would starve off funding from critical research and education programs that advance transportation efficiency and safety.
The infrastructure deal could end up spending money just like our current transportation program does — it’s unclear. Graphic from Repair Priorities
In the midst of debates over a new long-term federal transportation law, there’s been nonstop coverage of a potential bipartisan deal on new infrastructure investment that has the White House’s backing, but much of the reporting raises more questions than it answers. What do we know about the potential deal, and what questions does T4America have?
Capitol Hill has been abuzz in recent weeks about transportation reauthorization, whether the Senate’s dud of a highway title, the House’s much better all-in-one comprehensive proposal (The INVEST Act), or the Senate Commerce Committee’s very good rail and transportation safety title—though we’re still waiting to see the Senate’s transit proposal from the Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee.
With those competing proposals to replace the FAST Act (expiring in September) in the background, a bipartisan group of 21 senators have been hammering out a standalone infrastructure package that can get the President’s endorsement and potentially pass both chambers of Congress. Just last Thursday (6/24), the bipartisan group of senators met with and secured President Biden’s endorsement of their broad deal on infrastructure. The deal’s details are still emerging and making political waves on both sides of the aisle, but here is what we know (not much), don’t know (quite a bit), and really want to know.
What we know
The infrastructure deal is a $1.2 trillion framework that would make historic investments in clean transportation, power, and water infrastructure; universal broadband infrastructure; and climate resiliency. The framework highlights proposed funding amounts and how to pay for such a transformational framework—the latter of which has received ample coverage from the Hill media at the expense of more substantial reporting on the actual real-world impacts of the deal, much to our consternation:
People: What's in the deal? Will states be required to fix all the broken stuff first? What policies will guide the spending? What does this mean for transportation in my state?
Media: Here's our savvy behind the scenes look at the political implications, and who "won" the deal pic.twitter.com/5akDv16I4P
— Transportation for America (@T4America) June 25, 2021
There’s a lot more that we don’t know about what’s in this deal, than what we do know.
The framework is very light on specific details as to precisely how these funds would be spent and what measurable goals they intend to achieve. Is this funding framework intended to put money into existing programs and existing transportation policy? Something proposed by the Senate and/or House? Or something else entirely? After T4America was asked numerous times by the media last week if this bill has “enough” funding in it, there’s frankly just not enough information on “how” the money will be spent in order to make that call.
“You can spend a trillion dollars in highways and not spend a dime on repair. So seeing something titled ‘Highways’ with a number by it doesn’t tell me what will be repaired so I can’t answer whether this is enough,”
The bottom line here is, what are we paying for? Transportation for America believes strongly that if we are buying something, we want to know WHAT we’re buying before we decide how much *whatever it is* will cost.
The Senate committee tasked with handling the rail portions of the larger transportation bill managed to produce a bipartisan bill that also makes the expansion of reliable, frequent rail service to more Americans a cornerstone of its approach.
Residents of Pascagoula, MS outside the train station during the Gulf Coast Inspection Train several years ago
While the House writes their five-year transportation proposal all at once in one committee, the Senate breaks up the policy work between three committees. The Senators on the Environment and Public Works (EPW) Committee focused on bipartisanship at the expense of good outcomes for spending transportation dollars, but the Commerce Committee Senators, charged with passenger rail, safety, and a few other related issues, managed to be both bipartisan and set policy that will create a better, more effective transportation system.
Here’s a look at the good and the bad in the Surface Transportation Investment Act of 2021 before the committee considers it in full and likely votes on it this Wednesday, June 16.
The good: A national network of robust, passenger rail service is vital for the country’s future.
These Senators are proposing substantial steps to 1) expand, increase, and improve service, 2) focus on the entire national network (rather than just the northeast corridor), 3) encourage more local, ground-up coalitions of local-state partnerships for improving or adding new service, and 4) make it easier to finance projects and expand that authority to transit-oriented development projects. They also propose some important changes to the data we gather on safety across the entire transportation system, including our streets and roads.
Funding to expand/improve passenger rail service When it comes to providing more funding overall for passenger rail, they propose $5 billion for the same program (Consolidated Rail Infrastructure and Safety Improvements) which provided $33 million for restoring Gulf Coast passenger rail, allowing many more communities to benefit from this program. (Current funding is about $350 million a year, or ~$1.75b over the life of the current law..)
They also provide $300 million for the Restoration and Enhancements grants that provide critical start-up operating support for new or expanded passenger service, and allow those funds to be used over six years instead of just three—recognizing that establishing new ridership on a line can take a few years.
A lot of the country’s rail infrastructure is also badly in need of updates, and the bill proposes $1.5 billion to make long overdue repairs through what they call the Federal-State Partnership for Intercity Passenger Rail Grants for state of repair.
Amtrak For the country’s passenger rail operator, they propose a small but vital shift in mission and goals to emphasize Amtrak’s role in providing service both to rural communities and in long-distance routes and a national network. To help make this happen, they will require representation on the Amtrak Board from the Northeast Corridor, state-supported routes and long distance routes. They’ll require Amtrak to post station agents at stations with at least 40 passengers a day (and require them to be able to sell tickets), making it easier for people to use and navigate the service in smaller towns. And lastly, they’ll prohibit Amtrak from discontinuing, reducing the frequency of, suspending, or substantially altering the route of any long-distance route if Amtrak receives adequate funding for that route.
Duplicate the success of the Southern Rail Commission A new grant program will authorize up to ten interstate rail compacts, including the Southern Rail Commission, which has been key to restoring passenger rail service on the Gulf Coast, and provide up to $1 million annually for each one. (This is double what the House provided for these commissions.) Up to $1 million—which has to be matched 50/50 with local or state dollars—isn’t a huge sum but it would be hard to overstate the potential impact of creating nine more entities like the SRC to lay the groundwork and build the coalitions required to create or improve rail service in scores of other regions. (Read more about a similar House bill and the importance of these rail compacts here.)
Improving access to financing for rehab and improvement projects A major challenge with rail rehabilitation and improvement (RRIF) projects has been not only securing financing, but incorporating the project’s credit risk (the cost of creating the loan). This bill proposes $50 million to help offset some of these credit risk insurance premiums on financing RRIF projects.
Making it easier to finance transit-oriented development projects
More homes, offices, and retail near transit are in high demand, but because these big, complex projects are more difficult to finance than other types of conventional suburban development. The bill makes these projects (not just their rail components) permanently eligible for financing from the above RRIF program—something we’ve been working on for more than six years. “The areas around our country’s passenger rail stations are often economic sleeping giants,” as T4America co-chair John Robert Smith said in this 2015 T4America story about a previous iteration of this idea. “Finding ways to finance and catalyze smart development in and around them is a proven strategy to boost local economies.”
Extra: Safety provisions While most of the road and transit policy gets written by other Senate committees, the Commerce Committee also has jurisdiction over safety data and reporting, and they propose some notable changes.
As chronicled in Dangerous by Design, federal data on who is being killed while using the transportation system—especially people who aren’t in a car—are incredibly limited. We don’t even know how many people are killed while trying to navigate unsafe streets in wheelchairs, for example, so the committee calls for new crash data systems to be able to distinguish bicycles, electric scooters, and wheelchairs. They propose a $200 million a year grant program for local governments to develop and carry out Vision Zero safety plans to prevent death and injury on our roads and streets. Perhaps most interestingly, they require the Secretary of Transportation to finally examine updating hood and bumper safety standards for cars and trucks with a focus on how they are affecting the injuries and deaths of pedestrians, bicyclists, or other vulnerable road users. While more needs to be done on this count (and it needs to be done far faster than the bill specifies), it’s a big deal to see a bipartisan bill finally start to call out this issue in legislation.
Dangerous by Design 2021 focused heavily on designing streets for SPEED instead of SAFETY, but don't sleep on what happened to our vehicles during the decade’s historic 45% increase in pedestrian deaths. https://t.co/BWDyZaWXxR 1/ pic.twitter.com/FrQgDPu4dr
While the bill has a ton to praise, there are just a few missed opportunities worth noting and a few places where it falls short of what was in the INVEST Act in the House.
The bill doesn’t include two exciting rail investment programs proposed by the House. The bill lacks any funding for the PRIME program, which is devoted to expanding and improving intercity passenger rail. The Senate proposal also lacks the Bridge, Tunnels and Safety grants which would fund major capital projects, rail bridges, stations, and tunnels that are publicly owned or owned by Amtrak. The House proposed $25 billion for each of these programs.
Just because projects are big or expensive doesn’t mean they are wise investments. A new National Infrastructure Project Assistance program is designed to help fund projects of national significance that cost over $500 million or a large portion of small states’ transportation budgets. But while these projects are indeed hard to fund, this program is far too focused on costs and price tags, and only barely mentions any measurable things we want to accomplish. Just because projects are big doesn’t mean they are smart, and we should think about what they might do before providing money for them.
A new multimodal grant program like TIGER needs to provide more money for the best local projects. A new program called Local and Regional Project Assistance is basically like a new $1.5 billion TIGER/BUILD/RAISE program for locals, but the $25 million cap is too low and should be raised to at least $75 million so that it doesn’t keep larger but worthwhile projects with good outcomes from applying. The program’s size is sufficiently large to both advance a few larger projects while also giving out a large number of grants to the best projects. As an example, in the first round of TIGER, there was $1.5 billion available with no cap, yet USDOT made 3 grants of around $100 million while still advancing 55 total projects.
A multimodal freight program should not presume that half of the country’s best freight projects are road projects. The bill provides $1.2 billion for Nationally Significant Multimodal Freight Projects, but for some inexplicable reason, this bill caps the funding for truly multimodal projects at only 50 percent of the program—basically earmarking 50 percent for highway projects, before they’ve ever seen a proposal or spent a dime.
Why in the world is the committee with multimodal jurisdiction—rail, ports, and pipelines— and no jurisdiction over the highway part of the bill so intent on giving money to highway projects? And these are not gas tax dollars subject to the trust fund—this is a discretionary program using general tax dollars. Lose the cap entirely on multimodal projects and just select whatever projects will accomplish the most with the money.
As more Americans begin returning to work and daily life, we need transit to be there, running reliably and frequently, getting us where we need to go. There’s an exciting new proposal to fund increased transit service across the country, but time is short to build support for this important legislation.
Photo by T4 supporter Richard Rabinowitz.
While the INVEST 2.0 awaits a vote by the full House later this month, there are ongoing efforts to make further improvements to that already strong bill. Rep. Hank Johnson’s (GA) Stronger Communities through Better Transit Act is a must-have bill that would produce higher quality transit in communities of all sizes across the country. This vital piece of legislation would create a new program to fund transit operations costs, available to all transit agencies, rural and urban, in order to:
Increase service frequency so that people don’t have to wait so long for the bus;
provide additional hours of service so that those who don’t work white-collar hours can still get to their jobs; and
add new, frequent service to underserved communities in the region.
We have a tremendous chance to build an engine for equitable economic growth across the country through more robust transit service and systems. The more support this bill gets, the more likely that House leadership will include it in whatever final transportation and infrastructure product they consider later this month.
The Stronger Communities Through Better Transit Act is a game changer: 💰Authorizes $20 billion annually for FY2023-FY2026 🚍 Requires funds be used for projects that that boost frequency of buses, trains and increases routes ✅ Requires funding go to underserved communities pic.twitter.com/Ys0MzW2M9q
— Rep. Hank Johnson (@RepHankJohnson) June 9, 2021
Why we need more funding for operating transit
For decades, not only has transit gotten only 20 percent of federal transportation funding, but that funding has been limited by Congress to only maintenance and capital needs—not the day-to-day costs of running trains and buses. This moratorium was lifted for rural transit agencies in 1998, though it’s not a big benefit to rural transit agencies to make them choose whether to fund existing service or develop additional service with their limited funds. They don’t need flexibility: they need more robust funding. Beyond these rural agencies, large and mid-sized agencies still do not receive any operating funds, which make up two-thirds of public transportation’s costs.
This has to change in order to create the equitable and sustainable transportation system necessary to connect everyone to opportunities.
It wasn’t always like this. In the 1970s and 1980s, the federal government matched as much as $1 of operating assistance to transit agencies for every $2.25 provided by local and state governments, as we wrote with partners in this report. The current federal focus on only capital needs instead of providing quality service, leads many transit agencies towards spending “large quantities of federal funds upgrading or extending a handful of routes while neglecting the broader network of service,” and as a result, “ridership stagnates or shrinks.” In fact, following the stimulus bill in 2009, numerous transit agencies received money to buy new buses or railcars at the same time they were cutting service and laying off employees because of the Great Recession, putting many agencies in the ludicrous position of having tons of money to buy vehicles they could not afford to operate.
All Americans—no matter where they live—deserve transportation options that are convenient, affordable, sustainable and safe. But this arcane policy makes it an uphill climb for transit agencies to deliver that kind of service. In fact, fewer than 10 percent of Americans live within walking distance of transit that runs every 15 minutes or less, TransitCenter found.
The lack of operating support for public transit—and the severe underfunding of transit in general—also doesn’t impact everyone equally. People of color make up 60 percent of transit riders. Of that, 24 percent are Black Americans. In addition, 19 percent of Black households have no access to a vehicle, compared to 9 percent of households nationally with no vehicle access.
“A transit system that truly works has to be frequent and reliable,” said former Transportation Secretary Rodney Slater in a recent op-ed. “People should be able to depend on a bus coming every 10 minutes, no matter where in the country they live.”
Imagine a United States where every community has convenient, reliable, frequent transit service that can safely and conveniently get you to work, school, shopping, church or anywhere else you need to go; where you don’t need to spend thousands of dollars per year owning and operating a car if you don’t want to or can’t afford to. Putting millions more Americans within reach of frequent transit service is possible, and Rep. Johnson’s bill is our best opportunity to start to realize that vision.
Use the form above to tell your representative to support this bill.
Ed. note: the second half of this post was adapted from this related post we wrote back in May.
With the House’s INVEST in America Act being considered in committee on Wednesday, it’s a good time to look at what else beyond our core three principles in the bill are worth praising and potentially even improving.
Photo of Metroway (bus rapid transit in Northern Virginia) by BeyondDC on Flickr’s Creative Commons.
Most of the time, when we evaluate long-term transportation policy proposals or infrastructure bills from Congress, we start with a “good, bad, and ugly” post, but this House bill doesn’t fit well into that rubric. There’s a lot of great, some good, a few things that could use further refinement, and a couple of missed opportunities; but nothing that falls into the category of “bad,” much less “ugly.” It also has a lot of the same language in the INVEST Act introduced in the last Congress which stalled before a Senate vote, which also went 3 for 3 (after some modifications) on our scorecard.
With that in mind, here are nine specific things in the House bill (INVEST 2.0 for shorthand) that we wanted to highlight. Bear with us, this is a longer post!
1) Avoids the Senate’s cardinal sin of creating small, new programs to fix mistakes actively being perpetuated by the larger, unchanged, status quo transportation program
The overall approach of the last 30 years has been to create small, exciting new programs to fix established problems (safety, pollution, etc) while allowing the much larger core program to exacerbate and further those same problems. This was our biggest complaint about the Senate’s bill from a few weeks ago.
If you want to create a program to fix the issues created by running interstates through neighborhoods, you should also stop actively running interstates through neighborhoods. Or consider the issues of repair and maintenance. As we noted in our scorecard post, this bill doesn’t just create some new repair programs, it requires states to produce a plan to maintain any proposed new capacity while making progress toward their state of repair goals anytime they spend money from the biggest pot of highway funding. That’s the kind of new approach that the Senate completely missed, but the House is proposing to implement for key issues like repair, climate change, and others.
2) It recognizes that transportation is primarily about people and connecting them to what they need
The current federal transportation program does not require that states actively improve access to jobs and services for the real people who use the system every day. Say what? This is why the bulk of current transportation funding goes toward increasing vehicle speed, a “goal” that focuses on concrete and steel instead of the needs of actual people and where they need to go. This House bill kickstarts a huge shift toward focusing on people instead of vehicles by instituting a new performance measure that requires project sponsors to improve access to jobs and services by all modes.
Under the House bill, state departments of transportation and regional planning organizations would have to measure whether all people traveling (not just driving) can reach jobs, schools, groceries, medical care, and other necessities. Further, states and MPOs would have to project the impact their projects would have on access and USDOT will review and publicly report their targets and progress. USDOT also has to collect that data and make it available to help with the measurement of multimodal access, and there are requirements to analyze the accuracy of the models and update direction to states and MPOs on how to improve access.
While seemingly minor and perhaps a little wonky, this would mark a big shift in how transportation projects are evaluated. Measuring access—not vehicle speed—is a people-first way to consider the impact of the billions we spend on transportation each year. With this, we can create more equitable access to economic opportunity, lower transportation costs, and reduce emissions and the damaging climate and health impacts of them.
3) Nails all three of T4America’s core principles
Click to read our scorecard post
As we’ve done with every infrastructure proposal or long-term policy proposal for the last few years, we’ve produced a scorecard to evaluate how it starts to redirect transportation policy toward T4America’s three core principles of 1) maintaining the current system, 2) protecting the safety of people on the roads, and 3) getting people to jobs, schools, groceries and health care. This bill nails all three of these principles Read more about how the House bill advances these three simple priorities in this post with the scorecard.
4) Advances our proposal to start tearing down divisive infrastructure and repairing the damage
Since 2020, with help from Third Way, T4America has been advancing a policy to undo the damage of “urban renewal” projects that have displaced more than a million Americans since construction of the Interstate Highway System and that continue to harm communities of color today. Our plan focuses heavily on creating a competitive grant program to redesign or deconstruct things like divisive highways, and creating strategies to prevent displacement so that this work generates wealth for the communities that suffered most, in addition to a few other strategies.
What the sunken, divisive Rochester Inner Loop used to look like, before being filled in and replaced with a surface boulevard. The House bill would kickstart efforts like this across the country. Flickr photo by Friscocali
The House runs with our proposal through a $3 billion ($600 million a year) Reconnecting Neighborhoods program, which is six times larger than a similar proposal in the Senate bill. This program will analyze neighborhood barriers (like interstates) and identify candidates for remediation, repurposing, or removal. In addition, part of that money can also be used to establish a community advisory board or a land trust to preserve the new wealth for those most affected by the divisive infrastructure. There are some details we’d like to enhance, but this idea has gained incredible traction over the last year and we are excited about the possibilities for the future.
5) Recognizes that you must address climate change within the entire transportation program
Download our report on lowering emissions through better land use and transportation
Transportation is the largest source of carbon emissions in the United States, and the majority of them come from driving. The bill addresses the entirety of the transportation program by establishing a new greenhouse gas performance measure and requiring states to set positive targets to reduce emissions. It gives states the latitude to figure out their own preferred path to hitting those targets, but we know that infrastructure investments that give people more options than hopping in the car are key to reducing these emissions. INVEST 2.0 creates programs to fund these projects at both the state and city levels.
While making it easier to drive less overall should be central to our short-term climate and transportation strategy, we do need to accelerate the transition to electric vehicles as well. This is why we’re part of a unique coalition called CHARGE—the only “electric vehicle” coalition where improving and expanding public transit is the first priority. This bill creates a new program to build electric vehicle charging stations along corridors and sets standards to require them to be open to the public and work with all kinds of electric vehicles.
There are also some good provisions targeted at making the transportation system more resilient to climate change and making resilience an eligible use in the largest highway programs. One place where the bill could be improved is to require resilience to be built into the design of all projects.
6) Measuring access to jobs and services is one of the best ways to address equity, but this bill includes others
As noted above, requiring agencies to measure and improve access to jobs and services for all people is perhaps the single greatest change to remake transportation policy in a more equitable way. But INVEST 2.0 would also improve equity in other ways—something we wrote about at length last summer in the context of the House’s very similar 2020 proposal. Prioritizing access, investing in more and better transit, building safer streets for people, and investing in what we have would all have an impact on equity. Considering the similarities between that bill and this year’s INVEST in America Act, that evaluation still stands.
7) Support for expanded national passenger rail
Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS) addresses an enormous crowd in Gulfport during a rally for restoring Gulf Coast passenger service. Photo by Steve Davis / T4America
Expanding and improving our nation’s passenger rail network to bring better, more reliable passenger rail service to more people is one of the best ways to improve access for millions of Americans in big urban areas and small rural ones alike. This bill creates a new $5 billion a year program for high speed and intercity rail investments, triples the funding for the existing program for improved safety and efficiency in passenger and freight rail service, and funds Amtrak at $32 billion over the life of the bill.
The House incorporated several of our other recommendations, including updating the Amtrak Board to have better representation from riders and the national network as well as the Northeast Corridor. More importantly, it allows for the formation of more multi-state rail commissions like our partners the Southern Rail Commission, which has been the key to (almost!) restoring passenger service along the Gulf Coast, and provides funding for them to operate.
There is some opportunity to strengthen the authorities for the Federal Railroad Administration and the Surface Transportation Board to prevent the freight railroads from obstructing or interfering with that service.
8) A strong commitment to transit…
INVEST 2.0 provides over $21 billion for transit, a sizable increase over the current $13 billion program, and it also includes some funding for operations—a major win, as operations funding has typically been a no-go with federal funds. Funds from the Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality program and even the core Surface Transportation program can be used for transit operations. There’s also a new one-time competitive grant program to support capital and operations costs associated with addressing transit deserts through better, more frequent transit service.
Improving service frequency is a big focus of the bill. There is a new $100 million competitive grant program for transit agencies collaborating with state or local governments to increase bus frequency and ridership by redesigning urban streets to better move transit (and more people) in congested areas. There is also a change to the funding formula that prioritizes frequency.
9) But with opportunities for greater improvements on transit
While the bill makes some important changes and does slightly increase its share compared to highways, the bill does not hit T4America’s priorities of equalizing transit funding with highway funding, nor does it create long term support for keeping transit running. We will be once again turning to leaders on Capitol Hill to move these efforts forward. Rep. Jesus “Chuy” Garcia of Illinois has led the effort to invest in transit as strongly as we do highways, and we hope he uses this bill as an opportunity to push that effort forward.
On the operations side, Rep. Hank Johnson of Georgia is leading an effort to create a federal program for transit operating support. The Stronger Communities through Better Transit Act would create a new grant program available to all transit agencies, rural and urban, to increase service frequency so that people don’t have to wait so long for the bus; to provide additional hours of service so that those who don’t work regular hours can still get to their jobs; and to add new, frequent service in the region. We are proud supporters of that bill and we encourage you to tell your House rep to join Rep. Johnson as a sponsor.
Late last week the House released their new five-year proposal for transportation policy and spending, known as the INVEST in America Act. By focusing on making tangible progress on outcomes like repair, safety, climate change, and access to jobs and services—rather than just asking for more money for more of the status quo—House leaders have again proposed a paradigm shift in how we spend transportation dollars and measure what they accomplish.
The first, most important thing to know about the new Invest in America Act is that it’s quite similar to the INVEST Act, which was approved by the House in the last Congress but which failed to advance to the Senate. This new bill picks up where the INVEST Act left off, repeating almost all of the good provisions and making improvements. As we said in our statement last Friday about the bill, “this is a paradigm shift from the approach of the last 30 years of proposing small, exciting new programs to fix recognized problems while allowing the much larger core program to exacerbate and further those same problems.”
It’s the kind of fundamentally new approach we need.
As we’ve done with every infrastructure proposal or long-term policy proposal for the last few years, we’ve produced a scorecard for the bill to measure how the Invest in America Act starts to redirect transportation policy toward T4America’s three core principles of 1) maintaining the current system, 2) protecting the safety of people on the roads, and 3) getting people to jobs, schools, groceries and health care.
1) Prioritizes maintenance first in nearly every program
We can’t keep choosing to expand with no plan to maintain. We’ll never make progress on our infrastructure if we don’t start prioritizing the care of the valuable assets we’ve spent decades and billions of dollars building.
As we wrote last summer, we’re “expending money we don’t have to build roads we can’t afford to maintain which fail to bring the promised economic returns—all while neglecting repair needs.” While our preference would be to cut maintenance backlogs in half by dedicating formula dollars to maintenance, this bill finally brings the kind of focus on repair that we need, pushing transportation agencies to prioritize maintenance across the board in core programs—the most important way to make repair a priority—while also creating some new repair programs. This stands in sharp conflict to the Senate approach which favors providing state DOTs the flexibility to ignore their repair needs in order to build new things they can’t afford to maintain.
As an example of that approach, for one of the two largest programs typically used on highways (the National Highway Performance Program), this bill requires project sponsors to have a plan to maintain any proposed new capacity while making progress toward their state of repair goals. Overall, this bill maintains the INVEST Act’s language requiring a long-term maintenance plan for any proposed new capacity project and a record of improving their state of repair, includes a provision requiring states to spend no less than 20 percent of their main highway programs on bridge repair, creates a new programs to fix bridges and a $1 billion program for repairing rural bridges, adds a unique program to prioritize replacing the oldest buses, and creates other new programs focused on the maintenance of rail crossings, bridges, and tunnels.
2) Institutes a comprehensive approach to safety
Designing for safety over speed is our second principle, with a call to save lives with road designs that support and encourage safer, slower driving.
The conventional approach to designing highways—wide lanes and wide roads to allow for high speeds—has resulted in the highest number of people being struck and killed while walking and biking in three decades, in addition to a record rate of in-vehicle fatalities in 2020 as traffic evaporated and speeds increased. Our roads are deadly by design, and safety needs to supersede moving cars fast at all costs.
Last summer’s INVEST Act was strong on this count, and this bill maintains almost all of that positive language, which might be easiest to digest in a list of bullets:
It removes states’ current ability to set negative targets for safety, i.e, planning for more people to die on their roads next year with the money they spend. This stands in stark contrast to the Senate bill which continues to provide states with the “flexibility” to continue with this practice, with no penalties and certainly no concrete, accountable goals for saving lives and reducing deaths.
It will no longer require states to use the unreliable sorcery of traffic modeling that so often results in prioritizing speed and vehicle throughput over peoples’ lives.
The Transportation Alternatives Program, which is used to make walking and biking safer and more convenient, is popular and oversubscribed in almost every state, where localities have to apply to the state for funds. Yet some states either sit on this money or transfer it into conventional road-building projects, a practice which will be curtailed by this bill.
The Highway Safety Improvement Program (HSIP) gets a new focus on vulnerable users and a push toward what’s known as a safe systems approach.
To create plans for Complete Streets and Vision Zero plans—an effort to completely eliminate traffic fatalities, in part through street design—states would be able to use a variety of federal funds for those efforts, including the HSIP program above.
Lastly, the 85th percentile rule for setting speed limits gets tossed, and states would instead be required to set speed limits with a consideration of the community surrounding the corridor, the number of bicyclists and pedestrians, and crash statistics (as opposed to just traffic conditions). Right now (with the 85th percentile rule), speed limits are set by how people behave; so if you build a wide street and people drive too fast, the speed limit is often raised to accommodate the rule breakers, showing just how pernicious the focus on speed over safety is with the current program.
This bill will most certainly create a safer transportation system and save lives. We may dive into the safety provisions in more detail in a longer post, so stay tuned.
3) States and metro area planners must determine how well their system connects people to jobs—drivers and non-drivers alike
If the goal of transportation spending is to connect people to jobs and services, then that must be measured and considered when funding decisions are made. Our third principle is measuring transportation success by how many jobs and services people can access, rather than the blunt and outdated assumption that cars being able to drive fast on specific segments of road equals success.
As with the INVEST Act last summer and for the first time at the national level, recipients of federal transportation funding will be required to measure how well their system connects people to the things they need, whether they drive, take transit, walk or bike. State DOTs and MPOs must consider whether people traveling (not just driving) can reach jobs, schools, groceries, medical care and other necessities, collect that data, and also make it available. And they will be penalized if they fail to use federal funding to improve that access.
This is truly groundbreaking stuff, and while there’s far more under this umbrella to highlight in a longer post, this represents a massive shift to how we currently spend money on transportation, which is largely unhinged from producing any sort of measurable improvement in access for everyone who uses the system.
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We will be taking some longer looks in a follow-up post at how the bill will impact other important areas beyond our three principles, like climate, equity, transit, passenger rail, and others, so stay tuned.
The House Transportation & Infrastructure Committee’s proposal for long-term transportation policy makes repair, safety, climate change, and access to jobs and services core goals for the bill’s spending, rather than just nice add-ons— taking a dramatically different approach than the Senate’s long-term proposal.
WASHINGTON, DC — “Federal transportation policy has been on autopilot for two decades, blindly pouring money into the same old programs and hoping for miracles when it comes to producing a transportation system that works for all Americans, keeps them safe, is well maintained, and helps meet our goals for reducing emissions and addressing climate change,” said Beth Osborne, director of Transportation for America. “As with the House’s proposal in the last Congress, Chairman DeFazio once again lays the groundwork for finally updating our country’s 1950’s approach to transportation to meet 21st Century needs.
“The proposal that Chairman DeFazio released today takes last summer’s fairly groundbreaking INVEST Act and improves on it. We are particularly happy to see the inclusion of a program to address transit deserts and another program to reconnect communities divided by transportation infrastructure, like highways.
“Like last summer’s bill, this proposal includes reforms to the core, fundamental programs to ensure that states prioritize repair, make safety a primary goal, and make access to jobs and opportunities a priority for the billions we invest each year. This is a paradigm shift from the approach of the last 30 years of proposing small, exciting new programs to fix recognized problems while allowing the much larger core program to exacerbate and further those same problems.
“That’s the kind of fundamentally new approach we need, and we are excited to work with the Committee to make it even better. We hope the Senate takes some cues and that both Democrats and Republicans focus their efforts on a proposal that generates better outcomes, rather than agreeing to prop up a stale and destructive status quo,” Osborne said.
Transportation for America is pleased to announce that Benito Pérez, a veteran of the District Department of Transportation in Washington, DC, is joining the staff as the new policy director.
The Transportation for America and Smart Growth America staff are pleased to welcome Benito to the team, and are excited to work together to help bring about urgently needed reforms to our country’s transportation policies. Benito begins work on June 7.
Learn more about our new policy director with this short Q&A:
How did you get into transportation policy? What makes it interesting for you?
My passion for transportation started young, experiencing mobility and its influences on land use as a military child growing up in Europe. That led to my educational pursuits in urban planning, sociology, and engineering. I got into the transportation policy space at the Maryland State Highway Administration, working on equity and inclusion policy and implementation. There, I got to see firsthand how policy influences opportunities and life experiences in our communities. In Hampton Roads, I worked on long range planning, focused on facilitating a livable and sustainable transportation vision for the future and identifying not only the projects and resources to implement the vision, but policy tools to support and enhance the vision. I became intimately involved in District transportation policy in 2012 at DDOT, working a diverse portfolio involving curbside management, public transit, and public space. I joined the operations team in 2015 to reorient curbside operations to operate within the regulatory framework, and deliver an improved curbside experience for all users by considering issues of inclusion.
With your local, city-based perspective, how have you seen the rubber meet the road with federal transportation policy in DC? What needs to change with federal policy to better meet the needs of cities of all sizes? What’s good about it?
Benito Perez, second from left, participating in one of the T4America’s Smart Cities Collaborative meetings back in 2017
All transportation is local and it impacts everyone. Transportation moves the goods we consume and get us around within and between our communities. However, federal transportation policy doesn’t always line up with what’s needed on the local level. At DDOT, I was involved with creating a more accessible transportation system, from the curb to the cycletrack. However, federal accessibility policies and guidelines are still very suburban and auto-oriented, making it a challenge to implement and accommodate in a dynamic, intense city environment. One of the ways we tackled that challenge was to partner with other peer cities and federal agencies in an effort to adapt federal transportation policy to the diverse unique community experiences—one of the key aims of the Smart Cities Collaborative at T4America that I was able to participate in while at DDOT.
What are some issues that policymakers should be paying very careful attention to right now, but are not currently thinking about?
There is a lot of change happening in transportation right now, especially thanks to technology. However, it’s important to focus on the basics of transportation system management versus the shiny new technology. Things like state of good repair and asset management programs. However, even more importantly, is rethinking how transportation impacts the end user. So issues such as accessibility, inclusionary and participatory planning/involvement in transportation decisions are critical to be on the same page across the country, ensuring that transportation is developed and managed for all.
You are arriving at T4America at a very interesting time, with both an infrastructure bill moving as well as long-term reauthorization proposals from the House and the Senate. Do you feel like the debate over transportation and infrastructure has changed?
It is an exciting time to be joining T4America. There are many new ideas and concepts being discussed in the transportation and infrastructure debates on Capitol Hill. However, the central discussion points remain the same. Legislators need to focus more on how to maintain, increase, and enhance mobility in their community to stimulate economic opportunities. And then how to balance those localized aspirations with the need to deliver a federal transportation program that collectively benefits the greater national good.
The ultimate point of transportation policy is to manage our transportation system and orient it toward specific outcomes and goals. Similarly to how T4America’s third principle proposes measuring “access to jobs and services” as a core way to measure whether or not the system is working. That kind of focus is what I’m eager to bring to these debates on Capitol Hill.
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More about Benito
Benito O. Pérez, AICP CTP CPM CAPP (he/him) is the Policy Director of Transportation for America. He previously served in various roles at the District Department of Transportation since 2012, which included Curbside Management & Operations Planning Manager, Curbside Management Planner, and Transportation Policy Specialist. During his DDOT tenure, he worked on and managed a team involved with creating, accessing, analyzing, visualizing, disseminating, and working with stakeholders to leverage data for policy development, resource allocation, and operations management of the District’s curbside and its intersection with the greater transportation network. Prior to DDOT, he was a Transportation Engineer with the Hampton Roads Transportation Planning Organization, working on long range transportation planning and its intersection with active transportation and land use. Additionally, he previously worked with the Maryland State Highway Administration, working on equity and inclusion issues in transportation. Mr. Pérez earned his Master of Arts in Urban Planning and Master of Science in Civil Engineering from the University of Florida in 2009.
Last month, Rep. Steve Cohen (TN-9) introduced legislation that would create interstate rail compacts across the country. This bill is inspired by the success of the Southern Rail Commission, a compact of states along the Gulf Coast that teamed up to restore passenger rail service destroyed by Hurricane Katrina.
Riding the Gulf Coast inspection train in 2016. An interstate rail commission of southern states is fighting to restore passenger rail service to the Gulf Coast.
Restoring or expanding passenger rail across state lines is a tall order. These projects take years—often decades—requiring collaboration between a rotating cast of state governors, presidential administrations, and local officials.
Multiyear rail projects need leadership continuity and regular collaboration between states. That’s where the Interstate Rail Compacts Advancement Act comes in.
Last month, Rep. Steve Cohen (TN-9) introduced this bill that would create interstate rail commissions across the country. These commissions are organizations of state representatives appointed by governors to promote, pursue, and help communities implement rail projects with technical assistance.
“Most intercity passenger rail serves a multi-state region, with passengers regularly traveling across state lines. However, regional collaboration to support passenger rail service is only as effective as coordination between Governors, State Departments of Transportation, and other relevant state and local officials and entities,” said Rep. Cohen in a press release on the bill. “By incentivizing states to create multi-state rail commissions, we can improve regional collaboration to support passenger rail service.”
The Interstate Rail Compacts Advancement Act would incentivize the creation of up to 10 passenger rail commissions by providing states with matching operating funds up to $500,000 per year per applicant.
We know firsthand how successful these commissions can be at making passenger rail projects reality through our work with the Southern Rail Commission (SRC). This compact between Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama was created by Congress in 1982 to develop passenger service in the region, and later focused on restoring service along the Gulf Coast after it was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
In 2019, the SRC won $33 million in a Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) grant to restore passenger service along the Gulf Coast between New Orleans and Mobile. More federal grants have rolled in since.
“Expanding intercity passenger rail service in the U.S. requires a high degree of coordination and planning across state borders. The decades-long project to restore passenger rail service along the Gulf Coast spanning three states is a case in point, requiring funding and close coordination from three different states,” said our chairman, John Robert Smith, and former mayor of Meridian, MS. “By incentivizing other states to work together in this fashion with the promise of additional matching federal funds, this bill will foster the same kind of successful collaboration in other parts of the country to expand and improve the country’s long-neglected passenger rail network.”
We urge Congress to pass the Interstate Rail Compacts Advancement Act to make it possible for more regions across the country to pursue passenger rail.
Last week, Democrats and Republicans in the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee unanimously passed a transportation reauthorization bill that would make reducing emissions, improving safety, and providing equitable access impossible. It’s clear that Democrats traded in their goals for “bipartisanship.” But so did Republicans.
Senator Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV) announcing the revised Republican infrastructure proposal last week, days after passing a horrible surface transportation reauthorization in her EPW Committee. Read T4America’s thoughts on this proposal here. Photo credit Senate GOP.
Transportation is historically bipartisan. In the past couple of decades, this has been because it was the one policy area where Democrats and Republicans could agree to undermine their own goals for the sake of “bipartisanship,” consistently passing bills that make U.S. transportation inefficient, expensive, unsafe, unsustainable and in poor condition. They both favor flexibility and deference over accountability for good outcomes and guaranteeing the taxpayer a good return for their investment.
It doesn’t have to be this way, we wrote last week when we highlighted three effective and bipartisan policies the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee could incorporate into its reauthorization proposal. But unfortunately it was this way—last Wednesday this committee passed a deeply broken yet “bipartisan” bill, the Surface Transportation Reauthorization Act of 2021 (STRA).
We have discussed how Senate Democrats lost big: this bill makes no real effort to reduce emissions, reduce the impact of transportation on Black and Brown communities, or make our roads safer. But Senate Republicans lost big too. Here’s how:
1. Billions of taxpayer dollars will get wasted
Republicans often talk about avoiding government waste. Yet this bill—supported by every Republican on the EPW Committee—wastes government resources and taxpayer dollars by design. How? It’s simple: pumping billions into widening and expanding highways without any plan to maintain them or their existing system creates billions in new liabilities. Billions.
In a press release on the bill’s passage, Ranking Member Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV) said that the bill will take “meaningful steps to repair our country’s crumbling roads and bridges.” But this just isn’t true. STRA doesn’t require that states spend federal highway dollars on maintenance before expansion. This is a huge problem because states rarely spend the majority of their federal funds on maintenance—in fact, many states even spend more on expansion than maintenance.
The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) estimates that the cost of repairing our backlog of maintenance needs is $435 billion, and a recent Washington Post analysis found that one-fifth of the nation’s major roads were rated in poor condition in 2019. Yet “more than one-third of states’ capital spending on roads that year, $19 billion, went toward expanding the road network rather than chipping away at the backlog.”
Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA) praised STRA for including her “Billion Dollar Boondoggle Act” in the bill, which would require that projects over a billion dollars and behind schedule be “disclosed” to the public (as if they aren’t already). She specifically complained about rail projects. But what should we call a highway expansion that runs over budget yet can pull down ever increasing federal highway funds to help cover the cost without even having a plan to maintain it when it is done, much less the rest of their system? When the bill comes due, leaders turn to the taxpayer or even seek to raise taxes to pay for it. [For the record, T4A does not oppose a gas tax increase. We oppose any new funding for bad policy.]
STRA is $303.5 billion spent over five years. Without any requirement that that money be spent on maintenance, we will spend billions to do exactly what we’ve done to create our current monster backlog of maintenance needs (more on that below). That is not protecting against government waste.
2. Congestion will get worse
Everyone hates traffic, but Republicans apparently don’t hate it enough to actually reduce it. Instead of acknowledging that highway expansions have only led to more traffic congestion, Republicans (and Democrats) are supporting the same-old “congestion relief” strategy: widening and expanding roadways.
Between 1993 and 2017, the U.S, added 30,511 new freeway lane-miles of road in the largest 100 metropolitan areas—an increase of 42 percent. That rate of freeway expansion significantly outstripped the 32 percent growth in population in those regions over the same time period. Yet this strategy made congestion worse—delay is up by a staggering 144 percent, as we found in our report, the Congestion Con. None of the largest 100 cities saw congestion decrease or even increase just a little, even those that lost population and added highway capacity.
We know that Republican senators, like Ernst, understand the value of using data to spend transportation funds on projects that improve access to jobs and services the most. That’s why Senator Ernst co-sponsored the COMMUTE Act, a bill that would create a pilot program to help state DOTs and MPOs make decisions this way. This approach looks at the whole trip and whether you get where you are going, rather than whether traffic speeds in certain areas are high (which is what we use today). Yet the overwhelming majority of funding in STRA remains targeted to moving cars faster, a policy that has only made our congestion problems worse.
3. Roads will stay deadly
Senator John Boozman of Arkansas praised how this bill will improve roadway safety, specifically highlighting the “restoration of flexibility for Highway Safety Improvement Program funds to better protect motorists, cyclists and pedestrians.” Oh my.
Both parties seem to think that states need “flexibility” to improve safety. But do they really need flexibility to set targets and organize funding around having more people die on our roadways next year than died in the previous year? That’s our current approach and what STRA maintains.
A more charitable take would be that states need the flexibility to be passive to safety problems because it is beyond their control, said our director Beth Osborne. But they will still ask the taxpayer to give them more money to “fix” it, using roadway designs that are proven to be dangerous, like slip lanes and wide roads with high speeds near lots of points of conflict and children walking to school.
4. Local priorities will be overruled and economic opportunity disrupted
Republicans strongly emphasize giving states the flexibility to spend federal dollars as they believe is necessary, even if it undermines the desires of a local community. Which it often does. STRA continues this tradition by allowing states to design high-speed surface roadways that disconnect and disrupt local communities, trail networks, and undermine Vision 0 efforts—over the objection of the local leadership and the population.
And despite Senator Capito saying that STRA improves access to economic opportunities, this bill (like the current system) largely allows only movement by vehicle, an expensive proposition for American households. The current system has increased how much everyone has to drive and increased the exposure to danger for those trying to walk around or access transit. Hardly equitable access to economic opportunity. This approach also ignores legions of research demonstrating how safe roads and transit access attracts businesses to local communities.
Senator Capito also praised the provisions in the bill that focused on “rural areas, like West Virginia.” But there is nothing in STRA to improve transportation access for the over one million rural households that have zero access to a vehicle.
Both parties lost big in this bill
“Like any successful collaborative effort, neither side got everything they want, but I am glad we were able to find common ground and put forward a bipartisan plan to rebuild and revive America’s roads and bridges,” Senator Kevin Cramer (R-ND) said when STRA was released.
But neither side got much of anything they wanted. STRA won’t “rebuild or revive America’s roads and bridges”—it will undermine all efforts to bring our ginormous maintenance backlog in check and double down on a transportation system where congestion keeps getting worse. People will have to spend more on transportation and taxpayers will have to spend more to make up for these failures. Both Democrats and Republicans lost big in this bill.
As our communications director Steve Davis said: if bipartisanship is the goal, the broken status quo is the result.
Statement from Transportation for America director Beth Osborne on the Republicans’ second infrastructure proposal
“We’re disappointed to see Republicans—again—fail to provide any real infrastructure policy proposal, opting instead for small amounts of funding pumped through the broken transportation program. This plan will pour billions into efforts that have failed to make a dent in our maintenance backlog, while increasing our financial liabilities far into the future.
“Republicans also want to hamper public transportation’s role in connecting people to jobs and services—critical as we strive to equitably rebuild our economy—by cutting transit funding by $15 billion over eight years. There is hardly anything worse we could do when trying to get people back to work than removing an essential form of jobs access to those struggling financially.
“This proposal’s total lack of policy changes necessary to ensure that we’re spending money on the right things and massive cuts to essential transportation for essential workers is the exact opposite of what our country needs right now, and we hope that Republicans reconsider this proposal yet again.”
Read our in-depth analysis of the Republicans’ first infrastructure proposal here.
A statement from Transportation for America director Beth Osborne on the surface transportation reauthorization bill passed today by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee:
“We’re incredibly disappointed to see the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee unanimously pass—yet again—another highway bill that cements the broken status quo in place for decades. This bill attempts to solve the problems with the transportation system with small, underfunded new programs while spending way more to continue to churn out those same problems.
“This bill is far from a down payment on the American Jobs Plan. In many ways it completely undermines it. The American Jobs Plan prioritized maintenance, climate, equity and safety; today the EPW Committee pushed those goals aside and passed a long-term bill that pumps billions into worsening these problems.
“Neither Republican nor Democratic priorities are addressed in this bill. It wastes taxpayer dollars trying to achieve congestion relief and safety with tools that have failed for decades. It creates barriers to employment and essential services for many people, particularly carless households in rural America, low income households and people of color. It allows states to opt out of lowering carbon emissions and continues to support strategies that are well known to raise them. In transportation, when bipartisanship is the goal, the broken status quo is the result.
“We don’t have time for another five years of creating more problems that will take 20-50 years to solve. We urge the Senate to engage in an open process to fix this bill or reject it and start again.”
This past weekend, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee released their proposal to reauthorize surface transportation policy for the next five years. The bill has bipartisan support, but it undermines bothparties’ stated goals. A bipartisan and effective bill is possible—here’s how.
Some current and former members of the Senate EPW Committee and the House of Representatives at a press conference in 2016. Photo by Senate Democrats.
At Transportation for America, often our efforts to enact policies that actually connect people to jobs and services—not build new roads to nowhere—are stymied by “bipartisanship.” Or what people think is bipartisanship.
To us, bipartisanship isn’t passing transportation policy that just makes our problems worse, even if it undermines Republican and Democratic priorities equally as the status quo approach does. The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee is proposing more of the same. And where this new, bipartisan bill does seek to solve problems, it does so through several new and exciting, but toothless and/or underfunded programs.
Bipartisan legislation should solve problems, not make existing ones worse. And bipartisan transportation policy is possible—just ask the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, where freshmen members on both sides of the aisle joined together to pack their reauthorization proposal with programs that would fundamentally improve the federal transportation program.
Here are three bipartisan policies that we urge Senate Environment and Public Works Committee members to incorporate into their reauthorization proposal at mark-up tomorrow.
1. Fix-it-first
Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have long-proclaimed the need to fix our “crumbling roads and bridges.” Yet despite continuously increasing federal transportation funding, this never gets accomplished—because states aren’t required to spend federal funding on maintenance before expansion.
The Senate EPW Committee should require that sponsors of roadway expansion projects demonstrate that they can operate and maintain what they are building while making improvements in the state of repair. This common sense amendment was proposed by a Democrat and Republican in the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee last summer and passed by unanimous consent.
2. Measure and prioritize access equitably
The federal transportation program should prioritize investments that actually connect people to the things they need, by all modes. This is also called “getting the most bang for your buck.” Yet for decades, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have agreed to focus on increasing vehicle speed by pouring money into expanded roadways—even though not every American can afford to own or operate a vehicle, and expanding roadways only makes traffic worse.
Measuring access to jobs and essential services and targeting federal funds to projects that improve access should be something that both political parties can enthusiastically support. It ensures that federal funds aren’t wasted and that funding can be equitably spent on rural access by developing a better understanding of rural transportation needs through data. It also improves access to the economy particularly for low-income people, communities of color, and people with disabilities. It is modern and makes more sense to the taxpayer than “delay” and “level of service.”
3. Prohibit negative safety targets
The number of people killed while walking is skyrocketing, but particularly in southern and Sun Belt states like Florida, New Mexico, and Alabama. Yet current law allows states to plan for more people to be killed than in the previous year with no penalties.
Prohibiting states from setting these destructive negative safety targets can be an easy issue for both parties to agree on. It would also make a huge difference in incentivizing states to spend Highway Safety Improvement Program funds on safety improvements for people who bike and walk.
Bipartisanship is only good if it produces good legislation
Ultimately, achieving Democrats and Republicans’ transportation goals doesn’t require vastly different policy proposals. Here’s what we wrote on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee’s very similar 2019 bill:
“While Republicans say their priority is to reduce demand for federal spending, avoid wasteful spending and efficiently move goods to market, the current program and the bill they passed fails to do so. While Democrats claim to want to create jobs, reduce emissions, and build a strong and fair economy, the current program and the bill they passed fails to do so.”
Achieving all of this is possible by fundamentally updating the federal transportation program to finally invest in getting people where they need to go by all modes, safely, sustainably, conveniently, equitably, and affordably.
Passing a status quo bill that just makes congestion worse, our streets less safe, our emissions higher, and access to opportunities more inequitable is not the bipartisan deal we should accept. This is not something to praise or be excited about.
We must hold both parties to a higher standard: because a bipartisan and effective bill is more than possible.
The Senate committee responsible for writing the highway provisions for our country’s long-term transportation policies released their proposal over the weekend. This bill makes some notable improvements and creates some vital, small new programs, but largely leaves the problematic status quo intact—akin to filling up a bucket with a leak in it.
Our country’s fundamental transportation problems—huge numbers of people killed on our roadways, skyrocketing greenhouse gas emissions, the inability to participate in the economy if you can’t spend $10,000 per year on a vehicle or have disabilities—are getting worse. Yet our federal transportation policy hasn’t changed in decades and is perpetuating many of these problems.
That’s why Transportation for America believes that current policy must be rewritten with these three principles to redirect funding in order to achieve the outcomes we need: getting everyone where they need to go safely, sustainably, affordably and conveniently. But this past weekend, the Senate Environment and Public Works (EPW) Committee released the “Surface Transportation Reauthorization Act of 2021” that follows the same-old, status quo approach.
(Update 6/15/21: This bill was approved by the committee and advanced to the Senate with no tangible improvements. We believe that both Republicans and Democrats traded away their core principles in the name of bipartisanship. We sent this letter to Senate leaders, signed by dozens of organizations and leaders from across the country, noting that “these failures cannot be fixed with tweaks around the edges. They require a fundamental rethinking of what the American taxpayer should get for their investment in transportation infrastructure.” A week before that, the House released their full five-year transportation proposal, which we praised and which went three-for-three on our core principles, in sharp contrast to this Senate bill.)
While there are definitely some things worth praising in this bill, it’s a lot like summer 2019, when this same committee passed a status quo bill that would make our climate, income inequality, economy, safety, and health much worse. Here’s our breakdown.
The good
Regular updates of the traffic engineers’ bible: The Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD) is a monster of a planning document that provides guidance for street designs across the country. The current iteration is marked by an overall approach that prioritizes moving cars quickly through developed areas (including downtowns) at the expense of the safety for everyone else. This 1950s approach to transportation makes it too hard to implement life-saving solutions, like requiring a certain number of people to be killed while walking at an intersection before a crosswalk can be added.
This bill requires the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) to update the MUTCD now and every three years with a focus on vulnerable users and safely testing automated vehicles. After months of trying to get the MUTCD changed this year, this is a huge win for Transportation for America, our partners (particularly America Walks and NACTO who led the effort), and anyone who cares about a people-first approach to street design that will save lives.
Requires states to spend active transportation dollars on active transportation: The small Transportation Alternatives Program (TAP) is designed to support projects that make it safer and more convenient to walk or bike. Currently, some states move these funds very slowly or transfer them to other programs. This bill would allow the Secretary of Transportation to increase the amount sent directly to the local governments clamoring for these funds to ensure that it gets spent on making it safe and comfortable for people to move around outside of a car.
Support for measuring multimodal access to jobs and essential services: Based on the COMMUTE Act, introduced by Sens. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) and Joni Ernst (R-IA), developed with T4America, the bill includes a transportation pilot program to develop or procure an accessibility data set and make it available to those selected to participate. The goal is to measure the level of access by surface transportation modes to important destinations, including jobs and essential services. It is authorized for 8 years and funded out of the department’s research program.
Creates a pilot program to measure access: For decades, the federal transportation program has spent money without any evaluation of where people need to go and how they can get there—focusing instead on moving cars quickly to nowhere. That’s why connecting people to jobs and services is one of Transportation for America’s three principles. This bill establishes a pilot program to develop or procure an access to jobs and essential services data set and make it available to those selected to participate.
Good, but…
Some funding to repair damage of urban highways but no measures to prevent displacement: This bill would create a sorely-needed $100 million per year competitive pilot program to reconnect communities that were divided by a highway or other infrastructure, based on our proposal with Third Way. This is indeed a major, welcome development, but $100 million is a drop in the bucket, and it also lacks any anti-displacement provisions to ensure that potential highway teardowns don’t harm the same communities by driving up the price of housing.
Complete Streets policies (good) but no requirement to fund them: This bill requires states and metro areas to use their funding and time to adopt Complete Street policies and standards, and develop a Complete Streets prioritization plan, but it fails to require them to apply that plan to the majority of the federal funds they receive.
A bridge repair program that lets new construction go unchecked: This bill creates a new $600 million competitive grant program for bridge repair or replacement, but once again, the Senate is choosing to create a stand alone new program in an attempt to fix a problem (bridge repair) that will be undermined by the lack of any requirement for states to prioritize repairing bridges. (See “the ugly” below.) We’ve had dedicated bridge repair programs before (as recently as 2012), and it failed to eliminate the backlog because states were allowed to just continue building more roads and bridges at the same time.
The bad
A carbon reduction program that’s no match for highway funding: This bill creates a program that sounds exciting (it would fund projects like advanced truck stop electrification systems, public transportation, facilities for pedestrians and bicyclists, congestion management technologies and more) until you realize that: 1) it is a small project to fix problems that the larger program will continue to create, 2) is subject to a provision that allows states to transfer 50 percent out if they wish, and 3) allows many states to opt out completely. So, much less exciting.
Propane and natural gas fueling stations…? Transportation is the largest source of carbon emissions in the U.S., and the majority of them come from driving. To address this, the EPW bill establishes a competitive grant program for Alternative Fuel Corridors to deploy electric vehicle charging infrastructure, hydrogen fueling infrastructure, propane fueling infrastructure (only for medium and heavy-duty vehicles), and natural gas fueling infrastructure along alternative fuel corridors. Deploying propane and natural gas stations is out of step with our needs and the kind of solution we’d expect to see proposed 20 years ago.
Continues to suggest that highways are the only solution for moving freight: The freight programs were created to identify barriers to freight movement and projects to remove them. All the planning is multimodal. But nearly all of the funding is for highways. The current program allows a meager 10 percent of funding to go to multimodal projects. This bill raises that number to 30 percent. Apparently states need flexibility to set targets for more roadway fatalities, but not to spend freight funds outside of highway improvements.
The ugly
No tightening of safety performance measures: While states have to set targets for improving roadway safety, states can actually plan for more people to be killed than in the previous year with no penalties. This bill fails to fix that. It attempts to dedicate funding to vulnerable users, adding a requirement that when 15 percent of road deaths are pedestrians, cyclists, or people using mobility-assistive devices, that state needs to spend 15 percent of Highway Safety Improvement Program (HSIP) funds on addressing vulnerable user safety.
To give an example of just how pitiful this is, in Florida (the most dangerous state for pedestrians), would be required to spend $18.7 million on vulnerable users of the $2 billion they get from the feds. The message, just from the scale, is that this is not a priority.
No requirement to fix-it-first: Our Repair Priorities report makes this clear: when states aren’t required to spend highway dollars on maintenance, many choose to build new roads that let the maintenance backlog grow, often on projects that make traffic worse. In fact, the Washington Post reported on this tendency to ignore repair just today. FHWA estimates a $435 billion repair backlog and the Post’s analysis found that one-fifth of the nation’s major roads were rated in poor condition in 2019, yet “more than one-third of states’ capital spending on roads that year, $19 billion, went toward expanding the road network rather than chipping away at the backlog.”
This bill contains no requirement that states prioritize repair or have a plan to maintain what they build or make progress on the state of repair of their system. This approach was approved unanimously in the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee when they moved the INVEST Act last summer, and it should be an obvious fix.
Exempts states from measuring and reducing greenhouse gas emissions: Instead of an executive action that can be implemented and undone by a future administration, this bill would legislatively direct USDOT and EPA to require states to measure and set targets for CO2 emissions from transportation. The Obama administration promulgated a rule to do just that, and it was withdrawn by the Trump administration. Unfortunately, this bill allows states to be exempted from this rule, rendering it meaningless. The rule is just to measure and set targets. Even that seems to be too much to ask.
No requirement to build resilient infrastructure: This bill provides a good pot of money to plan and make improvements to infrastructure to make it more resilient, both through planning and by building protective infrastructure on or near transportation assets to weather increasingly worse storms. But none of it is required. So a state can choose to build infrastructure that is vulnerable to natural disasters and then have the federal taxpayer bail them out by replacing that with a new, equally unprotected asset. Due to an additional change in the rules, the taxpayer might pay not just to replace the vulnerable asset but expand it—and likely replace the now bigger asset again later.
Luckily, it can be fixed
This bill is emblematic of our traditional approach to our country’s massive transportation problems: create new, too-small programs ostensibly designed to address major problems while continuing to perpetuate the same damage with the bigger core highway programs. For example, the majority of this bill will pour billions into the same-old highway programs that states use to pursue damaging, divisive, and largely redundant projects like the I-45 expansion in Houston.
The good news is that these areas are fixable with targeted changes or amendments. Transportation for America is working on four amendments we urge the EPW Committee to incorporate into the bill this Wednesday during the mark-up hearing. These amendments would improve the equity, climate, safety and repair sections of this bill. Stay tuned for more information by subscribing to our mailing list or following us on Twitter.
A statement from Transportation for America director Beth Osborne on the Surface Transportation Reauthorization Act of 2021 released this weekend by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee:
“Federal transportation policy has very serious problems to solve, from increasing pedestrian deaths, skyrocketing emissions, and the lack of equitable access to jobs and essential services. This bill tried to tackle them in the way we have seen in the past. It creates exciting new programs with a small amount of funding in the hope that it can fix the problems that will continue to be created by the much larger status quo program.
“However, the good things in the bill can be enhanced and built upon to reflect and enact all that is exciting about the American Jobs Plan. With targeted amendments that support fix-it-first, equity, safety, and our climate, this bill can achieve the outcomes we all care about. The investments we make today will impact communities for decades to come—we cannot afford to get it wrong again.”
For decades, the federal government has only provided funding for public transportation maintenance and infrastructure projects—not the day-to-day costs of running trains and buses. This has to change in order to create the equitable and sustainable transportation system necessary to connect everyone to opportunities.
Credit: IndyGo
Senator Menendez said it best at a Banking Committee hearing a few weeks ago: “We subsidize roads and bridges. I don’t get how transit is any different.”
We don’t get it, either. For decades, not only has the federal government allotted just 20 percent of transportation funding to public transit, but they have limited that funding to only maintenance and capital needs—not operating dollars. This moratorium has been lifted for rural transit agencies since 1998, but large and mid-sized agencies still do not receive operating funds, which make up two-thirds of public transportation’s costs.
It wasn’t always like this. In the 1970s and 1980s, the federal government matched as much as $1 of operating assistance to transit agencies for every $2.25 provided by local and state governments, as we wrote with partners in the Green New Deal for City and Suburban Transportation. Now, agencies have to count on fare revenue and sales taxes to maintain and expand service. Yet these two sources of funding are far from reliable. These two revenue streams plummeted in March 2020, forcing many agencies to temporarily cut service until federal emergency relief arrived.
The current federal focus on building infrastructure, not providing service, leads many transit agencies towards spending “large quantities of federal funds upgrading or extending a handful of routes while neglecting the broader network of service, and ridership stagnates or shrinks” as a result, as we wrote in the Green New Deal report.
All Americans—no matter where they live—deserve transportation options that are convenient, affordable, sustainable and safe. Yet federal transportation policy makes it impossible for transit agencies to deliver this service. In fact, fewer than 10 percent of Americans live within walking distance of transit that runs every 15 minutes or less, TransitCenter found.
Funding public transportation is also a matter of equity. The lack of operating support for public transit—and the severe underfunding of transit in general—doesn’t impact everyone equally. People of color make up 60 percent of transit riders. Of that, 24 percent are Black Americans. In addition, 19 percent of Black households have no access to a vehicle, compared to 9 percent of households nationally with no vehicle access.
“A transit system that truly works has to be frequent and reliable,” said former Transportation Secretary Rodney Slater in a recent op-ed. “People should be able to depend on a bus coming every 10 minutes, no matter where in the country they live.”
Imagine a United States where every community has great transit service that can safely and conveniently get you to work, school, shopping, church or anywhere else you need to go; a place where you don’t need to spend thousands of dollars per year owning and operating a car. Putting every American within reach of frequent transit service is possible—we just need to fund it.
We urge Congress to include operating support for public transit in the next surface transportation authorization, the long-term law that determines how much we spend on transportation and what we spend it on. The current law, the FAST Act, expires this September, giving Congress a rare opportunity to fundamentally remake American transportation.
President Biden has gotten a lot of attention for his (good) infrastructure plan and overall approach to transportation. But after 100 days in office, the administration has ignored a lot of low-hanging fruit when it comes to executive and administrative actions they can take to support public transportation, emissions reduction, and other critical goals.
Then Vice President Biden. Photo by the U.S. Embassy Jerusalem
In November 2020, along with Smart Growth America, we sent the incoming Biden administration a memo outlining executive actions and long-term legislation we urged the new president to initiate, which included a list of executive and administrative actions on transportation:
Issue area
Department
Status
Action
Access to federal funds
USDOT
Simplify applications for discretionary grant programs (like the Better Utilizing Investments to Leverage Development (BUILD) program) by creating an online application and benefit-cost analysis (BCA) process so that small, rural and limited-capacity agencies can more easily access federal funds.
Climate change
USDOT
Started rulemaking
We only measure what we treasure. Re-establish the greenhouse gas (GHG) performance measure for transportation abandoned by the last administration, follow this up with annual state GHG rankings, and provide guidance for projecting GHG emissions at the project level.
Climate change
USDOT
Done
Repeal the June 29, 2018, Federal Transit Administration (FTA) Dear Colleague to public transit agencies regarding the Capital Investment Grant program, specifically the treatment of federal loans as not part of the local match, inclusion of a geographic diversity factor in grant awards, and encouraging a low federal cost share.
Climate change
USDOT
Allow rural transit systems to receive funding from the Low and No Emission bus program.
Equity
USDOT
Identify infrastructure that creates barriers to mobility (such as highways or rail beds that divide a community). Then prioritize resources to address those barriers and the disparities they create (e.g., by removing infrastructure barriers or creating new connectivity).
Passenger rail
White House, USDOT
Review the Amtrak Board of Directors and assess the balance of the board with respect to support for and experience with vital long distance, state-supported, and Northeast Corridor routes, as well as civic and elected leaders from local communities actually served by the existing network.
Safety
USDOT
Revise the New Car Assessment Program to consider and prioritize the risk that increasingly larger automobile designs pose to pedestrians and cyclists and the driver’s ability to see pedestrians (particularly children and people using wheelchairs and other assistive devices.)
Safety
USDOT
Comment period extended
Reopen the comment period on the handbook of street engineering standards (the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices or MUTCD) used by transportation agencies to design streets, and reframe and rewrite it to remove standards and guidance that lead to streets that are hostile to or dangerous for those outside of a vehicle.
Technical guidance
White House, HUD, USDOT, GSA
Re-activate the Location Affordability Portal created by DOT and HUD and establish a location efficiency and equitable development scoring criteria to be applied to decisions involving location of new federal facilities, particularly those that serve the public.
Update modeling to achieve desired outcomes
USDOT
Improve traffic projections used to justify projects by issuing guidance requiring the measurement of induced demand and a review of the accuracy of current travel demand models by comparing past projections with actual outcomes, reporting their findings, and updating the models when there are discrepancies.
Update modeling to achieve desired outcomes
USDOT
Push states and metro areas to stop assuming that time savings automatically accrue due to faster vehicle speeds by updating the guidance on the value of time and instead start considering actual projected time savings for a whole trip.
Unfortunately, while the Biden administration has been saying many of the right things, the administration hasn’t made much progress on transportation in real terms, only addressing two of the actions in this list.
The good: A rule change
Repealed Trump changes to transit construction grants: Under President Trump, the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) made an unprecedented change to the program for building transit to count federal loans that get repaid in full by local governments as part of the federal share of a project’s cost, rather than the local share. This unfairly penalized local communities that use low-cost federal loans, essentially requiring more local funds for projects where the feds are only covering 50 percent or less of the cost. As per our recommendation, the Biden administration rescinded this rule in February.
The incomplete: More comments for street design manual
Comment period extended for the broken street design manual: The Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD) is a street design document used by planners across the country. To date, this manual’s overemphasis on designing for motor vehicle speed and failure to fully consider all modes of travel in the places where people live and work has contributed to the rising tide of people struck and killed while walking on streets that are dangerous by design—by creating and governing the design of streets that contribute to this crisis in the first place.
The Trump administration proposed tepid changes to the MUTCD that failed to reform the vehicle-centric standards that prioritize the cars racing through neighborhoods and rules which limit, for example, how communities can install crosswalks, bike and bus lanes, or traffic calming.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg brought up reforming the MUTCD in March as a technical fix the new administration could focus on, and the Biden administration took the important step of extending the period for submitting comments on the MUTCD.
The comment period ends on Friday, May 14th. USDOT and the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) have not yet committed to a rewrite or a fundamentally new approach that would prioritize safety and people. This is the moment for us to push for it. You can submit a comment directly on our website—it only takes one minute.
There is so much more that the Biden administration can do immediately to make a major positive difference in transportation policy, from requiring the measurement of induced demand in traffic projections used to justify highway expansions, to reinstating the greenhouse gas (GHG) performance measure repealed by the Trump administration. The latter measure was supported by 47 members of Congress in a letter led by Senator Ben Cardin (MD) and Rep. Earl Blumenauer (OR-3), and over 75 organizations and local elected officials in a letter we wrote and organized.
The Biden administration is making some major promises on transportation and infrastructure—most notably with the American Jobs Plan, the largest investment in infrastructure ever proposed by a president. But only the broad strokes of this plan were released. As we wrote last month, getting the policy right is critical to making sure that this investment delivers the sustainable, equitable, safe and efficient transportation system we need.
We’ve learned the hard way through years of big spending with no policy changes: Policy matters. Rulemaking matters. If the Biden administration truly wants to transform U.S. transportation, they need to do more than talk about it. They need to seize the opportunities to make changes that don’t require Congress to weigh in.
Last week, Senate Republicans released an infrastructure proposal in response to President Biden’s American Jobs Plan. Not only did Republicans cut public transit funding by $7 billion, but they missed the mark on the policy, pumping billions into the existing—and broken—federal transportation program. Here’s our take.
More of the same? No thanks. South Walton Boulevard in Bentonville, Arkansas, a fairly typical arterial state highway.
The pun in the headline is intended. Last week, Senate Republicans released a $586 billion “framework to improve the nation’s infrastructure” called the “Republican Roadmap.” As our director Beth Osborne noted, last Congress, the House passed legislation to fund all surface transportation programs at $494 billion over five years and the Senate passed $287 billion for highways alone. Considering that, this is quite a modest bump in funding.
But this is not our focus. Other people will talk more about the amount of money in this proposal, while to us, the money doesn’t matter as much as the policy. And Republicans got the policy wrong by seemingly failing to change anything about it, pumping billions into making our transportation problems worse—while severely cutting transit funding.
Even though we like the broad strokes released by the Biden administration on its infrastructure proposal—which we covered in-depth here—we’re not committed until we see the details. But we’re not even excited about the Republicans’ blurbs. Here’s our take.
Less public transit and passenger rail funding and no policy change
The Republican proposal provides substantially less transit and passenger rail funding than the Biden administration proposal, offering $61 billion and $20 billion respectively where President Biden proposed $85 billion and $80 billion. Even worse, Republicans included annual federal transportation funding in their $586 billion proposal, and ultimately cut public transit funding by $7 billion.
Yet the problem is not funding. If the money was being proposed to better purposes, we would support less funding. But here, Republicans propose to cut transit and pump $299 billion for roads and bridges in the same way we always have—the way that has produced unsafe roads especially for low income people and Black, indigenous, and other people of color; a huge maintenance backlog; ever-increasing congestion; and lack of access to economic opportunity without multiple cars per household.
Worse still,these funds only support maintenance and capital projects, not operating costs that would enable transit agencies to run more frequent buses and trains. (Some senators criticized this at last week’s Banking hearing.)
Another warning sign in the Republicans’ proposal is the emphasis on “partner[ing] with spending from state and local governments.” Currently, the federal transportation program limits federal transit funding from covering no more than 50 percent of a project’s cost, though 40 percent has been more common in recent years—while highway funding can cover up to 80 percent of a project’s cost—even 90 percent in some limited cases—forcing states and local governments to choose between costly transit projects and virtually free highway projects.
Fees for electric vehicles, but no change to the gas tax
In this proposal, Senate Republicans are ready and willing to levy user fees on electric vehicles in order to raise revenue for the highway trust fund. This fund is currently filled by another user fee—the gas tax—even though the gas tax is no longer able to cover trust fund expenditures on its own, requiring increasingly large influxes of general funds to stay afloat. This is because increasing fuel efficiency means that drivers are using less gas and because the gas tax hasn’t been raised since 1993, despite inflation.
We believe that both electric vehicles (EVs) and internal combustion engine vehicles should pay into the highway trust fund. But we don’t see the value of levying a tax on electric vehicles while failing to raise the gas tax.
In addition, there’s no funding in this proposal for charging infrastructure that supports electric vehicle deployment. Without widespread charging infrastructure across the country—something members of our new coalition, CHARGE, know is critical to getting more EVs on the road—we don’t even raise much revenue from an EV user fee.
No focus on maintenance or safety
Republicans propose spending $299 billion on roads and bridges, but wouldn’t require that states use those funds on maintenance. As we found in our report Repair Priorities, states still spend just as much on expansion as repair—states spent $21.4 billion on average on road repair annually and $21.3 billion annually on road expansion between 2009-2014 even as road conditions continued to deteriorate. That’s because the federal government doesn’t require states to spend their highway funding on maintenance before expansion—and the Republican proposal wouldn’t do so either.
This past year has been particularly deadly on American roads, with deaths increasing by 24 percent despite fewer miles driven, according to the National Safety Council. Yet the Republican Roadmap doesn’t include any funding for street design changes that would improve safety. It merely proposes $13 billion for federal agencies focused mostly on design to protect vehicle occupants and convincing pedestrians to wear neon when they cross the street.
Credit is not real money
Anyone who’s ever swiped a Visa knows that credit is (sadly) not real money. Yet Republicans try to pass credit off as real bucks in this proposal, noting that federal funding should encourage “the utilization of financing tools.”
When “financing tools” get mentioned, they’re rarely for highway projects, which the federal government usually covers for states almost in full. They are for transit and rail projects, signaling that investing in transit and rail is not a priority by making states and local governments pay for them by themselves.
Also, as Center for American Progress infrastructure expert Kevin DeGood pointed out in this expertly-crafted Twitter thread, “creative financing” doesn’t make a project cost less, and the hurdle to infrastructure projects isn’t lack of access to credit, but lack of revenue.
Now, and I can’t stress this part enough, even with all this financial “innovation” a $1 billion project STILL COSTS $1 BILLION.
No new vision for the transportation program—just the broken status quo
The Republican Roadmap is heavy with goals, arguing that this funding will improve quality of life, boost our economy, help us weather natural disasters, and more.
But as we’ve learned through decades of the same-old federal transportation program and the 2009 Recovery Act, you don’t get different outcomes by doing nothing differently. We can’t hope that more money will solve our problems if we don’t change how we spend that money.
The current federal transportation program is broken. It pumps billions into highway expansions that make congestion, emissions, safety, and equitable access to the economy worse. So why don’t we change the program to deliver the outcomes we want?
