A word of warning: this is for those that want to go a little deeper into the specific policies and differences between the two bills. It’s long and fairly wonky.

National Goals & Performance Measures

Senate: The Commerce Committee title establishes national transportation goals and performance measures. It requires states and metro areas to use performance measures in long-range planning and short-term programming processes. It explicitly covers key indicators such as congestion, road condition, reducing environmental impacts, improving the reliability of freight movement, increasing access to transit, and reducing traffic fatalities across all modes.

House: It contains no comprehensive national goals. It requires US DOT to establish a qualitative “national goal” but the intent is unclear. Requires states to establish performance measures for a broad set of target areas.

State of Good Repair

Senate: The Senate bill has strong repair provisions. 60% of the funds in the newly-consolidated highway program are required to be spent on repairing roads and bridges. (Click to enlarge this helpful chart at right — the new consolidated program is at the top right.) It also requires DOT to establish minimum condition levels for roads and bridges and includes penalties for states for not meeting them.

Repairing other non-National Highway System bridges are eligible under the flexible 40% pot of funding — the second blue box from the top on the graphic. States must establish targets for infrastructure condition. (Read this post from our blog for more about repair: A closer look at the Senate’s MAP-21: state of good repair.)

House: The House’s newly-consolidated highway program requires reporting on progress towards state of good repair by states but without similar fixed requirements for spending on repair. There are penalties if a State’s National Highway System or other bridges are very bad (10% of NHS bridge deck area structurally deficient or 15% of off-system bridges are structurally deficient).

Possible House amendment fix:  Boswell 116 establishes minimum standards for National Highway System bridges and requires funds to be spent on bridge repair unless states meet those levels. Boswell 117 requires states with a significant number of federal-aid bridges to spend funds on repairing them.

Planning & Suballocation

Senate: Ties planning to performance-oriented goals and defines scenario planning. Divides metropolitan area planning organizations into tiers according to size. The amount of federal transportation funds given directly to metro areas is roughly equivalent to what they receive under current law, though the actual percentage has decreased.

House: Like the Senate bill, suballocated funds are roughly equivalent though the actual percentage has decreased. The above-mentioned penalties for not meeting minimum bridge requirements could reduce the funds available for metro areas. This bill also allows states (and the Governor) to override local planning decisions for projects on interstates. (See #3 in our list of top ten provisions being opposed in the House bill.)

Possible House amendment fix: Nadler 25 would restore the ability of metro regions to develop a transportation plan that meets their community needs without unilateral amendment by the Governor, addressing part of that #3 from our top ten list.

Public transportation & transit-oriented development

Senate: Continues dedicated funding for public transportation at traditional 20 percent share. Creates some new flexibility to spend federal funds on operations, i.e., keeping buses and trains running, not just buying new equipment. A new transit-oriented development planning program was incorporated into the bill via the Banking title.

House: Original bill ends 30 years of dedicated funding for public transit — read the letter we organized by more than 600 groups and individuals in opposition. Allows loans for transit-oriented development as an eligible expense under the TIFIA loan program. It doesn’t provide large transit operators with any flexibility to spend federal money on operating their transit systems. There’s also a provision to restrict any transit agency that operates a rail system from being eligible for grants that help build bus systems and bus facilities — resulting in unnecessary bureaucracy as large transit agencies split into two agencies to continue receiving those grants.

Read more about that provision in our recent post: Fixing the House Bill: cutting regulatory burdens and bureaucracy.

Possible House amendment fix:  LaTourette/Carnahan 16 would allow all transit agencies to use a portion of their federal transit funding for operating expenses during times of economic crisis. (This amendment is similar to this bill the two representatives offered back in 2011.)

Walking and bicycling, local control of funds

Senate: Due in part to this amendment offered by Senators Cardin and Cochran and incorporated into the bill, MAP-21 consolidates programs for making biking and walking safer (as well as for other small local projects) and gives 50 percent of this consolidated program directly to metro areas. States and metro areas must create a competitive grant process to distribute that funding to local communities that apply. The Commerce Committee title also includes a new Complete Streets provision.

House: Eliminates most dedicated funding for bicycling & walking. Those uses remain “eligible” but without any dedicated funding for them. The bill also deletes numerous references throughout the bill that encourage multimodal projects. The bill retains the Recreational Trails program.

Possible House amendment fix: Petri-Blumenauer 103 creates consolidated program for bike/ped and other local projects and provides local governments access to new consolidated pot of funding.

Rural Issues

Senate: Ensures rural roads are properly considered for safety projects. Provides flexibility to invest in street networks. Consolidates rural and specialized transit programs to ensure that service is better coordinated.

House: Ensures rural roads are properly considered for safety projects. Consolidates rural and specialized transit programs.

Congestion and Air Quality

Senate: Retains the Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality program but with a new focus on PM2.5 (particulate matter 2.5: diesel emissions). Air quality is not included in new statewide planning goals.

House: Moves CMAQ program into the Alternative Transit Account. Allows construction of single occupant vehicle projects with funds. (Read more about this provision in our blog post: Fixing the House bill: reducing air pollution by providing more travel options)

Possible House amendment fix:  Ellison 97/Blumenauer 191 restores CMAQ program to original intent.

Workforce Development

Senate: Requires urban transit agencies to spend a portion of their funds on workforce development activities.

House: No new workforce development provisions.

Passenger Rail

Senate: Requires National, Regional and State comprehensive passenger and freight rail plans, including a Northeast corridor high speed rail plan. Includes Amtrak authorization language and adds eligibility for other high speed rail projects.

House: Includes Amtrak authorization language but with a 20-25% cut in operating funds for Amtrak. No high speed rail funding.

Freight

Senate: Establishes a new national freight program and new national freight strategic plan. Read more about the FREIGHT Act that was incorporated into MAP-21. Allows up to 10 percent of highway freight program and 5 percent of flexible Transportation Mobility Program funds to be spent on rail. States and regions must establish performance targets for freight movement.

House:  No new freight program. Encourages States to form freight plans tied to achieving broad goals. Read more about the freight provisions in the second half of our recent post: Fixing the House Bill: cutting regulatory burdens and bureaucracy.

After almost 40 years of building our world-leading interstate system, many people started to realize that this excess of people driving alone at rush hour created a whole lot of air pollution and congestion. Some busy cities were seeing their air fill up with nasty pollution and smog from tailpipe emissions, and their roads were choked with traffic several hours a day.

After the environmental disasters of the 60′s and 70′s helped catalyze the movement to clean up our air and water, Congress declared clean air a national priority in the 1970s and Republican President Richard Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency. On the transportation side, in the transportation bill written in 1991, Congress created a new program called the Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality program (CMAQ), dedicated solely to helping communities deal with the negative side effects of over-reliance on major roads for rush-hour travel.

A provision in the House’s transportation bill (H.R. 7) upends that intention by opening that fund to construction of regular highway lanes.

Essentially, the bill’s authors in 1991 recognized that efforts to build our way out of congestion had reached a point of diminishing returns, where each new lane simply invited more cars, leading to more emissions and, ultimately, still more congestion. They decided that it made sense to take a very small slice of transportation dollars to help address and mitigate those problems.

The Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality program gives states a small pot of funding to help provide other options, promote carpooling, or address other impacts of too many people driving alone at peak hour. Washington, D.C. used some CMAQ funds to kick-start their world class bike sharing program known as Capital Bikeshare, which helps people make short trips throughout the city and part of the region without having to get in a car, a bus or a train. Other cities have used it to fund new transit service in or adjacent to a congested corridor, add new high-occupancy vehicle lanes to provide an option that rewards carpooling on congested roads, or improve the flow of traffic with more intelligent transportation systems.

Some states even give the CMAQ funding directly to their metro areas, because the local leaders in a metro area usually know best how to spend the funds and address their most pressing needs.

Our cities are as congested as they’ve ever been, and though our air is significantly cleaner than it was in the 1970′s thanks in part to cleaner vehicles, it doesn’t make any sense in 2012 for the House bill to “decide” that air pollution and congestion are no longer negative side effects of building new roads, reversing 20 years of stated transportation policy.

Two proposed amendments to HR7 would fix the problems with CMAQ. Amendments 191 and 97, proposed by Reps. Blumenauer and Ellison respectively, would restore the current function of CMAQ to helping reduce exhaust and emissions. And high-occupancy vehicle lanes would once again be the only new eligible road capacity.

—

With the House in recess and the Senate poised to pass a bipartisan transportation bill this week, we’ll be taking a longer look at a few other issues with the House transportation bill in the coming days — and how some of those issues can be fixed. Though they may have addressed one issue by restoring dedicated transit funding (reportedly, though not publicly confirmed), there are still other issues that need work to improve the bill and get a bipartisan majority of House members to support it.

The Urban Mobility Report is an important reminder that too many Americans are stuck without good options for efficient, safe and affordable travel in our cities and towns. It is especially timely as Congress prepares to reset priorities for investing our transportation trust fund. However, we must note that flaws in the UMR’s analysis could lead to faulty conclusions about what the report indicates.

It assumes, for example, that everyone should be able to speed as rapidly down the highway during rush hour as they could in the middle of the night. American taxpayers will never stand for being asked to turn over their wallets and their neighborhoods in order to build that kind of highway capacity.

They would much rather see Congress make more efficient use of their money by fixing crumbling roads and bridges; investing in technology to manage existing freeway traffic better; providing rail and rapid bus service in congested corridors; and linking transportation funding to smarter planning and development.

The economist Joe Cortright showed in a study for CEOs for Cities that the UMR obscures the fact that people who live in cities with transportation options and less urban sprawl generally have shorter commutes. That means a lower proportion of the population is subjected to highway congestion than is true in places where long automobile commutes are the predominant option.

In the upcoming transportation authorization, Congress can fix the system that has left too many with no alternative but to sit in traffic, by giving communities the tools they need to provide more and better choices in living locations and travel options.

Read our response from October about the CEOs for Cities report, and read today’s response from CEOs for Cities here (pdf)

A new report from four leading transportation organizations demonstrates how existing and emerging technologies can squeeze more capacity from over-burdened highways, help commuters avoid traffic delays and expand and improve transportation options, all while saving money and creating jobs.

“Smart Mobility for a 21st Century America” shows why improving efficiency through technology is critical as our population grows and ages, budgets tighten and consumer preferences shift. The report was co-authored by Transportation for America, the Intelligent Transportation Society of America (ITS America), the Association for Commuter Transportation (ACT) and the University of Michigan SMART Initiative.

With President Obama’s support for a $50 billion down payment for infrastructure and the real prospect that Congress will move forward on a comprehensive, multi-year transportation bill in the upcoming session, the paper makes the case for investing in technology and innovation to help solve our nation’s most critical transportation problems.

The new report was released today in conjunction with the IBM Smarter Transportation Virtual Forum, which brought together experts from across the public sector, private industry and academia to discuss urban mobility and the growing need for technology solutions to the nation’s transportation, economic and environmental challenges.

“We have a unique opportunity to shape the direction of transportation policy for years to come, which is why this report is so important,” said Transportation for America Director James Corless. “We can harness technology and tap America’s creative potential to get a better bang for our buck and ensure the transportation options Americans rely on are available and affordable in the coming decades.”

“As public agencies are being asked to do more with less, investing in smart technology is critical for improving system efficiency, optimizing the public’s return on investment, and creating a more connected transportation network,” said ITS America President and CEO Scott Belcher. “Congress and President Obama have the opportunity next year to put the U.S. back on the road to global competitiveness and economic prosperity by investing in a more intelligent 21st century transportation system.”

Studies have shown that intelligent transportation systems (ITS) and other smart technologies are cost effective and quick to deploy, with solutions like synchronized and adaptive traffic signals yielding a $40 return in time and fuel savings for every $1 invested while also reducing CO2 emissions up to 22 percent and travel delays by 25 percent or more. The Government Accountability Office found the benefit-cost ratio of a nationwide real-time traffic information system to be 25 to 1, with a $1.2 billion investment returning more than $30 billion in safety, mobility and environmental benefits.

In addition, researchers from the London School of Economics and the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation found that investing in ITS creates a network effect throughout the economy and stimulates job creation across multiple sectors, including green jobs, high-tech, automotive, information technology, electronics, and other industries.

While improvements to vehicles and cleaner fuels are the most talked-about technological innovations, many smart technologies are being deployed today to improve system efficiency and reduce travel delays, provide more convenient access to transportation alternatives, and even customize routes based on real-time traffic conditions and individual travel preferences to keep people and businesses moving on schedule. The paper groups these innovations into five categories:

• Making transportation systems more efficient and cost-effective
• Providing more travel options and multimodal connectivity
• Providing travelers with real-time, accurate transportation system information
• Making pricing and payments more convenient and efficient
• Avoiding unnecessary trips and time wasted in traffic

“It is critical for the future of our nation’s transportation policy to foster projects and programs that collect and disseminate information to the public in a timely and easily accessible fashion,” said Brian Shaw, President of ACT. “The result is a transportation system that is safer and provides more options for system users.”

“Investing in next generation transportation infrastructure makes sense. It connects and optimizes new transportation technologies, services, modes, and design, offering Americans more livability, sustainability, and hip factor for less money. It also lays the foundation for leadership, major business opportunity, and green job creation in the emerging global New Mobility industry,” said Sue Zielinski, Managing Director of SMART at the University of Michigan.

The report contains a series of case studies that demonstrate how these technologies have already been applied to real-world transportation challenges. The report also offers policy recommendations as Congress and the Obama Administration consider a comprehensive transportation bill. These include providing incentives and dedicated funding for states and regions to adopt smart technology solutions to make system more efficient, offering competitive grants to stimulate innovation, and having the federal government play a role in disseminating the latest research and best practices.

You can download the full report and read it cover to cover now, but we will be publishing the case studies as a series here on the blog over the next 2 weeks if you’d like to read about these innovations in smaller bite-sized chunks. Look for the first story later today.

The cycle is familiar by now. A study tells us what we all know: our roads are congested. We pour billions into new roads and lanes to “reduce congestion.” Then the study comes out two years later and just as before, our roads are still congested. There’s a call for new roads, new roads open up, we drive further and further, congestion goes up. Rinse and repeat.

Every two years, nearly every major media outlet in the country reports on a “congestion index” study that ranks metro areas and cities by their relative amount of traffic congestion. But a significant new report from CEOs for Cities suggests that there’s a fundamental flaw in that study from the Texas Transportation Institute, and by failing to accurately measure congestion or pinpoint what is producing it in our cities, we’re failing to truly understand the problem.

And when you don’t understand the problem, how can you ever really fix it?

Noah Kazis at Streetsblog most succinctly describes how the TTI study fails to see the whole picture:

Imagine two drivers leaving downtown to head home. Each of them sits in traffic for the first ten miles of the commute but at that point, their paths diverge. The first one has reached home. The second has another twenty miles to drive, though luckily for her, the roads are clear and congestion doesn’t slow her down. Who’s got a better commute?

Shockingly, the standard method for measuring traffic congestion implies that the second driver has it better. The Texas Transportation Institute’s Urban Mobility Report (UMR) only studies how congestion slows down drivers from hypothetical maximum speeds, completely ignoring how long it takes to actually get where you’re going. The result is an incessant call for more highway lanes from newspapers across the country.

The reason why we find ourselves in this situation is because our current federal transportation policies virtually guarantee it. There’s no financial incentive for anyone to measure congestion accurately or improve it — states just get a big load of federal transportation money with few strings attached. Congestion doesn’t get better in large part because states and metro areas aren’t required to reduce congestion or try to shorten or reduce trips with their federal money.

If a state wants to spend some of their federal money on a new comprehensive metro transit system to provide drivers some relief by giving them an additional option as well as taking cars off the road, the process takes years longer and is far more complex. What state, given the choice, would choose to invest in projects that take 4 times longer to get approved and require more local money to build? (Transit projects have about 50% of the cost paid by the federal government, highways get around 80%.)

As this new study demonstrates, the lack of proper metrics to measure success (or mostly failure) is emblematic of the need for reform.

If the ultimate point is to make smart transportation policy, we need to look at a lot of different factors that affect people’s lives. Fixating solely on interstate throughput, while failing to offer other travel and living options, has led our state departments of transportation to invest billions to create a result that is choking the lives out of our regions and isn’t making life better for the vast majority of commuters.

The good news is that places that are attempting to reduce trips and congestion by investing in diverse transportation options are actually showing progress. Regions that have been aggressively investing in additional travel options, eliminating trips, reducing trip length, creating more places to live close to jobs or more effectively managing demand have seen their congestion numbers get better, according to the CEOs for Cities report.

All of this is just one more giant sign pointing to the need for a truly reformed transportation program that can more accurately measure the problems we face, prescribe solutions that will work, and get out of the way as we unleash those solutions on the traffic that is killing our productivity and choking our regions while we motor along at 10 mph with no other option.

Perhaps you’ve seen the IBM commercials touting the fact that for the first time in history, the majority of humanity lives in cities — and solving the challenges facing our growing cities will be more urgent than ever before. One of the 21 programs of IBM’s “Smarter Planet” initiative focuses on traffic, congestion and what’s known as Intelligent Transportation Systems. (Others include cities, buildings and infrastructure.)

Last week, a forum sponsored by IBM as part of their Smarter Planet series that focused on improving transportation systems through technology yielded important lessons from some of our European counterparts.

Two speakers – Dr. Leo Kroon of Netherlands Railway and Gunnar Soderholm of Stockholm, Sweden – were among the highlights of “A Smarter Transportation System for the 21st Century,” held on Capitol Hill last Thursday.

Kroon described the importance of rail in his “tiny country,” whose 16 million people make it extremely dense. According to Kroon, rail market share between some Dutch cities reaches 50 percent, an amount that would be unheard of in the United States. And rather than force anyone onto the train, Kroon says the Netherlands Railways “seduces” them instead, through continued technological improvement that makes travel convenient and a commitment to reliability and affordability.

For instance, Netherlands Railway has introduced a SmartCard system and is improving its monitoring systems to pinpoint its flow of passengers and accommodate them as efficiently as possible.

The report out of Stockholm was even more compelling.

Gunnar Soderholm, head of the city’s Environmental and Health division, explained how a congestion charging scheme went from “biggest political suicide ever in Sweden” to embraced by even the most right-wing parties. The policy itself was made easier to implement than other cities because Stockholm proper is composed of several islands, with easy boundaries around the central business district.

After implementing the policy – in which drivers are charged for bringing autos into the business district during peak hours – the conventional wisdom was that people would need to see numbers showing its impact. According to Soderholm, no numbers were needed. Everyone could see the difference. “It was free flow all the time,” he said. Stockholm saw a 20 percent reduction in traffic, a 30-50 percent reduction in travel time and a 10-14 percent reduction in carbon emissions. Many more Stockholm residents are combining auto use with more walking and bicycling. Revenues from the charge are directed toward transportation infrastructure.

Stockholm is aiming to be fossil fuel free by 2050.

Innovations are also underway here at home. Judge Quentin Kopp, a decades-long transit advocate and former chairman of the California High Speed Rail Authority, explained how his home state has pledged to match dollar-for-dollar every piece of stimulus funding for high-speed rail. Kopp has been on the frontlines of the cause from the beginning, battling with former Republican Gov. Pete Wilson over a commission and, just two years ago, helping to shepherd narrow passage of a statewide ballot measure to fund high speed rail in the State.

Congressman Earl Blumenauer, a Portland Democrat, concluded with a window into how innovation and technology can guide efforts on the Hill. The big question: how does Congress pay for the next transportation bill? Blumenauer is an advocate of a vehicle-miles-traveled-tax and has pushed legislation to allow pilot projects across the country.

There remains great potential to both learn from our friends abroad and build upon successes here at home.

(Graphic below from Smarter Planet’s Transportation page.)

Due to the impact of high gas prices, the economic slowdown, and a growing preference for public transportation and other options for getting around, congestion was down in 2008 over 2007, marking the first two-year decrease in congestion since the Texas Transportation Institute began keeping track in 1982. Today, TTI released their bi-annual Urban Mobility Report today on the state of congestion and traffic in the U.S.

Some key findings:

Travelers spent one hour less stuck in traffic in 2007 than they did the year before and wasted one gallon less gasoline than the year before. The differences are small, but they represent a rare break in near-constant growth in traffic over 25 years.

• The overall cost (based on wasted fuel and lost productivity) reached $87.2 billion in 2007 — more than $750 for every U.S. traveler.
• The total amount of wasted fuel topped 2.8 billion gallons — three weeks’ worth of gas for every traveler.
• The amount of wasted time totaled 4.2 billion hours — nearly one full work week (or vacation week) for every traveler.

One cause of the decrease in congestion is the same cause responsible for the lower numbers of highway fatalities — Americans have been driving less and less. Vehicle miles traveled (VMT) growth rates have been in decline since 2005 and in 2007, total VMT and per capita VMT actually decreased for the first time since World War II. High gas prices and the recent economic downturn have contributed to these declines, but VMT was actually in decline well before the shock of increased gas prices and the recession, and has continued to fall even as gas prices plummeted over the last year.

And while total vehicle miles traveled (VMT) went down just slightly, congestion is down much more significantly.

According to Feburary numbers from INRIX, a reputable traffic statistics service, just a 3.7% drop in vehicle miles traveled in 2008 resulted in a 30% drop in congestion in our 100 most congested metro areas. That means each commuter spent 13 less hours stuck in traffic in 2008 over the previous year. And in slight contrast to the TTI report, the report found that overall, “99 of the top 100 most populated cities in the U.S. experienced decreases in traffic congestion levels in 2008 as compared to the prior year.” Small reductions in how much we drive each year have a much larger impact on congestion.

There’s no doubt that the sagging economy had a hand in reducing how much we drive. But regardless of the current economy, most Americans seem to be looking for ways to drive less — not more. So what if we invested more in the positive ways to reduce the amount we have to drive by making other options for getting around accessible, convenient, and available to more people?

With public transportation ridership still going up — even as driving is going down — it’s clear that people who have choices for getting around use them. People are looking for other convenient ways to travel that can get them out of traffic and save them time and money.

And as the INRIX numbers show, if we can make it easier to get around and increase the options for doing so, everyone behind the wheel benefits as congestion decreases. (And despite the decrease overall, the current $87 billion in congestion costs isn’t good news, by any stretch of the imagination.)

It’s unquestionable that the recession has had an impact, giving us some momentary slack in congestion. But what will we do with the breather? When the economy begins to pick back up again and people start driving more, will we head straight back into gridlock? With driving down and public transportation up, will we make more investments in the kinds of transportation options people are clamoring for, the kinds of options that can reduce congestion and make travel more painless for everyone?

Or will congestion simply mount as the economy rebounds?

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

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

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

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

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

Reduce congestion with smarter policies and smarter infrastructure

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

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

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

Develop our transportation workforce

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

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

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

Invest for the future

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Flickr photo originally uploaded by Atwater Village Newbie

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

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

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

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

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

There’s also a breathtaking movie version of this same map, that shows the flights in real time through the course of the day.

The sheer number of airplanes traveling over the United States is simply mind boggling. On this day chronicled in the map, the FAA tracked 205,000 flights in U.S. airspace. Anyone who has ever traveled by plane knows that we have plenty of air above our country, but the problem is the fact that too many of them need to be in specific pieces of air at the same time. Or traveling through the same crowded airports.

Watch the movie and look at what happens to the east coast — especially the northeastern corridor — during the major commuting hours. Our major airports are bursting at the seams, and our air traffic control system, while among the safest and most professional in the world, is hard pressed to keep up with the growing demands placed on it.

With some experts predicting a doubling of airline traffic by 2050 — though not considering the impact that fuel prices or economic conditions could have on the industry — we’d be smart to find a way to get some of these planes out of the air.

What if there was a way to remove as much as a third of these planes from the air. Or even just a 1/4 or 1/5? Imagine the difference in our most crowded metropolitan airports (and travelers) if we could ease the burden on their runways and air traffic control systems?

Q: What could we do to make air travel simpler, faster, and more cost effective?

A: Build a robust nationwide network of passenger rail once again to take the pressure off of the airlines and our airspace. Use airline travel for longer trips where it makes the most financial sense. Start with the heavily trafficked shorter city-to-city corridors that are responsible for a huge portion of air travel.

Did you know that 1/3 of all air travel in this country is for trips under 350 miles? Think of heavily traveled corridors like Atlanta to Charlotte, Washington DC to New York, Houston to Dallas, San Francisco to Los Angeles. These are all trips near or under 350 miles.

Imagine the impact that having efficient city to city rail options in heavily traveled corridors would have on air travel in this country — not to mention what it would do for boosting our economic competitiveness, reducing emissions, and improving energy security with an electrified system that isn’t beholden to the price of oil.

Compare this 2001 map from the U.S. Department of Transportation establishing potential high speed rail corridors to the portions of heaviest air travel on Koblin’s map above.

High speed rail across the country is obviously something we’d love to see. But a great start would be improving existing passenger rail in these corridors to make it reliable, faster and on-time. The Northeast corridor is the only place where trains don’t have to regularly submit to freight trains, but service is still constrained by obstacles like old trackage, curves in the route, old bridges and tunnels, just to name a few. The distance from Washington to Charlotte’s financial markets is shorter than DC to Boston through the bustling Northeast megaregion, but the trip is hours longer due to freight priority and other constraints.

Dedicated right-of-way for passenger rail could make train travel feasible once again, improve freight times with passenger trains out of their way, and ease up airport congestion. What’s not to like?

So what do you think? What should we do to improve rail service in the United States?