Business and transportation industry leaders today joined Transportation for America for a briefing on Capitol Hill to underscore the potential of a reformed, multi-year transportation bill to boost the economy and create lasting jobs across the country.

Business leaders from Siemens, IBM and the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, which represents more than 300 major companies in the Silicon Valley including Yahoo!, Microsoft and AT&T, highlighted the power of new and innovative policies to revolutionize the transportation sector, make our country more economically competitive for the 21st century and provide working Americans the affordable options they need to get to their jobs every day.

“Our annual CEO survey identified traffic congestion as one of the top concerns for businesses in the Silicon Valley,” said Carl Guardino, President and CEO of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group. “Public transportation is a lifeline for our nation’s workforce. Allowing the cuts to service we have seen around the country to continue will only worsen congestion for commuters and increase the challenge of attracting the talent that our cutting-edge businesses depend on.”

The panelists highlighted the need for major reform to our national transportation system and investments in smart technologies that will make our country a leader in innovation. Whether in reducing congestion, improving road safety or increasing service and efficiency in public transportation networks, these investments can help communities solve problems and create jobs.

“Siemens is optimistic that the combination of political will, public interest, and unprecedented funding will lead to an integrated and comprehensive transportation system throughout the U.S.,” said Diederick Van Dillen, Mid Atlantic Regional Manager for the Siemens Corporation. “The movement of people and goods is what keeps cities and regions competitive, and less time spent in traffic leads to enhanced quality of life for Americans.”

Our current transportation program is based largely on policies enacted in the 1950’s. These policies helped our nation successfully build a world class highway system that now connects communities across the country. The next federal transportation bill offers a chance to stand on the shoulders of that success and focus our transportation program on using smarter approaches to solve the problems of the 21st century.

“IBM is committed to working with all stake holders in the broad transportation ecosystem – policy makers, transportation operators, agencies and academics – to make new innovations and technology a reality for smart transportation systems and to better serve society’s needs in the 21st century,” said Mike Kearney, Business Development Executive, IBM Research Division.

“Across the country major employers are working hard to support investments in public transportation because they know it is essential to reducing congestion, and creating efficiency in the movement of people and goods and most importantly to reduce our dependence on oil by giving people options other than driving everywhere,” said Tom Murphy, Former Mayor of Pittsburgh and a Senior Fellow at the Urban Land Institute. “Whether it is local chambers of commerce or companies like Google, and Yahoo!, businesses on the cutting edge of the new economy are telling us that the next transportation bill must remove the impediments at the federal level that suppress and slow down investment in public transit and safe, complete streets.”

“We have an unprecedented opportunity to build for the future and create communities that will thrive for generations to come,” said James Corless, director of Transportation for America. “We must embrace the power of innovation in our transportation program and seize this chance to grow our economy, create jobs and wean our nation off dangerous sources of oil. Only a truly reformed long-term transportation program will allow us to seize this moment. We cannot allow it to slip away.”

Transportation for America will continue to work with business leaders around the country as the transportation authorization bill makes its way through Congress.

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.