Join us as we discuss the connections between transportation and economic opportunity tomorrow, Friday, April 29 from 1-3 p.m. EDT.  Speakers will explore how the transportation sector drives the economy and creates employment opportunities for American workers. Topics will include the transportation sector’s ability to create good jobs and sustain global growth, and the use of transportation as a driver of neighborhood revitalization.

A panel of experts on economic opportunity will lead our discussion, including Carmen Rhodes, Executive Director of FRESC, Mac Lynch, Program Associate at Apollo Alliance, Peter Skinner, Director of Transportation & Land Use at Silicon Valley Leadership Group.  The session will be moderated by Dena Belzer, President of Strategic Economics.

Registration is free and open to the public — visit www.t4america.org/webinars to register today.

The safe and efficient movement of goods across the United States is an absolutely critical aspect of our national economy. While discussions about building a modern transportation network often focus on the need to provide people with better options, an equally important ingredient for broad-based reform is the creation of a truly multi-modal freight system that matches the increasing demand for freight improvement while addressing national objectives for greater efficiency and reduced oil demand. Reforming our approach to freight won’t just improve the movement of goods — it will also make life much easier for commuters by reducing demand on our highways and opening our rail system for the freer movement of passengers.

The existing problems and needs in our system are clear:

• Between 1980 and 2006, road infrastructure capacity increased 4.5 percent while railroad route miles actually decreased 23.6 percent.
• Recent cargo projections for contained ports anticipate a doubling or tripling of throughput growth in the next 15 or 20 years.
• Recurring road congestion during peak periods is forecast to slow traffic on 20,000 miles of highway system and create stop-and-go conditions on an additional 45,000 miles by 2035.
• Every ton-mile of freight moved by rail instead of truck reduces GHG emissions by two-thirds of more.

Check out our fact sheet on freight, which is linked above, and be sure to sign Transportation for America’s petition urging Congress to take a new direction by making the creation of a 21st-century freight system a top priority in the next transportation bill. To get a more detailed look at some of our positions on investment in freight capacity, be sure to check out our newly released platform.

In an excellent article in this week’s New York Times, writer David Leonhardt reminds us that we can’t simply face these challenges by throwing billions of dollars at new highway construction projects without a coherent set of goals or a system for measuring gains. We need to look at what we’re getting with the money we already spend — and then ask ourselves why the results aren’t better.

A lack of adequate financing is part of the problem, without doubt. But the bigger problem has been an utter lack of seriousness in deciding how that money gets spent. And as long as we’re going to stimulate the economy by spending money on roads, bridges and the like, we may as well do it right.

It’s hard to exaggerate how scattershot the current system is. Government agencies usually don’t even have to do a rigorous analysis of a project or how it would affect traffic and the environment, relative to its cost and to the alternatives — before deciding whether to proceed. In one recent survey of local officials, almost 80 percent said they had based their decisions largely on politics, while fewer than 20 percent cited a project’s potential benefits.

Without accountability at the state, local, or federal level, rigorous data collection to prove results, or coherent national goals that articulate the purpose of our investments, it comes as little surprise that Americans are faced with endless traffic jams, overburdened mass transit systems, and rising costs of transportation.

As Rob Puentes, a transportation expert at Washington D.C. think tank The Brookings Institution, makes clear, the system is broken in part because we don’t think about what benefits our transportation program brings; we just “send a blank check and kind of hope for the best.”

The governors of Virginia and Pennsylvania joined a coalition of environmental, housing and urban planning groups Tuesday in calling for a new federal transportation policy that focuses more on mass transit and repairing deteriorating infrastructure and less on building new roads.

Virginia Gov. Timothy M. Kaine, Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell and former Maryland Gov. Parris Glendening, who currently heads the Smart Growth Leadership Institute, endorsed the agenda of Transportation for America, a coalition formed to influence the debate over the transportation bill that Congress is due to deal with next year. All three are Democrats. The current transportation legislation expires in September 2009.

“What we’re seeing is vehicle miles traveled are declining and demand for transit is going up,” Kaine told The Associated Press. “The key is to provide choices, so you invest in everything.”

Democrats have recently proposed investing heavily in transportation projects as a way to create jobs and stimulate the economy, and the House passed an economic stimulus measure in September that included that idea. Transportation for America endorsed that concept in its plan released Tuesday, but said such investments should not be spent primarily on highways.

“Make sure that infrastructure really builds for the future,” Glendening said in a conference call with reporters. “That’s about transit, that’s about walkability, that’s about ‘fix it first.’“

At the same time, good transportation infrastructure is key to emerging from the economic crisis, Kaine said.

The plan calls for restoring infrastructure before building any new roads and for eliminating projects in the pipeline “that could deepen, rather than relieve, our oil dependence.”

Rendell said his state has been adhering to the “fix it first” motto, refraining from building new bridges and roads before the maintenance backlog is cleared.

“That’s always difficult politically,” he said. But he added, referring to the deadly 2007 bridge collapse over the Mississippi River: “How many more Minnesotas do we have to have as a country?”

The coalition — which includes groups as diverse as American Institute of Architects, the National Association of Realtors and the American Public Health Association — is calling for parity in the way transit and highway projects are funded. While highway projects currently get an 80 percent match from the federal government, transit gets an average of 50 percent, said Shelley Poticha, president of Reconnecting America, a group that advocates for transit, and one of the coalition leaders.

Jeffrey Solsby, a spokesman for the American Road and Transportation Builders Association, said the next transportation funding program should be “mode-neutral,” instead of favoring transit over roads.

He also said waiting until the maintenance backlog is addressed before building new roads would not work, given the expected increases in freight traffic.

“We don’t just have a maintenance challenge; we have a capacity challenge,” he said. “They need to be undertaken simultaneously.”