One of the primary motivations of the Transportation for America campaign is our belief in building a transportation system that meets 21st century challenges.

But understanding how current federal transportation policy works — much less how to go about changing the current system — requires a sometimes painful amount of context. We know it’s not always the easiest issue to follow and a lot of people tend to use complicated jargon and acronyms that confuse even the veterans sometimes. Advocates and legislative staffers who are new to transportation policy often have a lot of catching up to do, and it’s difficult even for folks who have been around awhile to know all the details.

So we put together “Transportation 101: An Introduction to Federal Transportation Policy” to provide some clarity and help document where we’ve been, where the money comes from, how the program works (or doesn’t work) the process of reauthorization and the new (and old) challenges facing us as Congress debates a new transportation bill.

The report was debuted and distributed during a packed briefing on Capitol Hill in the Cannon House Building this morning. We were lucky enough to have some notable panelists speaking at the event, including Roy Kienitz, Under Secretary for Policy at U.S. DOT; former Virginia Secretary of Transportation Pierce Homer; and Mayor Patrick Henry Hays of North Little Rock, Arkansas to kick it off with a short session giving an overview of the federal, state and local roles in transportation policy.

So if you want to learn more about things like the history of the federal transportation program, how the Interstate System was started, how earmarks came to be so prevalent or how the federal role in funding transportation has changed throughout the years, we hope you find Transportation 101 useful.

(And about that jargon and those acronyms…there’s a glossary in the back.)

DSC_0056 Originally uploaded by Transportation for America to Flickr.

Our transportation investments and the built environment — what we build and where — have an enormous impact on our health and the cost of our health care.

With the debate over health care reform dominating the news daily, Transportation for America and coalition members from across the country took that powerful — yet often ignored or neglected — message to Capitol Hill leaders.

T4 America’s “health fly-in” last Friday connected health professionals and advocates from across the country with their Congressional representatives to highlight the impact that transportation has on our health and wellness.

T4 America kicked off the day with a briefing from campaign director James Corless and four other nationally recognized experts on health and transportation. Then, participants from across the country, from the Pacific Northwest to New England, split up and took the message to their representatives, visiting a total of 37 Congressional offices.

Among the 25 participants in the fly-in, six hailed from national groups and 19 from state and local organizations. Several, including fourteen-year-old childhood wellness advocate Julia Lopez and UCLA professor Dr. Richard Jackson, traveled all the way from California. (Look for a full list of organizations at the bottom of the post)

During the meetings, advocates discussed how the built environment — where we live, work and play — has a profound impact on obesity rates, diabetes, asthma and other quality of life measures. And they discussed policy prescriptions that can increase walkability, grow transit ridership and make physical activity a normal part of our daily routine.

“As a pediatrician and child advocate, my job is to do what I can to make sure as many kids as possible live healthy lives, and the biggest threats to them at this time are injuries — both violent and unintentional — and obesity,” said Dr. Katherine Kaufer Christoffel, a medical and research director at Northwestern University.

“This active transportation stuff really gets at all of those things.”

Dr. Joe Thompson, Director of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Center to Prevent Childhood Obesity, participated as a briefing panelist but did not attend Congressional meetings. Thompson serves as the Surgeon General of the State of Arkansas, where an alarming 22 percent of children are obese and 40 percent are overweight. Thompson said the built environment is a critical component of America’s livelihood.

“If we don’t solve the upstream causes of health problems, we won’t be able to hold health care reform together,” he said.

207 Originally uploaded by Transportation for America

14 year-old health advocate Julia Lopez chats with attendees of the health fly-in after making a few remarks.

Noelle Dobson, Director of the Healthy Eating Active Living initiative at Portland’s Community Health Partnership, has been stressing the link between health and transportation through her work preparing health impact assessments for new development projects.

“This is all public health has ever been about for me,” she said.

T4 America and participating advocates were promoting three important pieces of legislation that address the health and transportation connection.

One is CLEAN-TEA, a Senate bill that would allocate ten percent of revenue from climate legislation toward clean transportation, walking and biking, and other modes that can help reduce emissions. The second is the National Transportation Objectives Act, which would create explicit, specific targets and benchmarks for the transportation bill, including goals like reducing CO2 from transportation by 40%, eliminating at-risk exposure to pollution, and tripling the amount of walking and biking we do.  Lastly is Complete Streets legislation to make our streets safe and  accommodating for all users and people — bus riders, bicyclists and pedestrians.

Most fly-in participants met with their representatives’ transportation staffers, but a few were able to meet face-to-face with the representatives themselves. Heidi Klein, a board member for the Vermont Public Health Association, got a few words in with Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, and two fly-in participants from Montana had the chance to meet their junior Senator, Democrat Jon Tester.

Other office visits included Sen. Barbara Boxer of California, Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, Sen. Robert Menendez of New Jersey and Sen. Max Baucus of Montana.

Our thanks to the many advocates and supporters who worked very hard to take this crucial message to Capitol Hill.

Participating organizations:

• National Recreation and Park Association
• National Coalition for Promoting Physical Activity
• Campaign to End Obesity
• American Public Health Association
• American Lung Association
• PolicyLink
• National Complete Streets Coalition
• Trust for America’s Health
• America Bikes
• Safe Routes to School
• State and Territorial Injury Prevention Directors Association (STIPDA)

It comes around every half-dozen or so years, but this time, when the gargantuan transportation bill is written, “smart growth” advocates are determined to play a prominent role — muscling aside the bill’s traditional highway heavy hitters.

How prominent a role, however, depends in part on whether the price of gasoline continues to hover around $4 a gallon, a price point that has suddenly made Americans acutely conscious of how much they drive.

“The onus is off us to make them pay attention,” said Geoff Anderson, president of D.C.-based Smart Growth America, which is co-managing the new coalition along with Oakland, Calif.-based Reconnecting America. “They’re paying attention.”

But the prominence of the smart-growth community in next year’s transportation bill, which could balloon to as much as $500 billion before it’s finished, also depends on the lobbying and grass-roots prowess of Transportation for America, a newly formed coalition that also goes by the snappier name T4.

The new group, which expects to have a $4 million budget, has already hired veteran strategist Donald Ross of M+R Strategic Services to map out a campaign plan that he said will include shoe-leather lobbyists as well as online, grass-roots and grass-tops advocacy.

T4 is consciously broad-based, because, they argue, it’s in everyone’s interest to promote the types of transportation policies that encourage people to live in denser communities that have a lower carbon footprint.

“The transportation bill has historically been fought within the confines of the Beltway and inside Congress,” Ross said. “But there has been the growth of organizations all over the country now concerned with transportation issues, directly or indirectly, there’s a much broader universe of people who will have concerns.

“People in the public health movement are worried about obesity because people aren’t walking,” Ross said. Real estate barons “who heretofore have not cared a tinker about transportation now do because they can do an infill building that can be very valuable,” Ross added, referring to the practice of building mixed-use structures in inner-city vacant lots.

The coalition began earlier this year with $700,000 in seed money from the Rockefeller Foundation — a “big deal,” Anderson said, “and a reflection of the growing importance that people are giving transportation.”

The idea, transportation consultant David Burwell explained, is that “transportation should support public policy outcomes. It’s not just about pouring concrete and pavement.”

The concept of smart growth has been around since the 1970s. Three transportation bills ago, during the landmark 1991 Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act, a transportation policy that emphasized transit and bike use as well as money for highways was actually enshrined in the legislative language.

But it was more a suggestion than a mandate. And despite two more multihundred-million dollar transportation bills since then, one in 1998 and the latest in 2005, there has been little progress on the issue. Local and state governments are still reimbursed for the cost of building highways at about 80 cents on the dollar; public transportation continues to be reimbursed at rates around half that amount.

Since the early 1990s, however, the world has changed, and $4-a-gallon gasoline is only an exclamation point on a far bigger trendline, Anderson said, and one that Congress has not yet fully recognized.

In 1996, for example, Anderson said, “zero percent of the residential market was being built inside D.C. Now, it’s around 15 percent.”

There’s an aging population, and a lower percentage of people having children, factors that can encourage couples to move back in to cities from suburbia. “It’s not fabulous to have to mow the lawn every week,” he said.

The war in Iraq has made clear to many people that there are ties between a U.S. troop presence abroad and an economy overdependent on oil. People are driving less, and, Anderson said, “transit is at a 50-year high.”

Global warming has moved from “people who say it’s happening versus people who don’t, to almost everybody who says it’s happening,” said Polly Trottenberg, a longtime Senate staffer who is now executive director of Building America’s Future, another coalition that supports infrastructure investment.

There’s also new, growth-sensitive political leadership on Capitol Hill, especially at the committee level.

In the Senate, Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) chairs the Environment and Public Works Committee, which has a major piece of the transportation bill. In the House, the Transportation and Infrastructure chair is Minnesota’s James Oberstar (D); his crucial subcommittee chair on the transportation bill is Peter DeFazio, an 11-term Member from Oregon, a big smart-growth state, who heads the Highways and Transit subpanel.

Still, moving an entire Congress into the 21st century is a daunting legislative challenge. The 1998 Transportation Equity Act and the 2005 Safe, Accountable, Flexible, Efficient Transportation Equity Act: A Legacy for Users, which weighed in at $286 billion, have inviolate old-line constituencies that reach back into the years when building the nation’s interstate highways was the federal government’s most important land transportation priority.

These include the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials as well as the American Road and Transportation Builders Association — interest groups that urban planner and author Jeff Speck said “have a stranglehold on Congress that’s as strong the [National Rifle Association] and probably more dangerous.”

Noted one Senate staffer: “The world up here is behind the world as we know it. The lobbyists who are powerful — AASHTO, ARBTA — represent the past; the lobbyists who aren’t powerful — the smart-growth types — represent the future.

“We have to get folks thinking in a broader way,” he said. “If you improve transportation to downtown Seattle and its port, that’s the best thing in the world for Montana beef growers and their refrigerated trucks.”