Transportation for America unveils its Blueprint for Reform on Capitol Hill
May 11, 2009By Andrew Bielak
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| BlueprintRelease6 Originally uploaded by Transportation for America |
| Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell delivers the keynote at this morning’s Capitol Hill briefing marking the release of The Route to Reform Blueprint. |
With Congress preparing to write the bill that will determine the next six years of transportation spending, Transportation for America today released a detailed plan to restructure the nation’s transportation program in order to build a smart, safe and clean transportation system that provides real choices to all Americans.
If our platform, released in February, lays out the vision and goals for America’s transportation system, then the Transportation for America Blueprint contains the detailed directions for getting there.
The Route to Reform: Blueprint for a 21st Century Federal Transportation Program will serve as T4 America’s proposal for the policies and financing structures necessary to achieve real transformational change in America’s transportation system. (We’ll be highlighting and explaining pieces of the Blueprint here over the coming weeks — it’s a lot to digest at once.)
Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell — a co-chair of the Build America’s Future campaign and one of the leading voices calling for a renewed transportation system – gave the event’s keynote speech in the same committee where the transportation bill will be written and considered first by Chairman Oberstar’s House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.
Read the press release from this morning’s event.
Gov. Rendell was followed by a panel that included James Corless, director of the Transportation for America Campaign; Elaine Clegg, Special Projects Director for Idaho Smart Growth and and city council member in Boise; Astrid Glynn, former Commissioner of the New York State Department of Transportation; Andrew Cotugno, the director of planning for Metro in Portland, Oregon; and Ronald Kilcoyne, the General Manager/CEO of Greater Bridgeport Transit Authority.
Governor Rendell kicked off the event by praising T4 America’s vision for the future while urging advocates and experts to fight tooth and nail to push for a 21st Century transportation system.
“This report couldn’t be more correct when it says this is a once in a lifetime opportunity,” Gov. Rendell said.
“If we don’t take advantage of this opportunity…nothing will change, and we’ll just bump along, funding some good projects almost by accident, some mediocre projects and some terrible projects. We won’t have national policy, we won’t move the ball forward, and we won’t do something that will improve our economic competitiveness – we’ll just keep moving along the way we’ve been moving along, and not solving any problems.”
Thankfully, Gov. Rendell echoed T4 America’s optimism in envisioning a brighter future for our national economy that could rest on a revitalized transportation system.
He called attention to a factory outside Harrisburg, Pennsylvania that produces railroad ties and could build a second plant and double its workforce if the country committed to building an intercity rail system. Calling The Route to Reform a “very thorough, very thought-provoking, and very detailed report,” the Governor noted that all the great ideas for building a modern transportation system won’t go anywhere without a sustained and powerful campaign to back them up.
“Every one of us has to fight,” he said. “Let’s touch every media outlet, and get local support among mayors, and councilman and state senators, let’s get everybody talking about infrastructure and how this is the opportunity of a lifetime.”
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| BlueprintRelease20 Originally uploaded by Transportation for America |
| T4 America Campaign Director James Corless holds a hot-off-the-presses copy of The Route to Reform. View more photos from today’s event in the Flickr set. |
After Rendell’s remarks, the panelists delved into the details of the report with a detailed discussion of the Blueprint, laying out the campaign’s proposals for a drastically reformed program with clear national objectives and concrete, accountable performance measures.
Download the full report, the executive summary, or the press release with more details about today’s briefing at t4america.org/blueprint.
Transportation For America officially launches campaign platform
February 26, 2009By Stephen Lee Davis
Today in Washington, D.C., Transportation for America held an event on Capitol Hill to formally announce our new coalition of more than 225 organizations and 17,000 individual members and to release the platform drafted with input from dozens of practitioners and stakeholders. In opening remarks, Congressman Earl Blumenauer (D-OR) called the coalition perhaps the “most formidable” such coalition assembled on behalf of transportation reform.
Rep. Earl Blumenauer addressed the guests and VIP’s gathered in the Capitol Caucus Room of the Cannon House Office Building
With events last night and this morning on Capitol Hill, we brought together leaders in the worlds of transportation, public health, business and social justice to launch the platform.
Our campaign platform calls on President Obama and Congress to launch a new federal transportation mission that breaks with the worn out ways of the status quo, helps put an end to America’s oil dependency, brings opportunity to all Americans and allows our country’s businesses to compete and thrive in the 21st Century.
Other panelists, including Dr. Georges Benjamin of the American Public Health Association, Judith Bell of PolicyLink, Richard Baron of McCormack Baron Salazar and Transportation for America campaign director James Corless, spoke on behalf of the public health benefits, implications for real estate development and the need for local areas to have greater latitude to address their mobility issues.
Mayor John Robert Smith of Meridian, Mississippi — a city that has worked hard to turn their rail connections into downtown reinvestment and vice versa — spoke at length about the need for the next phase of our transportation system to unite our country in the same way that Eisenhower envisioned the interstate system would help a collection of States be unified as a truly “United” States of America:
Few national issues offer a greater opportunity for imaginative change. And we need a Congress that will reach across the aisle that separates their parties, and reach across the geography that separate their states. These issues are complex and daunting, but we must act and act now. Our children and children’s children will hold us accountable. To fail would be to leave this nation as Eisenhower said, “As many separate parts.”
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| Dr. Georges Benjamin of the American Public Health Association shows off his copy of the Platform. |
The Platform is now available for you to download and read.
Also today, the National Association of Realtors released a poll done in conjunction with Transportation for America that shows strong support for investment in public transportation, walking and biking and a better-managed and maintained highway system. Read the details about the NAR/T4 poll.
Transportation for America also announced that the coalition will launch a series of town hall meetings and provide materials for self-organized house parties where engaged citizens can talk about what a renewed national vision for transportation investment could mean for their communities. Watch here for more to come on that over the next several days and weeks.
Mayor John Robert Smith of Meridian, Mississippi, left, and Rep. Earl Blumenauer take their respective turns at the mic this morning on Capitol Hill.
Photos licensed with Creative Commons by Steve Davis/Transportation for America
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