Skip to main content

Tag: transportation enhancements

AP says attacks on transportation enhancements are “exaggerated and misrepresented”

On Friday, we highlighted the disingenuous attempt from some in Congress to tie the need to repair our bridges to the elimination of a tiny program to make it safer to walk or bike on our streets and roads.

Senators Rand Paul of Kentucky, Tom Coburn of Oklahoma and John McCain of Arizona have been targeting the transportation enhancements program, a mere 2 percent of the federal transportation budget. They say eliminating the set-aside would make it easier for states to repair bridges, even though many states have failed to prioritize maintenance when they can spend the bulk of their transportation funds however they want.

The Senators and their supporters seem to have gotten a good chuckle out of some particular projects. They point to, among others, roadside snack stand in Pennsylvania shaped like a giant coffee pot and a lighthouse renovation in Toledo, Ohio.

“We picked some of the more interesting and exciting ones to get our colleagues’ attention,” McCain reportedly admitted.

But exciting as they might be, the claims about the projects are “exaggerated and misrepresented,” according to a fact check feature in the Associated Press this past weekend.

That roadside coffee pot? AP’s Joan Lowy reports:

No transportation aid was spent on the coffee pot’s $100,000 restoration, said Olga Herbert, executive director of the Lincoln Highway Heritage Corridor. The money was raised entirely from preservation and civic organizations and local supporters”

“We did not use any of this $300,000 award for anything to do with the coffee pot,” she said. “It’s interesting that nobody from Senator Coburn’s office called me about this.”

As for the lighthouse in Toledo:

Actually, no transportation dollars have been authorized or awarded. The lighthouse renovation is among projects community officials tentatively hope to get around to in 2019.

Senator Paul has also repeatedly cited a supposed “turtle tunnel” project. But the project he referenced on U.S. 27 in Florida was a significant safety issue for motorists, many of whom were forced to swerve when alligators, turtles and other creatures crossed the highway from adjacent Lake Jackson. While Coburn claimed the project would require $6 million or more to finish on an undefined timeline, in fact, USDOT told Lowy the project was completed in September 2010 at $3 million, under budget and $3 million less than Senator Coburn claimed.

Streetsblog Capitol Hill has more.

The takeaway? At the least, members of Conrgess should do a better job fact-checking. While they’re checking the numbers, they might look to see how long it would take to repair bridges relying solely on this relatively tiny share of funds. It would take Paul’s home state of Kentucky 66 years of bike and pedestrian funding to achieve a state of good repair for their bridges. Pennsylvania wouldn’t catch up until sometime during the 24th century.

Safe to say, this isn’t the serious proposal for bridge repair that we urgently need. If Paul, Coburn and McCain are serious about fixing bridges and not just scoring political points, they’ll come back with something better.

Photo courtesy of the Associated Press.

Late update: Senator Rand Paul’s amendment to cut money for walking and biking and direct it to bridge repair failed in the Senate today, by a 60-38 count.

Correcting some misinformation on bicycle and pedestrian spending

Bike and pedestrian projects get less than 1.5 percent of federal transportation funding — despite recent misinformation to the contrary.

There’s some misinformation percolating about the size of the transportation enhancements program — the small dedicated program that has funded projects to make biking and walking safer and more convenient for 20 years. Some misleading data has been shared and then propagated in news stories, so we wanted to put up this very simple explainer to help set the record straight — and equip you to help us set the record straight.

There have been news stories and press releases saying that states are required to set aside 10 percent of their transportation funds for things like “like transportation museums, educational programs for pedestrians and the operation of historic transportation facilities.” Two things are incorrect and misleading here.

  1. The purpose of the program:  Though there are 12 eligible uses in the transportation enhancements program — including the others mentioned above — more than half of TE funds are spent to make people on foot or bike safer. People who oppose this program like to cite some of the other eligible uses like highway beautification and transportation museums while neglecting to mention that the majority of the funding is used for just one purpose: making walking and biking safer.
  2. The size of the program:  Most deceptively, this program does NOT make up 10 percent of a state’s transportation dollars that they get from the federal government. Not even close. Each state gets their transportation money from several pots, and one of them — about a quarter of the total — is called the “surface transportation program” (STP). Ten percent of that pot is set aside for enhancements, and about half of that total is spent on biking and walking. Local governments apply for this money, and there are far more applications than there are funds. While TE only accounts for 1.5 percent of transportation funding, it is the largest source of funding for biking and walking facilities– which carry 12 percent of all trips in the United States.

This chart below from our Transportation 101 document should help.

The bars below show the core federal program funding levels for 2009. The bar in red is the surface transportation program. 10 percent of that single bar is where enhancements come from, or about 1.5 percent of all transportation spending. About half of that TE program is spent on biking and walking, and a small bit of funding from a few other programs (Recreational Trails and Safe Routes to School) adds up to the total of a little more than one percent of all transportation dollars spent to make walking and biking safer — though pedestrians make up about 14 percent of all traffic fatalities.