In ourwork to inform the policy response to COVID-19 and how the pandemic is compounding housing, climate, and other crises, we’ve emphasized the need for policy makers to take a unified approach to these issues rather than treating each one separately. The problems are interconnected, and our solutions must be as well.
But a new collaborative effort from more than 100 people and organizations, including Transportation for America, takes that work even further. Thriving Together: A springboard for Equitable Recovery & Resilience in Communities Across America goes beyond the issues of transportation, land use, and our built environment to tackle the whole person and our whole society, creating a jumping off place—a springboard—that “shows how we can convert our immense loss from COVID-19 and other crises into renewal.”
The Deep Dive on Reliable Transportation (page 232) is a comprehensive look at how we ended up with inequities present in transportation today and what we can do in both the short and longer term to create a more equitable transportation system.
WASHINGTON, DC—Joined by scores of transit riders, transit agency executives from coast to coast, and union representatives, Minority Leader Senator Chuck Schumer, Senator Chris Van Hollen, Rep. Jesús “Chuy” García, and Rep. Jerry Nadler made a powerful plea for Congress to come together and provide at least $32 billion in emergency relief for transit during a “Save Public Transit” rally Wednesday. The rally was organized by the Riders Alliance of New York, Alliance for a Just Society, and Transportation for America, and co-sponsored by 39 other organizations.
“Public transit is not an option. Public transit is a lifeline,” said Rep. Jesús “Chuy” García. “The working men and women at all transit agencies across the country roll up their sleeves and go to work everyday. They enable the rest of our essential frontline workers to get the job done. Now it’s our turn.”
“We have to do this, we have no choice—it’s the decent thing to do,” said Rep. Jerry Nadler. “The function of government is to let people live, and the economy needs to survive.”
“I fully support and will fight to secure our proposal of $32 billion to help our nation’s mass transit stay in operation and recover from the crisis,” said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. “As a New Yorker, the transit system is the blood, arteries and veins of our system. Without it, we die. Investing in mass transit now will ensure that hard working families can keep relying on the train, the bus, the subway, to earn a living.”
“$32 billion dollars is absolutely essential to maintain current essential service, and make sure we can maintain and sustain transit systems that [are the] lifeblood of so many of our communities,” said Senator Chris Van Hollen. “We need to make sure this emergency relief is included in the next round of legislation.
These four members of Congress were joined by dozens of others, including public transit executives, union representatives, and most importantly, transit riders from a half-dozen cities—including essential healthcare workers, students, and others—who vividly described how they rely on public transit daily to connect them to work and other daily needs, and how their lives would change dramatically if agencies are forced to dramatically curtail service or raise fares.
Massive reductions in transit revenue—a result of plummeting ridership and reduced tax receipts from COVID-19 shutdowns—is threatening the viability of public transit systems, putting millions of Americans’ access to jobs, healthcare, grocery stores, and other services essential to surviving the pandemic at risk.
The full rally can be watched here:
Quotes from speakers
“Transit agencies are seeing unprecedented levels of revenue decrease. The financial position that they’re in right now is untenable. Congress did the right thing by providing badly needed resources in the CARES Act but going into the fifth month of this pandemic, more assistance is absolutely essential. We’re proud to join everyone in this call calling on Congress to provide at least $32 billion in the next COVID response bill,” said Larry Willis, President of the Transportation Trades Department, AFL-CIO. “Without relief, transit systems will face damage that can’t be reversed. Not just jobs and operating subways, but as a labor organization representing many unions, we’ll see cutbacks in many sectors. We call on Congress to save our economy and protect frontline workers in our community.”
“At the end of the day, transit workers are the unsung heroes of the pandemic. We were the ones on the frontline. We were the ones who ferried other essential workers to the frontlines of this fight and we have paid the price,” said John Samuelsen, President of the Transport Workers Union International. “Around 145 transit workers in the TWU have died in the line of duty from COVID-19. Thousands of others have been sick and will be affected for the rest of their lives. We came to work diligently across the country. $32 billion dollars is what we need.”
“The truth is we haven’t faced a crisis like this. Without quick action by Congress this month, the MTA will need to make painful choices to balance our books. It will harm our customers,” said Patrick Foye, CEO of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. “The precipitous decline in revenues means we can’t cut our way out of the crisis while keeping the region running. I remember the 1970s when the MTA fell into disrepair. We can’t go back there. We’ll fight on behalf of fellow New Yorkers. We can’t afford to do anything else.”
“We ask so much of our transportation workers precisely because the service they provide is so essential,” said Leslie Richards, General Manager of the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transit Authority (SEPTA). “Throughout the COVID-19 crisis SEPTA has provided critical service to ensure that medical and other essential workers can get to their jobs and residents can access life-sustaining services. The emergency investment of at least $32 billion dollars we are urging Congress to include in the next coronavirus relief bill will preserve our ability to provide safe and critical service now and into the future.”
“If ever there was any doubt that transit is an essential service—and I’m not sure if there ever was—the pandemic has proven just how essential it is,” said Dorval Carter, president of the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA). “In Chicago, 20 percent of riders during the stay at home order were medical workers. Twenty-six percent said they wouldn’t be able to get to work without public transit. And sixty-two percent would not have been able to get essential things like food.”
“It’s expensive to live in the Bay Area. BART is the connection between affordable housing and jobs,” said Bob Powers, General Manager of Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART). “I spent several hours in the BART system yesterday. Our riders wore masks, spread safely. Stations and trains were clean, disinfected. Hand sanitizer stations were filled. We handed out masks in the stations. The ventilation system replaces every 90 seconds. For us to provide the quality of service so many need, whether in San Francisco, Chicago, or New York, and to prevent a mobility divide, we need Congress to act now.”
“New Orleanians are tough. We got through Katrina, and we’ll get through COVID-19. But we absolutely need Congress’s help right now,” said Alex Wiggins, CEO of New Orleans Regional Transit Authority. “Our revenue, which we rely on to provide service, is substantially down. We have to maintain the mobility of our patrons who rely on us to get between home and work. We call on Congress to fund transit with an additional $32 billion to keep us going through 2021.”
“The mobility divide is as important as the digital divide,” said Dr. Floun’say Caver, Interim CEO of the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority. “The mobility divide perpetuates economic inequality in our communities. Seventy-nine percent of RTA riders are minorities, and 60 percent of riders earn less than $35,000 per year. RTA needs to be a catalyst for the economic and social recovery of our community. We implore Congress to provide a minimum of $32 billion to support the economic mobility of our minority community members and those who are less affluent.”
“I live in New Orleans. Public transit is my bread and butter,” said Judy Stevens, a New Orleans transit rider. “I’m an essential healthcare worker. I don’t own a car. I use transit to get to work, grocery, doctor appointments, all daily activities. I rely and depend on it. With cutbacks to service during COVID, riders aren’t able to social distance right now. Please Congress, listen to riders, and fully fund transit service.”
“In Cleveland, our transit agency didn’t have the resources it needed to support social distancing. More federal funding for transit would make the difference between illness and health for many riders like me, and it would make a difference in other aspects of our lives as well,” said Dana Beveridge, a Cleveland transit rider. “For those of us who don’t drive public transit dictates where we shop, live, work. So much depends on if there’s a bus that’s on time or a bus at all. I implore Congress to provide the much-needed emergency relief that will save transit and save lives.”
WASHINGTON, DC: Yesterday evening, Senate Republicans released their proposal for the next round of COVID-19 relief funding. The proposal, called the HEALS Act, contains no emergency funding for public transportation operations or passenger rail. Transportation for America released the following statement in response.
“Stay-at-home orders to prevent the spread of COVID-19 have hit transit agencies very hard. At the same time, transit remains critical for essential workers to reach their jobs and will be central to restarting the economy if we want everyone who wants to work to be able to get there. But the Senate leaves transit out of the HEALS Act,” said Beth Osborne, director of Transportation for America. “Americans need reliable, convenient, and affordable transportation options now more than ever. Any final bill must reflect that transit needs at least $32 billion in order to survive this crisis.”
“The response to COVID-19 has slowed travel between cities by a huge amount. Interestingly, the Senate recognized in the HEALS Act the importance of keeping airports operating through the crisis, but not passenger rail,” said John Robert Smith, chairman of Transportation for America. “However, many in small town America still rely on intercity rail to get to hospitals and essential services. It is irresponsible to leave many people in small towns and rural areas disconnected from Amtrak and other passenger rail services at this precarious time.”
Earlier this month, the House Appropriations Committee approved transportation funding levels for fiscal year 2021. Emergency funding for the primary transit construction program and passenger rail is great, but more money for highways—funneled into existing broken programs that just make traffic worse—is not. Here’s what’s to like and not to like in the House FY2021 transportation appropriations bill.
Increased funding for transportation is only good if it’s spent on programs that make a difference. Unfortunately, current federal highway policy fails to prioritize maintenance while worsening safety, climate change, and congestion, and undermining investments in rail, transit, biking, and walking. That’s why our transportation problems continue to worsen despite large sums of funding: our highway funding creates problems that wastes the money spent on transit and passenger rail.
While current public transportation, BUILD Discretionary Grants, and passenger rail policy can be improved, additional funding for these programs, even under current law, is absolutely critical for state and local governments. This is why the FY21 Transportation, Housing and Urban Development (THUD) bill approved by the House Appropriations Committee is, for the most part, a mixed bag. Here are three things to know.
1. Emergency funding and policy improvements for Capital Investment Grants (CIG)
Capital Investment Grants (CIG) is the main federal program for constructing new transit assets. In order to receive CIG funding, state and local governments need to raise matching funds. With COVID-19 demolishing state and local governments’ budgets, few entities will be able to receive funding from CIG without making major sacrifices.
The FY21 THUD appropriations bill includes $5 billion in emergency funding for CIG, bringing CIG’s total fiscal year funding level to $7.2 billion. The bill also makes a policy change that will make CIG funding more accessible in the COVID-19 era: Funds made available by this bill can be used for amendments to an existing Full Funding Grant Agreement to lower or defer the local match, something that may be necessary due to COVID-19.
2. No emergency funding for transit operations
With all of public transportation’s funding sources—farebox revenue, state and local sales tax revenue, and more—dwindling due to COVID-19, transit is in dire need of emergency operating support. Many transit agencies are anticipating running out of funds in the next few months, stranding riders who depend on transit to reach their jobs, healthcare, groceries, and other services.
In May, transit agencies, elected officials, and organizations across the country called for $32 billion in emergency support; many agencies have now upped their ask to $36 billion. But the FY2021 THUD appropriations bill doesn’t provide any emergency operating support for transit. There’s hope that transit will be included in the next round of COVID-19 relief legislation, but it might not be at the level necessary to keep transit services running.
3. More highway funding for broken programs
The FY2021 THUD bill significantly increases highway and transit funding levels to match the INVEST Act, the House-passed proposal to reauthorize federal transportation policy. However, while FY21 appropriations must be approved to avoid a government shutdown, the INVEST Act is unlikely to become law, at least not this year, and the most likely scenario is an extension of current law (the FAST Act).
This means that these increased funding levels will just be funnelled into programs that make our problems worse—particularly the federal highway program, which is still hardwired to prioritize car access, incentivizing projects that improve vehicle speed without actually increasing people’s access to jobs and services, reducing our maintenance backlog, or saving lives from crashes. The INVEST Act would update the federal highway program with performance measures that would connect federal funding to the outcomes Americans value, but in the meantime, increased highway funding will likely be spent on building roads to nowhere.
If the INVEST Act was law, this would be a different story
The Appropriations Committee directs spending—not policy—so we cannot hold the committee responsible for outdated transportation policy that just makes our problems worse. Although we are concerned that significant new highway funding without policy reform will continue to undermine our goals, we appreciate increased funding levels for transit, passenger rail, and the BUILD program, and the support this Committee has given to the CIG program in FY21 and in recent years.
This is why we support the INVEST Act, and why we’ll continue to work to secure fundamental reform in the next surface transportation authorization: under new transportation policy, all federal funding will work to improve Americans’ access to the things they need. We’re looking forward to working with Congress to pass transportation policy that puts funding to work.
Public transportation is in crisis. Transit agencies are suffering tremendous losses in ridership and farebox revenue, as well as state and local revenues, with no end in sight. Meanwhile, the multi-year transportation bill passed in the House of Representatives that includes some relief for public transit won’t pass anytime soon. Here’s what Congress must do to truly save transit from collapsing.
Public transportation is facing an existential crisis.Transit agencies across the country are making drastic cuts to service to cope with depleting budgets, severing millions of people from access to essential jobs and services, including healthcare and grocery stores. Any long-term economic recovery will be nearly impossible without transit service to connect people to opportunities and these essential services.
But recent transportation and stimulus bills didn’t supply transit agencies with sufficient emergency funding, nor make critical, short-term policy changes to help agencies weather this crisis. The HEROES Act, House Democrats latest economic stimulus measure, included $15 billion for public transit, less than half of the need. The INVEST Act, a long-term transportation authorization passed as part of a large infrastructure package in the House earlier this month, fundamentally changes the programs at the heart of federal transportation policy to help communities improve access, safety, and their maintenance backlogs. But it only provided transit agencies with $5 billion in emergency assistance—a far cry from the $32 billion over 160 organizations, including Atlanta’s MARTA and New York City’s MTA, have asked for.
Last week, the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Transportation, Housing and Urban Development (THUD) released their proposal for fiscal year 2021 spending levels. While the subcommittee supplied transit construction programs, like New and Small Starts, with emergency funding, there is no funding for direct emergency operating support for transit agencies like was provided in the CARES Act.
We can’t afford for transit to stop running. If Congress does nothing, public transportation won’t be able to provide Americans with a convenient, affordable, rapid and sustainable transportation option when our country needs it the most. Here’s what Congress can do.
NOTE: while some of these recommendations are included in the HEROES Act, the INVEST Act, or the House FY21 appropriations, no bill includes all of these recommendations and none of these bills have been signed into law (or even stand a chance of consideration by the Senate). Transit agencies are hurting now, and urgent action is required. Each of these recommendations work together, and we urge Congress to consider this as a package.
Provide at least $32 billion for emergency operations support and allow transit agencies to use 2019 ridership data to receive formula grants in FY21 and FY22.
Public transportation is the bedrock of our transportation infrastructure, connecting millions of Americans to jobs, schools, services and opportunities every single day. Yet this essential service might not survive COVID-19. Transit agency revenues are dwindling due to dramatically reduced fare collection, diminished local funding sources, and other impacts from a contracting economy. Further, ridership levels are plummeting as transit agencies actively discourage non-essential travel. With recurring federal transit funding based in part on ridership, these historic low ridership levels put future funding at risk. Without emergency help today, and a guarantee of long term stability, essential transit service will suffer.
To ensure that transit agencies can continue to operate, Congress should: (1) provide at least $32 billion for emergency operating support, and (2) allow transit agencies to use 2019 ridership data to receive formula grants in FY21 and FY22, holding transit providers harmless for the loss of ridership due to COVID-19, as is allowed in the recently-passed INVEST Act.
Require detailed, directive, guidance on how to safely operate, and provide necessary personal protective equipment (PPE)
Over 100 U.S. transit workers have died from COVID-19. In New York City, transit workers are dying at three times the rate of police and fire emergency personnel combined. Yet thousands of transit personnel work everyday to connect Americans to jobs and healthcare, many doing so without access to adequate personal protective equipment (PPE).
Another factor contributing to transit workers’ greater risk of contracting COVID-19 is underwhelming federal guidance for transit agencies regarding the purchase, distribution, and use of PPE, and how to safely operate during this crisis. The CDC guidance for transit operators, maintenance workers, and station staff does not provide clear enough instruction, leaving local communities, states, and transit agencies to develop a patchwork of rules. The lack of prescriptive, national regulations, means some transit workers and riders will be more protected than others and leaves safety to the discretion, and political whims, of local communities.
To improve safety for the essential transit workforce, Congress should (1) require detailed, directive, federal guidance on how to safely equip personnel and work environments and operate transit services, (2) supply transit workers with PPE.
Eliminate the local match for existing and upcoming projects in the Capital Investment Grants (CIG) pipeline and increase annual funding for CIG
COVID-19 is decimating state and local governments’ budgets, constricting local governments’ ability to raise matching funds to receive funding from the CIG program. There are $23 billion worth of projects in the CIG pipeline, demonstrating the demand for additional public transit across the country. These projects create manufacturing jobs and support local economic development. To reduce strain on local budgets and support local economic development, Congress should (1) Provide no less than the FY19 funding level of $2.55 billion and $3.1527 billion to cover the additional proposals; (2) eliminate the local match for new CIG projectsin the pipeline and retroactively reduce or eliminate the local match for existing projects, and(3) prevent Federal Transit Administration from changing overall project ratings due to changes in local commitments or ridership projection.
Provide at least $7 billion in public transit formula funding to save jobs and protect transit’s future
Some kinds of spending create more jobs, faster, than others. Transit maintenance has proven to be an effective job creator because less money is spent on equipment and permits and more on wages. Transit agencies face a $99 billion maintenance backlog due to chronic underfunding. By investing in transit maintenance, we can improve essential service and create jobs quickly.
To create jobs and repair essential public transit systems, Congress should (1) provide $7 billion in formula maintenance funding, (2) eliminate the local match for these funds in FY21 and FY22.
Provide a fair share for transit by ending the “80-20” split and funding transit at the same level as highways
Investing in transit creates jobs quickly and supports service essential to our economic recovery; yet, since 1982, Congress has provided transit with only about 20 percent of dedicated surface transportation funding. This “80-20 split” in transportation spending has left transit chronically underfunded for decades and has created the perception that highways are more deserving of support, and more affordable, than transit. With the gas tax increasingly unable to support transportation spending, the rationale for the 80-20 split no longer applies. To support our economic recovery, Congress should (1) not default to the 80-20 split, and (2) provide funding for transit at least at the same level as highways.
Last week, Joe Biden’s presidential campaign jointly released policy recommendations across a range of issues in partnership with Bernie Sanders supporters through a Unity Task Force. Climate change takes a prominent role in the 110-page report, but the proposal fails to call for the comprehensive changes needed to address transportation emissions. Here’s how the Unity Task Force recommendations fall short, particularly in comparison to the House’s new climate blueprint and the INVEST Act.
Weevaluated presidential candidates’ climate plans last November based on how well they address transportation emissions, and in February we scored their transportation proposals against our three guiding principles. Most candidates were heavily focused on promoting electric vehicles and strengthening fuel efficiency standards. Fewer offered concrete goals and targets for (or even addressed) the need to reduce driving by making it safer to walk and bike for short trips, making transit more convenient, supporting passenger rail, and prioritizing maintenance over road expansion projects that induce more traffic.
So how does the Unity Task Force’s proposal compare to its predecessors in addressing climate and transportation? It largely follows in the same footsteps, with nods to investing in transit and passenger rail but no acknowledgement of the need to reform the base national transportation program that has produced communities where transit can’t serve people well. While the report includes brief language on the need to prioritize allocating transportation funds to transit and pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure, it says nothing about reforming the policies that prioritize car travel and congestion reduction above all else—policies that make it inconvenient, dangerous, or impossible to travel outside a car in much of the US.
Support “cash-for-clunkers” style approaches to incentivize accelerated adoption of zero-emission passenger vehicles. Provide incentives for manufacturers to build new factories or retool existing factories in the United States to assemble zero-emission vehicles or manufacture charging equipment.
“Encourage states to prioritize allocation of transportation funds for public mass transit, and pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure, and ensure transportation options and infrastructure meet the needs of tribal, rural, and urban communities to fully participate in zero-emissions transport.”
“Encourage states to prioritize allocation of transportation funds for public mass transit, and pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure, and ensure transportation options and infrastructure meet the needs of tribal, rural, and urban communities to fully participate in zero-emissions transport. Make major improvements to public transit and light rail. Preserve and grow the union workforce within the rail, transit and maritime sectors.”
“We commit to public transportation as a public good, including ensuring transit jobs are good jobs.”
Invest in high speed passenger and freight rail systems, while reducing pollution, helping connect workers to quality jobs with shorter commutes, and spurring investment in communities more efficiently connected to major metropolitan areas and unlocking new, affordable access for every American.
500,000 new public charging outlets by the end of 2030 and restore the full electric vehicle tax credit.
Altering local regulations to eliminate sprawl and allow for denser, more affordable housing near public transit would cut commute times for many of the country’s workers while decreasing their carbon footprint.
Communities across the country are experiencing a growing need for alternative and cleaner transportation options, including transit, dedicated bicycle and pedestrian thoroughfares, and first- and last-mile connections.
Ensure that America has the cleanest, safest, and fastest rail system in the world and will begin the construction of an end-to-end high speed rail system that will connect the coasts.
100 percent electric vehicles powered with renewable energy.
For too long, government policy has encouraged long car commutes, congestion, and dangerous emissions. Create more livable, connected, and vibrant communities.
$300 billion investment to increase public transit ridership by 65 percent by 2030.
$607 billion investment in a regional high-speed rail system.
Check out how we scored Democratic candidates like Senator Warren and Andrew Yang on climate in this November 2019 blog
We can’t “prioritize” transit, biking, and walking without addressing the underlying problems with our highway program
As we said when we evaluated Biden’s transportation plan back in February, layering good programs on top of a program that causes the problems isn’t smart policy. We can’t simply invest more in transit on top of our current highway program and expect to see the emissions results we want, let alone by simply “encouraging” states to invest more in transit as the report calls for. Likewise, just investing more in pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure won’t be enough to make it safer to bike and walk. Adding a bike lane to a dangerous high-speed, car-oriented corridor running through a community without making any other changes to reduce speeds isn’t giving more Americans the option to bike. And investing more in transit in a community where you have to wait for the bus on a busy road with nowhere to cross safely won’t bring us closer to making transit a public good as the Task Force envisions.
We need to come to grips with the legacy of our highway system and fix the problem. We have invested in transportation for decades in ways that are bad for the climate and disproportionately harm low-income people and people of color, and we’ll continue to see the same results until we change the underlying policies that have led to those investments.
A far cry from stronger recent proposals from the House
It is disappointing to see recommendations from Biden and Sanders’ task force that do so little to change the status quo, especially on the heels of much stronger and more comprehensive reforms proposed by the House. The House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis recently released a comprehensive legislative blueprint for tackling climate change that takes a much wider view—prioritizing repair, safety, and access in a holistic approach to promote more transit, biking, and walking and reduce the need to drive. The INVEST Act, recently passed by the House as part of the Moving Forward Act, introduced significant reforms to our core national transportation program along similar lines to those recommended by the Select Committee that could have far-reaching impacts for climate if adopted.
By contrast, the Unity Task Force report does not address reforming current federal transportation policy at all. Here are some specific ways it falls short by comparison:
1) No acknowledgement of the need to stop building needless new roads at the expense of maintenance
Unlike the Unity Task Force report, the House Select Committee’s blueprint calls for changes to our core highway program, including prioritizing maintenance over new road infrastructure. The INVEST Act would put requirements in place to hold states more accountable to doing so. While prioritizing repair may not be intuitive climate policy, it would make a huge difference in stemming the trend of inducing more driving and more emissions. The nation’s roads are deteriorating, contributing to a looming financial problem, yet states consistently underinvest in maintenance and build new roads instead. We have talked previously about how a 1 percent increase in lane miles can result in a 1 percent increase in vehicle miles traveled.
2) Lacks the focus on safety necessary to actually make walking, biking, and transit viable
As we discussed above, dangerous streets and disconnected communities pose a major barrier to taking short trips by walking and biking in many communities, and those same dangerous conditions can make it difficult or impossible to reach transit. The House Select Committee’s blueprint recommends requiring states to use Complete Streets and context-sensitive principles and makes numerous recommendations throughout to prioritize funding for walking and biking. The INVEST Act also takes a comprehensive approach to prioritizing safety. The Unity Task Force report does not address transportation safety at all.
3) Nothing on measuring outcomes that matter for climate change
The House blueprint recommends creating a new performance measure for greenhouse gas emissions, requiring states and metro areas to measure emissions and then create plans for lowering them, as does the INVEST Act. This is a major shift, and it will lead to significantly different outcomes if states are truly held accountable to these measures. The Unity Task Force’s report does not include any recommendations for measuring outcomes that matter for climate, nor does it propose any concrete goals for reducing transportation sector emissions.
These are all major blindspots in the Unity Task Force report. We must address the problems embedded in federal transportation policy to reduce transportation emissions and make our transportation system work for everyone, and it seems like Biden and Sanders still don’t understand this.
Last week, the House passed a long-term transportation authorization—the INVEST Act—as part of the Moving Forward Act, House Democrats’ large infrastructure package. But the INVEST Act likely won’t become law anytime soon. Here’s how the INVEST Act advances the debate by moving the starting line for future legislation—and presses the Senate to do something better.
Biking near the National Mall in Washington, DC. Photo by Elvert Barnes on Flickr’s Creative Commons
Last week, the House of Representatives passed the Moving Forward Act, an infrastructure package that included the INVEST Act. The INVEST Act is a long-term transportation authorization that takes a markedly different approach to transportation policy: it fundamentally changes the programs at the heart of federal transportation policy to help communities improve access, safety, and their maintenance backlogs.
But President Trump and the Senate majority have already signaled that they won’t support the bill, and Senate Democrats are supporting a far more inferior reauthorization proposal passed in a committee last summer. And with Congress focused on other pressing issues such as another COVID-19 relief bill, there’s not much time left on the Congressional calendar for Senators and Representatives to agree on a massive infrastructure package. The INVEST Act is likely dead on arrival.
But all of our research and reports, your calls and messages to legislators, the op-eds, the group and individual sign-on letters, the fact sheets, the social media campaigns, the blogs and more had a major impact. The hard work that made the INVEST Act a new kind of transportation bill laid a powerful foundation for future transportation legislation, making a better final product—whenever one finally passes—far more likely.
“You think nothing is happening on the Hill, and then it all happens in two days,” said Chris Rall, T4America’s Outreach Director. While the actual legislating only occurs over the course of a few weeks, the work that goes into that first draft bill takes months—years, even. T4America has been laying the groundwork for this new kind of transportation bill for at least the last year, launching our three principles for transportation success in October 2019—all three of which were included in the INVEST Act.
“One chamber of Congress just voted to make fundamental reform, and that’s a significant victory,” said T4America policy director Scott Goldstein. “The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee did the hearings, research, and outreach. Votes were cast and it’s forever in the Congressional record. And once things are written down, they stick around and become normalized. That’s massive.”
This victory is worlds away from the process that produced MAP-21, a transportation authorization that Congress passed in 2012. During those negotiations, the House attempted to kick public transportation entirely out of the highway trust fund, undoing the political compromise forged by President Reagan in the 1980s to raise the gas tax and devote a portion to transit. A rapid, massive group sign-on letter organized by T4America ultimately prevented the House from passing their calamitous reauthorization proposal, leading House legislators to enter conference with the Senate with only a draft.
Unlike MAP-21, the FAST Act that replaced it in 2015, and all other transportation authorizations, the INVEST Act starts the work of finally connecting federal funding to the outcomes Americans want—rather than the Senate’s approach of simply pouring more money into the same old broken systems and hoping for better results.
The INVEST Act almost certainly won’t become law this year. But when lawmakers are able to focus on an infrastructure package, the INVEST Act—a bill that updates our broken federal transportation program by prioritizing maintenance, safety, access, climate, and equity—will be the template for the House. That’s a success in our books.
When cities and states began shutting down in response to COVID-19, the financial impact to transit was swift and immense, but the immediate impacts only tell part of the story. Given the myriad ways that transit is funded around the country, the fiscal impacts of the pandemic will likely be varied and long-lasting. Congress and state legislatures should strive to find ways to adequately plan for and address those shortfalls in the long-term.
As businesses closed and non-essential workers followed the advice of health experts to stay home, transit lost a lot of riders and fares evaporated with them. On average, fares make up the single largest share (36 percent) of operating revenues for transit. But despite the fiscal cliff that a lack of riders presented, transit agencies actively began urging riders to stay home if possible—for the safety of riders and transit employees.
Combine the loss of fares with increased costs for cleaning (supplies, labor, and personal protective equipment) and it’s easy to see why transit agencies needed emergency operating funding.
But that’s only part of the story.
Public transportation is a public good and as such is funded by a variety of public revenues, like sales taxes, property taxes, and income/payroll taxes. Parking garages, advertising, and bonds are also sources of revenue for transit—both to operate and (especially in the case of bonds) for capital costs like new buses or a new rail line. All of those funding sources have been or will be adversely impacted by COVID-19 and the financial forecasts of transit agencies paint a grim picture.
In places where sales taxes make up a sizable share of funding (like Via in San Antonio, TX) the budget hole will appear fairly quickly. Sales dropped, taxes dropped, and funds stopped coming in. Those revenues will slowly begin to recover if and when businesses start to reopen and unemployment drops substantially—a hard thing to forecast in these unprecedented times. The CARES Act offered some support here, but more will be needed, especially as it becomes increasingly clear that the country’s economic recovery will not be as swift as it was assumed a few months ago.
“Projecting is tricky. There are so many variables and unknowns. It’s like throwing a dart at a fan,” says Karl Gnadt of the Champaign Urbana Urban Mass Transit District. “Our largest revenue stream is our state operating grant which is funded by state sales tax. Sales tax has tanked. The cuts will be significant and dramatic. The CARES Act is a band-aid over a broken bone.”
But the impact on property taxes and payroll taxes will be less immediate and potentially more troubling for that very reason. The impact of the pandemic on property taxes will likely be delayed by months or more given how they are collected. And budget holes from payroll or income taxes may not appear for close to two years from now.
TriMet in Portland, OR gets about 60 percent of its operating revenue from payroll taxes, while IndyGo in Indianapolis, IN receives about a third of its operating revenues from payroll taxes and another third from property taxes. In many other communities, these taxes make up smaller but significant sources of funding. The conversation in Congress and statehouses around the country aren’t taking into account these looming fiscal crises.
IndyGo in particular is expecting a 50 percent drop in revenues that will suddenly appear two years from now. The financial forecast in other cities is likely just as stark, but these projections are getting very little attention.
“The unknown is how deep this recession will be and the impact to property values,” says Elizabeth Presutti, CEO of the Des Moines Area Regional Transit Authority. “We’ll see our impact 2-3 years down the road.”
Without action, service cuts are likely. Network expansions and improvements could be halted or abandoned. Old buses or trains might have to continue operating without funds to replace. Layoffs could come, further hampering the ability for transit to provide a useful public service. Degraded service will make it that much tougher for Americans hard-hit by the recession to get to jobs and services right when they most need an affordable option.
As the service suffers, ridership will be harder and harder to attract and our communities will pay the price with worsened traffic and pollution.
As Congress and state legislatures consider additional measures to help communities recover, the long-term transit impacts should be considered as well.
Last week, the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis released a new legislative blueprint for tackling climate change that incorporates a number of T4America’s recommendations. The blueprint goes beyond merely electrifying vehicles to take a much wider view—prioritizing repair, safety, and access, and promoting transit, biking, and walking.
Riding a Citi Bike in New York City. Photo by Thomas Hawk on Flickr’s Creative Commons
For too long, electric cars have been the sole focal point of legislative efforts to reduce transportation emissions. Transportation is the single largest source of greenhouse gases (GHG), contributing 29 percent of the United States’ total greenhouse gas emissions—and the majority of these emissions come from driving. Electric vehicles (EV) would seem like a guaranteed way to bring those emissions down, but they are not enough. Increasing rates of driving are negating even impressive gains in fuel efficiency and EV adoption. Between 1990-2016, a 50 percent increase in driving negated a 35 percent increase in overall fleet fuel efficiency brought on by the implementation of CAFE standards. This caused emissions to rise by 21 percent over the same time period.
To truly bring down transportation emissions, we need to think #BeyondEVs. We need to stop building expensive, unnecessary new roads that just increase vehicle miles traveled (VMT). We need to stop making car ownership a prerequisite for participating in the economy. We need to actually measure emissions from the transportation sector, and penalize states for pursuing projects that fail to bring those emissions down. We need to focus on the low-carbon modes that can improve people’s lives: transit, walking, and biking.
This is what we recommended to the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis in November 2019 when they asked us for strategies to reduce emissions. The Committee released their new legislative blueprint for tackling climate change last week, and we are incredibly pleased to see our recommendations shaping the transportation section.
Here are the T4America recommendations for moving #BeyondEVs that found a home in the new blueprint.
Measure what matters: Greenhouse gas emissions and access
The House blueprint recommends creating a new performance measure for greenhouse gas emissions, requiring states and metro areas to measure emissions and then create plans for lowering them—just like in the INVEST Act. “It gets a lot harder to justify building a new highway (that you probably can’t afford to maintain anyway) when you have to reduce emissions with your federal dollars, considering that every 1 percent increase in lane miles results in a 1 percent increase in vehicle miles traveled,” as Smart Growth America wrote in this more expansive blog on the House blueprint.
The blueprint also takes steps to increase access to jobs and services by all modes, a climate-forward proposition that starts to make moving people—not just vehicles— the focus of transportation funding. “The House Select Committee adopted our core priority to start measuring access to destinations, directing states and MPOs to start evaluating how well the transportation system is facilitating access to housing, jobs, and critical services by any and all modes—similar to provisions that were included in the INVEST Act,” as Smart Growth America wrote in this more expansive blog on the House blueprint. The blueprint also directs agencies to analyze how low-income communities and communities of color experience difference degrees of access to jobs and services.
Make roads safer to walk, bike, and ride transit
Walking, biking, and riding transit are the lowest-emitting modes of transportation, but dangerous streets and disconnected communities make them difficult for many Americans to reap their benefits. The Committee makes numerous recommendations throughout the plan to prioritize funding for low-carbon transportation, especially walking and biking—and not just by increasing funding for the Transportation Alternatives Program, which receives only a meager $750 million for biking and walking projects across the country.
Measuring access instead of vehicle speed, as noted above, would begin to improve safety for all road users by measuring access by all modes—that includes walking, biking, and riding transit. But the plan also recommends requiring states to use “complete streets” and context-sensitive principles, using language that actually comes directly from T4America’s long letter of recommendations for the Committee.
Stop building needless new roads by prioritizing maintenance
Prioritizing repair is not the kind of strategy that is on the radar of most climate advocates, but it would in fact make a huge difference by stemming the trend of inducing more driving, making it an incredibly effective climate policy that could be easily implemented. How so? The nation’s roads are deteriorating, contributing to a looming financial problem, yet states consistently underinvest in maintenance and build new roads instead that bring increases in emissions. As we found in our report Repair Priorities (cited by the House Select Committee in their blueprint), between 2009 and 2017, the percentage of the roads nationwide in poor condition increased from 14 to 20 percent. At the same time many states continued to spend a significant portion of funding to build new roads.
As we discussed above, building new roads increases driving, with every 1 percent increase in lane miles resulting in a 1 percent increase in vehicle miles traveled. Prioritizing maintenance means that states can’t use federal funds to build new roads while neglecting their basic maintenance needs—a requirement that was included in the recently-passed INVEST Act.
It’s time to go #BeyondEVs—and the House majority agrees
With driving contributing the majority of U.S. transportation emissions, it’s time to shift our focus from reducing pollution from all the cars to asking: “why do we need all those cars in the first place, and can we drive them less overall?” Because we know that electrifying cars isn’t enough. We will not be able to electrify vehicles faster than vehicle miles traveled are increasing—the consequence of our national transportation strategy prioritizing vehicle access above all else.
To substantially reduce our GHG emissions, we need to couple electrification with strategies that cut to the heart of our problem: too much driving. We’re pleased to see so many of our recommendations included in the Committee’s blueprint, and are excited to continue to push the needle towards reducing emissions with our new partners in the House.
WASHINGTON, DC: Last week, 88 elected officials, organizations and businesses signed a letter written by Transportation for America commending the leaders of the House Transportation and Infrastructure (T&I) Committee for passing a new framework for the federal transportation program. The INVEST (Investing in a New Vision for the Environment and Surface Transportation) in America Act takes a markedly different approach to transportation policy that would begin to put outcomes—instead of the price tag—at the center of our decision making.
“Chair Peter DeFazio has done a tremendous job crafting a new kind of transportation bill,” said Beth Osborne, director of Transportation for America. “Change on this scale is notoriously difficult to achieve, but the House T&I Committee pulled it off. We thank Chair DeFazio and the House T&I Committee for their work and urge the full House to pass the INVEST Act. We especially recognize the hard work of Representatives Jesús ‘Chuy’ García and Mike Gallagher in introducing and supporting an amendment to strengthen the maintenance requirement in the bill, respectively.”
Many of these same 88 signatories also signed a Transportation for America letter to Congress this past April urging the House T&I Committee to adopt important reforms—reforms that were ultimately included in the INVEST Act. Last week’s letter thanks Chair Peter DeFazio (OR-4) and Ranking Member Sam Graves (MO-6) for their efforts and expresses strong support for the INVEST Act, praising its efforts to finally place the highest priority on repairing U.S. roads, bridges and transit systems; saving lives; increasing access to jobs and services by all modes; and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
With federal transportation policy set to expire this September, the full House of Representatives will vote on the INVEST Act this week, which would represent a notable rewrite of our country’s transportation policy. The INVEST Act stands in sharp contrast to the long-term transportation bill passed by the Senate last July, America’s Transportation Infrastructure Act (ATIA). The ATIA pours billions of new dollars into the status quo of broken policy, overshadowing notable improvements like a climate title and Complete Streets requirements.
Route 603 runs between Ogden Union Station and Weber State University in Utah which will eventually be served by a BRT route funded in part through a federal grant.
After the Trump administration took office, long-planned transit projects applying for federal grants began to run into administrative roadblocks, unexplained delays, and other difficulties that put the future of these projects at risk. In response, Transportation for America launched Stuck in the Station to call attention to these inexcusable delays and slowly USDOT began to respond to the pressure. Now, in light of that progress, our focus will be on policy solutions—changing the law—to make transit easier to build in America.
Nearly two years ago—in August of 2018—Transportation for America started ringing alarm bells. Under the Trump administration, “the pipeline of new transit projects has effectively ground to a halt,” we wrote at the time when we released our Stuck in the Station tool to track the administration’s (lack of) action on transit grants. Seventeen transit projects in 14 communities were waiting for funding; they’d followed all the rules over multiple years to get to the point where a federal grant was finally in sight, “and yet still the administration does nothing.”
As we directed the public’s attention to the unexplained hold ups at USDOT, media outlets started writing about it. Members of Congress started asking questions and holding hearings. The funding delays were the talk of transit conferences where administration officials were speaking. And slowly, our work to hold the administration accountable began to show results. Today the situation is markedly better. Twenty transit projects have been awarded funding and moved forward in the last two years.
That’s not to say everything is perfect—public transparency at the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) has plummeted. The FTA is still failing to release project rankings (a key component in eligibility for a grant) and their annual reports continue to include less information than under past administrations. But the situation has changed over the last couple years and there are other ways that we can continue to hold the administration accountable and help transit projects get built: policy reform.
Policy is our bread and butter
Right now, Congress is writing legislation that will govern all of federal surface transportation policy for the next five years, including the Capital Investment Grants program. At the same time, the COVID-19 crisis has devastated local transit budgets, putting transit projects in line for federal grants at risk of ever coming to fruition because of financing, not administrative obstruction. Both of these offer opportunities for us to improve the program by changing the law—to streamline it, to reorient the priorities, to increase transparency, and to make it easier to build transit in America.
And that’s already bearing fruit. The long-term policy proposal from the U.S. House—the INVEST in America Act—would change policy to delay the repayment of local funding matches and authorizes the federal government to cover more of a project’s total cost.
As our focus shifts more to policy reform, it’s our hope that Stuck in the Station will become wildly out of date as new transit projects are funded and the pile of cash for new projects that FTA is sitting on continues to dwindle. We’ll still be keeping an eye on this administration’s actions and be ready to ring the alarm again if fishy business starts anew. But until then it looks like transit projects are slowly leaving the station. All aboard!
With the INVEST Act clearing a crucial vote in committee last week, it moves to the full House for a final vote. We’ve covered the bill from nearly every angle, but here are five important things to remember as the bill moves forward, including how it radically outperforms the Senate’s status quo proposal on reauthorization.
The scale of change in the INVEST Act is a sign that leaders in Congress are taking reforms seriously, but they need to know that you care about this too. Will you send a message to your representative and urge them to support modern transportation policy? Take action here >>
This means that the INVEST Act will be considered as part of that larger bill, rather than with a separate vote like all other reauthorization proposals. Without a proposal for paying for the INVEST Act or the rest of the $1.5 trillion package, House Democrats are using the Moving Forward Act to signal their broad, overarching priorities for stimulus and infrastructure investments. Regardless of the outcome on this whole big package, the INVEST Act represents the starting point for one-half of Congress on reauthorization. And that’s why we are calling on everyone who cares about overhauling the nation’s transportation policy to weigh in with your representative: Make sure your rep knows that the INVEST Act is Congress’ best chance to finally move the needle.
In our initial scorecard, the original bill got neither a ✔ or an ✖ on our core issue of prioritizing repair and maintenance thanks to some significant loopholes. Thankfully, the bill got those needed changes due to the bipartisan leadership of Reps. Garcia (D-IL) and Gallagher (R-WI). They proposed important fixes via an amendment that passed by a voice vote—not a single member of the committee opposed it, giving our INVEST scorecard a solid checkmark for repair.
SENATE: In incredibly stark contrast, the Senate took a look at the country’s backlog of repair needs and the tendency for states to ignore those needs while building and widening new roads, and decided to opt for the status quo, dumping more money into a program that has allowed expansion in place of repair for decades. (The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee passed the America’s Transportation Infrastructure Act last July.) The INVEST Act represents a fundamentally different approach to repair.
3) Safety is front and center
The INVEST Act incorporates a focus on safety throughout all federal programs, overhauling a broken system that allows states to increase pedestrian deaths without penalty, dedicating more funding to protect the most vulnerable, and making changes to how we set speed limits to prioritize safety, and prioritizing access rather than speed. There is still room to improve this area, but we do especially thank Rep. Steve Cohen for introducing the Complete Streets Act of 2019 which sparked many of these changes.
SENATE: The Senate included new safety programs and language encouraging agencies to adopt Complete Streets designs and plans, but those programs would be undercut by failing to include the INVEST Act’s kind of overarching requirements to prioritize safety throughout. The Senate bill considers safety to be an option that agencies can and should pursue, but the last 20 years have proven that making Complete Streets designs or safety “optional” will result in an increase in deaths for people walking or biking.
4) Looking beyond cars to measure how well everyone can get where they need to go
We wrote at length about how the House sets existing policy on its ear by finally starting to organize all spending around improving access for everyone, by all modes:
The INVEST Act creates a new performance measure that requires project sponsors to improve access to jobs and services by all modes. While seemingly minor, this marks a huge shift in how transportation funding would be allocated—especially because project sponsors will be penalized if they fail to use federal funding to improve access. …Under the INVEST Act, states and MPOs must consider whether people traveling (not just driving) can reach jobs, schools, groceries, medical care and other necessities. And they will be penalized if they fail to use federal funding to improve that access.
SENATE: The Senate created a new pilot program to bring this kind of approach to a very small slice of all funding. Based on the COMMUTE Act, it would help a select group of states and metros measure whether or not their investments are connecting people to jobs and services. But as with the safety provisions (as noted above), the benefits would be limited by the fact that the other $358 billion in the Senate’s proposal would be spent using standards that often make access worse for many people with every dollar spent.
5) Bipartisanship is good, but it’s also failed to produce a new vision for transportation
House Republicans complained they were left out of the process on the INVEST Act. Even though the repair amendment was approved with a bipartisan voice vote, all of the House Republicans on the committee voted against the bill in the final committee vote. And as noted above, it’s being incorporated into a larger package which will almost certainly see a party-line, partisan vote for and against.
SENATE: Many on the Senate side have been bragging that their proposal was bipartisan, but that’s more of a reflection of the fact that both Senate Democrats and Republicans lack vision. Infrastructure has always been hailed as the place where Congress comes together, but that’s merely because the debate about policy usually begins and ends with the price tag. In the bipartisan transportation bills of the last decade, there was no (potentially controversial) new vision offered, and bipartisan majorities rallied to pass bills that gave everyone a little more money while undermining each party’s priorities equally and failing to replace a broken system. This is why the loudest cries for “bipartisanship” often come from the most entrenched interests, like state DOTs.
The Senate’s bill doubles down on the status quo and does little to nothing to support innovation, get more value for the dollar, fix existing infrastructure, improve safety, ensure access to economic opportunity for all people, address climate or today’s public health crisis. The INVEST Act is not perfect, but it is a different kind of bill that’s challenging many of these old, ingrained rules.
Wrapping up
A final agreement on reauthorization is unlikely to happen this year before the FAST Act expires this September. The silver lining is that T4America and other advocates out there have time to convince good government, equity, climate, and public health champions in the Senate that their status quo bill undermines all of these important goals. There’s not much to be proud of in the Senate bill, even if it was bipartisan. If you’re looking for more, you can find more of our issue-based analysis with these links below:
After two days of debate, the House Committee on Transportation & Infrastructure passed its proposal for long-term surface transportation policy last week. The INVEST Act starts the work of updating our broken federal transportation program by prioritizing maintenance, safety, access, climate, and equity. T4America thanks Chair Peter DeFazio for leading this effort and we urge the House to pass this modern bill next week.
For decades, federal transportation policy has sung the same tired tune: if we spend more money (that we don’t have) on building new roads (that we don’t need), our transportation problems will solve themselves. But they’ve only gotten worse. Inequitable access to jobs and services, congestion that only gets worse, more and more people killed while walking and biking, astronomical maintenance needs, increasing emissions—you name it.
But last week, the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure (T&I) passed a bill that starts to change this story. The INVEST (Investing in a New Vision for the Environment and Surface Transportation) in America Act takes a markedly different approach to transportation policy that would begin to put outcomes—instead of price tags—at the center of our decision making.
“Chair Peter DeFazio has done a tremendous job crafting a new kind of transportation bill,” said Beth Osborne, director of Transportation for America. “Change on this scale is notoriously difficult to achieve, but the House T&I Committee pulled it off. We thank Chair DeFazio and the House T&I Committee for their work and urge the full House to pass the INVEST Act. We especially recognize the hard work of Representatives Jesús ‘Chuy’ García and Mike Gallagher in introducing and supporting an amendment to strengthen the maintenance requirement in the bill, respectively.”
The full House of Representatives will likely vote on the INVEST Act next week; if passed, the bill would rewrite our country’s transportation rules for the next five years. T4America is pleased to support this exciting bill and strongly recommend that House legislators vote in its support.
What does the INVEST Act actually do?
The INVEST Act starts the work of connecting transportation funding to the outcomes communities need from their transportation systems: improved access, decreased emissions, safer and well-maintained roads and more. Here’s the rundown.
Maintenance:Sets aside funds for repair and requires states to fulfill conditions (which includes performance measures for state of good repair and others) before building or expanding roads.
Safety: Takes aggressive action to make our streets safer with everything from new street design standards to changing how speed limits are set.
Access: Focus transportation planning on multimodal access so people outside of cars are no longer left behind.
Equity: Prioritizes safety—especially for people struck and killed while walking which disproportionately affects low-income people and people of color—, requires that every state establish a vulnerable road user safety assessment, and reserves transit funding to serve areas of persistent poverty.
Climate. Takes a holistic approach to addressing climate change through new performance measures and grant programs.
We’ll have more shortly, including a quick look at a few important things to know about the INVEST Act, and how the INVEST Act stacks up against the Senate’s reauthorization proposal from last year.
As noted in our scorecard, the House’s INVEST Act transportation bill takes important strides to make safety a priority, from the inclusion of new performance measures all the way down to making changes with how agencies set speed limits. Here are five things to know.
Here’s how Emiko Atherton, director of the National Complete Streets Coalition at Smart Growth America, described the INVEST Act in our statement from June 3rd:
“The safety of everyone using our transportation system should always have been the number one priority for the dollars that we spend, but we have utterly failed with America reaching the highest number of pedestrians struck and killed by vehicles in three decades. Thanks to the hard work of Rep. Cohen who introduced the Complete Streets Act and saw many of those ideas incorporated here, safety will once again be paramount.”
So what does the INVEST Act change when it comes to safety? Here are five important changes.
1) Incorporating a focus on safety throughout all federal programs
Safety is not a single program, and our biggest criticism of the Senate’s approach to safety last year was the same as our critique on climate change: You’ll never measurably improve safety (or climate) by creating a small add-on program when the the overall federal program’s focus on vehicle speed makes safety worse and increases emissions. That’s why the most notable changes to the bill are those that prioritize “Complete and Context Sensitive Design” across federal spending and require states and metro areas to consider and design for all users, including pedestrians, bicyclists, public transit users, children, older individuals, individuals with disabilities, motorists, and freight vehicles. This will also take precedence over the current practice at most transportation agencies to plan projects around a guess at future traffic and, instead, prioritize operational performance.
The Secretary of Transportation is also charged with producing new design standards for the nation’s road system that takes context sensitive design principles into consideration, while also giving wide flexibility for local governments on design. (It should be noted that agencies already have wide flexibility to prioritize safety, though many continue to claim that the FHWA won’t “let them” do so.)
2) Overhauling a broken system that allows states to increase pedestrian deaths without penalty
States will be prevented from setting regressive targets for more people to be struck and killed by drivers while walking or biking—which are disproportionately the elderly, Black Americans and Native Americans, and people in low-income neighborhoods. (We just can’t bring ourselves to call these targets “safety” targets when the target is for less safety.)
We have written about this issue extensively, including an addendum to Dangerous by Design that we released earlier this year. After examining state data, we found that an astonishing 18 states set targets for more non-motorized users to be killed and injured in the coming year compared to the most recent year of data reported at the time. Let that sink in: 18 states are taking billions in federal transportation dollars, ostensibly intended to move people safely from A to B, and then planning for more people to die because of their spending decisions, and there are no penalties for doing so. States would now be required to set safety targets to improve, and if they fail to meet them, they will be required to spend more money to make their streets safer for everyone
Beyond this new requirement for the targets, states with the highest levels of pedestrian and bicyclist fatalities will also be required to set aside additional funds to address those safety needs.
3) Dedicates more funding to protect the most vulnerable
The INVEST Act doubles funding for the Transportation Alternatives Program (from $850 million to an estimated $1.5 billion per year), which funds many biking and walking projects; and the bill adds new protections that will prevent states from transferring those funds to other programs unless they first make them available to local governments who could identify no suitable projects. (That’s unlikely to happen—local communities are eager for funds to make their streets safer, especially in smaller communities where the state dictates what projects to build—not the locals.)
It also allows federal dollars to be used to create plans for Complete Streets and Vision Zero—an effort to eliminate traffic fatalities. Every state will also be required to establish a safety assessment for “vulnerable users” within their road safety plan, and create an overall safe systems approach to roadway design that incorporates the likelihood of human error in order to prevent fatalities, which leads us directly to…
4) Setting speed limits to prioritize safety rather than to accommodate speeders
The legislation would also change the way that speed limits are set. Today agencies set speed limits by finding the speed where 85 percent of drivers are obeying the limit and making that the posted speed. If you build a wide street (too wide for the planned speed) and people drive too fast, the speed limit is often raised to accommodate the rule breakers. It’s time to stop bending to the needs of dangerous speeders and ignoring the safety of everyone using our roads. Speed is the number one contributor to death on our roads, and those impacts are pronounced when someone is struck while walking or biking. Speed limits would instead be set based on a number of factors (the safe systems approach mentioned above), like crash statistics, the number of people walking & biking, and what sort of development exists around the road. The context of the street will determine the speed limit instead of how fast drivers choose to drive.
5) Changes to other parts of the bill will help prioritize safety
One of the bill’s major changes we detail in this post is a focus on access to destinations instead of vehicle speed, which is directly related to improving safety:
[To determine success, transportation agencies] measure whether or not your vehicle was moving quickly at some point of the trip. Whether or not you actually arrived isn’t measured. This metric of “success” ignores those who can’t or don’t drive, take transit, or are mobility impaired. …Vehicle speed isn’t a good measure of whether or not people can conveniently access the things they need in their daily lives.
By making access to destinations by all modes the measure of success, instead of “did your car go fast for some period of time,” we can dis-incentivize the building of big, wide roads that don’t have crosswalks and intersections and signals (those things slow down the cars!) and move toward making investments that will increase the ability of everyone to get where they need to go, regardless of how they are traveling.
Prioritizing access and starting to plan street design around the needs of today rather than magical thinking about traffic “needs” tomorrow will also contribute to improving the safety of our network overall, for everyone.
This bill could still use some improvements on safety for these changes to have their desired effects, including changing some “mays” to “shalls” and better defining context-sensitive designs in the #1 section above. But we applaud the work and leadership of Chairman DeFazio in writing a bill that puts safety front and center, and that of Rep. Cohen who introduced the Complete Streets Act of 2019 that sparked many of these changes. Federal standards and policy are just one part of this puzzle, and we will continue our important work with cities, counties, metro areas and states to help them learn how to better plan, design, and implement safer street designs.
It’s surprising, but the current federal transportation program doesn’t actually require that states spend federal funds to improve people’s access to jobs and services. This is why the bulk of transportation funding goes to increasing vehicle speed, a “goal” that fails to help many people get where they need to go. The new transportation proposal from the House of Representatives fixes that with a powerful new performance measure and grant programs.
Here’s how a new performance measure and grant programs in the House’s five-year INVEST Act would start to focus transportation funding on what counts: getting people where they need to go.
The current approach is broken
To determine if you had a successful trip, you probably think about getting from point A to point B and how long that trip would take. But transportation agencies don’t measure success that way: they instead measure whether or not your vehicle was moving quickly at some point of the trip. Whether or not you actually arrived isn’t measured. This metric of “success” ignores those who can’t or don’t drive, take transit, or are mobility impaired. This doesn’t mean drivers are loving life either though: they may be able to go fast but still feel trapped in their car for too much of the day to get to the things they need. Vehicle speed isn’t a good measure of whether or not people can conveniently access the things they need in their daily lives.
We think it is time to consider how well the transportation system provides access to jobs as well as all other necessities, from the grocery to the bank to school and health care. Access is not only a much better measure, areas with high accessibility allow people to access opportunities and necessities even if they’re not able to afford to drive alone. So this measure captures whether our communities provide equitable access to opportunity, allow for healthy and active living, and contribute less to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions as well as pollutants that harm public health.
And now, the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure brought this important concept into their vision for the future of the nation’s transportation program .
How this game-changing performance measure works
The INVEST Act creates a new performance measure that requires project sponsors to improve access to jobs and services by all modes. While seemingly minor, this marks a huge shift in how transportation funding would be allocated—especially because project sponsors will be penalized if they fail to use federal funding to improve access. The Virginia Department of Transportation has been doing this successfully for years, but this type of performance measure has not been tried across the nation yet and has never been attempted at the federal level before.
Under the INVEST Act, states and MPOs must consider whether people traveling (not just driving) can reach jobs, schools, groceries, medical care and other necessities. And they will be penalized if they fail to use federal funding to improve that access.
New grant programs will also support this approach
The INVEST Act authors know that transportation doesn’t exist in a vacuum: housing plays a huge role in how many jobs and services people can access. Putting housing (and especially attainable housing) close to transit is a powerful way to increase access to jobs and necessities. That’s why the bill requires the Federal Transit Administration to create the Office of Transit-Supportive Communities to provide funding, technical assistance, and coordination of transit and housing projects within the U.S. Department of Transportation and across the federal government. Further, this proposal adds affordable housing into the planning considerations for metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) and state DOT Transportation Improvement Programs, as well as for future transit capital grants.
The new Community Transportation Investment Program also solidifies the importance of access as a measure of success to the federal transportation program. The INVEST Act authorizes $600 million per year for competitive grants to localities and agencies for projects which improve safety, state of good repair, access to jobs and services, and the environment by reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. This requires the Secretary of Transportation to develop a system to objectively evaluate projects on program criteria, and develop a rating system which can be used to compare the benefits and costs of each application—as with Virginia’s Smart Scale program.
How these policies will actually improve the transportation system
Measuring access—not vehicle speed—puts transportation projects, regardless of mode, on an even playing field. Technologies like GIS and cloud computing makes it easier for states and MPOs to determine whether their system is connecting people in residential areas to jobs and services by all means of travel. With this information, project sponsors can consider all kinds of transportation projects and all transportation users equally. States and MPOs can also see when it is more cost-efficient to build the things people need closer to them, rather than defaulting to building expensive, new transportation projects to make far away necessities less inconvenient to travel to. With this, we can create more equitable access to economic opportunity, lower transportation costs, and reduce emissions and the damaging climate and health impacts of them.
The federal transportation program as we know it was largely created to increase vehicle speeds across the country, connecting the nation through a network of highways. Now that those highways are built, and we thoroughly understand the consequences of speed—both in terms of loss of life and failure to improve travel times and cost—it’s time to use technology to connect federal funding to the transportation outcomes we need. We’re pleased to support this new performance measure and accompanying grant programs in the INVEST Act.
UPDATE, June 17: This amendment was accepted by unanimous consent in the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. We thank Chair Rep. Peter DeFazio, Rep. Jesús G. “Chuy” García, and Rep. Mike Gallagher for their tremendous support and leadership.
The House’s transportation bill is being debated and voted on starting Wednesday, June 17th, and a vital new amendment would strengthen the repair provisions in the bill, helping to strengthen the bill’s language and better align it with the legislative goal of prioritizing maintenance over new road capacity.
When we first read through the INVEST Act last week we were excited to see that the committee clearly made a good faith effort to prioritize maintenance and after a cursory look we were inclined to give it a passing grade on our first principle of prioritizing repair. But the deeper we looked into the language, the more we saw the loopholes. …the INVEST Act’s fix-it-first language still needs to be strengthened to ensure a true focus on prioritizing repairing what we have before building new things that come with expensive, long-term repair costs. There were three misses in the House’s approach, but all can be fixed if the House is truly committed to ensuring that we preserve and maintain our existing transportation network.
We’re pleased to report that there has been a bipartisan amendment offered for tomorrow’s markup that would address the concerns outlined last week. Amendment #63 from Rep. Jesús “Chuy” García (D-IL), co-sponsored by Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI), would make three important changes:
1) Require a maintenance plan If your state or metro area wants to use core highway dollars for building new capacity, then they must present a financial plan for maintaining it. This is already true for transit, and it should be true for roads. The amendment would require a public plan for maintaining the new road while also maintaining the existing system. It is vital that we finally start requiring states to prove they can maintain what they’re building with the billions that they are given.
2) It will be hard to justify new road capacity with old models. The INVEST Act requires states planning new capacity road projects to perform benefit-costs analyses (BCAs), but this amendment requires them to use demand models with a demonstrated track record of accuracy. The models in current use don’t have a good track record.
3) Require a more complete accounting of the benefits and costs. The INVEST Act includes a new host of performance measures, including greenhouse gas emissions, and access to jobs and services. This amendment would require states planning new capacity projects to consider the benefits of ALL the performance measures, including new ones created by the bill. Without the amendment, project sponsors could have chosen one measure, like the narrow measure of “congestion reduction,” which is so often used to justify projects which just induce new driving, failing to consider the other priorities of the program like safety, emissions and access.
Who supports this amendment?
So far, in the limited time since it was released before markup began:
Transportation for America
Bipartisan Policy Center
League of American Bicyclists
League of Conservation Voters
National League of Cities
National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO)
Taxpayers for Common Sense
We’ll be keeping tabs on this amendment and others that are going to be considered as the House transportation committee starts debating and voting on these amendments starting at 10 a.m. on Wednesday, June 17th. Learn more about amendments and view our tracker here.
For those of you that live in a district represented by a Member of the House Transportation & Infrastructure Committee, you can send a message to your rep with this page and urge them to support the INVEST Act and to support this very necessary amendment. If you’re not sure if your rep is on the committee, just go on over to take action and the form will let you know.
Note: This amendment was accepted by unanimous consent in the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. Thank you Chair Rep. Peter DeFazio, Rep. Jesús G. “Chuy” García, and Rep. Mike Gallagher for your tremendous support and leadership.
The INVEST Act could be a turning point for the federal transportation program, almost hitting the mark on Transportation for America’s three principles for transportation investment. But a few amendments could make—or break—the bill. Stay up to date here.
So far well over 200 amendments have been proposed. Bookmark this page, as we’ll be posting updates to the most notable amendments we’re tracking closely. Smart Growth America is fighting for four amendments in particular to be included in the final bill:
Garcia #63: An amendment that strengthens the fix-it-first provision of the bill;
Garcia #64: An amendment that increases transit funding to the same level as highways;
Garcia #65: An amendment that sheds some light on a misguided transportation metric, Level of Service;
Cohen #91: And an amendment that expands the eligibility for transit-oriented development in the Transportation Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act.
Tracker
Find this tableon the web here in case it does not display well below. The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee will start consideration of this bill via a (remote) markup on Wednesday, June 17th at 10:00 a.m. Eastern. We expect the committee to take at least a day if not more to mark up the bill before they move to a final vote to advance it to the full House. We’ll be keeping this tracker updated as the markup proceeds, but stay tuned especially to @t4america on twitter for more real-time updates.
For those of you that live in a House transportation district, send a message to your rep and urge them to support the INVEST Act and to support these four amendments. If you’re not sure if your rep is on the committee, just go on over to take action and the form will let you know.
House transportation leaders introduced legislation to update our national transportation program to address climate, equity, safety and public health. Climate advocates and climate leaders on the Hill should recognize the strides taken with this proposal from Congress and fight to protect those changes in the bill.
This is a joint post by Transportation for America and Third Way, co-written by Rayla Bellis, T4America program manager, and Alexander Laska, Third Way Transportation Policy Advisor for the Climate and Energy Program. It is also posted on Third Way’s site.
While it isn’t perfect, the INVEST Act introduced in the House takes some very important steps, including:
Measuring and tracking important outcomes like GHG emissions and access to jobs and services.
Making significant progress towards electrifying our vehicle and transit fleets; and
Supporting investments in low emissions transportation modes, including:
Supporting transit with more money and better policy; and
Supporting biking and walking with a comprehensive approach to improving safety.
For too long, federal transportation policy has prioritized car travel and the infrastructure to support it while neglecting cleaner and more affordable transportation options like transit, walking, and biking. We are now seeing the consequences of decades of spending in line with those priorities: car-ownership is a prerequisite for participating in the economy in most communities, and many people are driving further every year to reach work and daily necessities. It is unsafe, inconvenient, or flat-out impossible to reach those destinations by any other means in much of the country. As a result, transportation is now the nation’s single largest source of greenhouse gases (GHG), accounting for 29 percent of emissions, 83 percent of which comes from driving. While cars and trucks will and should remain an important part of our transportation system, any effective strategy to reduce emissions from transportation must make it easier for Americans to take fewer and shorter car trips to access work and meet basic needs.
Last week the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee released their transportation reauthorization proposal. Third Way and Transportation for America unveiled a scorecard earlier this week to show how the new House reauthorization proposal and previous Senate proposal stack up against the recommendations in our new Transportation and Climate Federal Policy Agenda. The House bill makes significant strides in several areas in line with our federal policy agenda:
Measures and tracks important outcomes
We measure all the wrong things in our transportation system and therefore get the wrong outcomes. Instead of measuring whether people can get where they need to go (e.g., jobs, healthcare, and grocery stores), we measure how fast cars are moving. Rather than being required to reduce transportation emissions, states are distributed more money if their residents drive more and burn more gasoline.
The House bill takes important steps in reversing these perverse incentives. It requires states to measure and reduce greenhouse gas emissions from their transportation system (a similar requirement from USDOT was rolled back early in the Trump administration). States that reduce emissions can be rewarded with increased flexibility, while states that fail to reduce emissions will face penalties. This is a major shift, and it will lead to significantly different outcomes if states are truly held accountable to these requirements.
In addition, the bill requires a new performance measure to help states and MPOs evaluate how well their transportation systems provide access to jobs and services. This access measure is monumental. For the first time at the national level, recipients of federal transportation funding will be required to measure whether their transportation system is performing its most essential function: connecting people to the things they need, whether they drive, take transit, walk or bike. This will have profound impacts in communities, including directing more funds to projects that shorten or eliminate the need for driving trips. It also happens that providing a high level of access, especially for nondrivers, correlates with lower GHG emissions.
Makes significant progress towards electrification
Decarbonizing our transportation system will require us to transition quickly to zero-emission vehicles (ZEVs)–and that means making sure we have the infrastructure ready to support those vehicles. The INVEST In America Act establishes a new $1.4 billion program to deploy electric vehicle charging and hydrogen fueling infrastructure in public places where everyone will have access. The grant program will focus on projects that demonstrate the most effective emissions reductions. We believe the program should additionally focus on ensuring this infrastructure is accessible to low-income communities; this, combined with policies to make ZEVs more affordable, will help ensure all Americans can benefit from the air quality improvements and other benefits of clean vehicles.
The bill also reorients federal funding for transit buses towards electric vehicles by boosting funds for the Low- and No-Emission Vehicle Program five-fold, incentivizing the purchase of electric fleets, and requiring a plan for transitioning to a 100 percent electric bus fleet. This improved program, and other transit reforms, will help transit agencies procure electric and other clean buses, as well as the refueling infrastructure to support them. Transit is already a lower-carbon alternative to driving, and shifting our fleet towards clean buses will make it even more so. Ultimately, all federal funding for bus procurement should go towards low- and no-emission buses, but the significant increase for this program is a good start.
Supports transit with more money and better policy
Too many Americans must drive because they either are not served by transit or only have access to infrequent, unreliable, and inconvenient service. Transit has been underfunded for decades at the federal level despite the significant benefits it provides to communities: reduced emissions, improved economic opportunity, a way out of congestion, cleaner air, mobility choice, better health outcomes, and improved quality of life. Our failure to invest sufficiently in transit has disproportionately impacted low-income people and people of color, who are more likely to rely on transit to access jobs and services.
The House bill gives transit a big increase in overall funding: 47 percent. Equally importantly, however, it changes some policies that have long obstructed transit as a truly viable option in communities. For years, federal transit funding has incentivized lowering operating costs (usually accomplished by offering less or infrequent service) at the expense of building transit that best serves people’s needs. The new bill includes policies that shift those incentives, focusing instead on frequency of service. This will make transit a real option for more people in more communities.
Supports biking and walking with a comprehensive approach to improving safety
Dangerous road conditions pose one of the biggest barriers to taking short trips by walking or biking in many communities, leading to unnecessary driving trips that increase traffic and emissions. Between 2008 and 2017, drivers struck and killed 49,340 people walking on streets nationwide, and pedestrian fatalities have risen by 35 percent over the past decade. People of color, older adults and people walking in low-income communities are disproportionately represented in these fatal crashes.
The House proposal takes a comprehensive approach to make walking and biking safer through a combination of increased funding, policy reform, and better provisions to hold states accountable. For example:
The bill requires Complete Street design principles and makes $250 million available for active transportation projects including Complete Streets.
It proposes changes to how speed limits are set to prioritize safety results over a faster auto trip.
It requires states with the highest levels of pedestrian and bicyclist fatalities to set aside funds to address those needs.
The bill would also prohibit states from the current practice of setting annual targets for roadway fatalities that are negative—in other words, targets that assume the current trend line of increased fatalities is unstoppable, essentially accepting more fatalities every year as an unavoidable cost.
The House bill isn’t perfect, but is a significant improvement over the Senate’s proposal
While the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee’s proposal takes many steps in the right direction, it still misses the mark in some areas based on our agenda. It still includes significant funding for highways without the proper restrictions in place to avoid unnecessary buildout of new lane-miles we can’t afford to maintain, and congestion relief is still a primary goal embedded throughout the proposed program. This ultimately prioritizes the same types of transportation investments we have seen for decades.
Yet, the House bill takes significant steps that the Senate EPW bill introduced last year did not. In contrast to the broad, holistic approach the House bill takes to addressing emissions, the Senate bill introduced some new (but relatively weak) stand-alone programs to address emissions, congestion, and other important topics. Importantly, the Senate bill did not make any needed changes to the core federal formula programs, continuing to direct the vast majority of funding into programs that incentivize building high-speed roads and making travel by any means other than driving — and emitting — impossible for most Americans.
Bottom line: the House’s proposal could be a game-changer for climate, equity, and safety goals
The House’s proposal introduces more substantial reforms to our national transportation program than we have seen in years, and many of the changes will directly support reduced emissions, environmental justice, and other important goals. This is a big deal, but the magnitude of the changes may not be readily apparent. Many of the most transformative proposals do not sound like climate initiatives because they do not specifically reference emissions or address electrification. Instead they change funding formulas, policies, and performance measures that, over decades, have produced a transportation system that requires more and longer car trips and greater emissions.
Climate advocates and climate leaders on the Hill should recognize the strides taken with this proposal from Congress and fight to protect those changes in the bill. Advocates for preserving the status quo are preparing to fight these important changes. We need climate advocates to do the same to defend them.
The House’s new INVEST Act made a strong effort to prioritize maintenance, but there are still loopholes that can allow states and metro areas to avoid the legislative intent of a real, concrete focus on repair first. Here’s a run down on our concerns with the repair provision and how it could be strengthened in next week’s markup in the House transportation committee.
Flickr photo of bridge resurfacing by WSDOT. https://www.flickr.com/photos/wsdot/49921039787
We’ve spent 60-plus years building an unparalleled highway system with hundreds of thousands of bridges, in addition to scores of metropolitan transit networks and a network of other streets. But we have failed to steward our assets well. For no good reason at all, we’re still spending money like it’s 1956, expending money we don’t have to build roads we can’t afford to maintain which fail to bring the promised economic returns—all while neglecting repair needs. Liberals have supported and aggressively funded the status quo, ignoring the transportation program’s impact on climate, public health, and access to opportunity. Conservatives have joined them, failing to take a stand for bedrock values of good stewardship of federal dollars and keeping federal spending low. We must make repair and maintenance the core, number one priority of the federal transportation program. We cannot afford to keep expanding our system without any plan for maintaining it.
When we first read through the INVEST Act last week we were excited to see that the committee clearly made a good faith effort to prioritize maintenance and after a cursory look we were inclined to give it a passing grade on our first principle of prioritizing repair. But the deeper we looked into the language, the more we saw the loopholes.
It is indeed a major change that the committee proposes dedicating 20 percent of the two biggest sources of state DOT funds toward repair. In addition, states have to fulfill some new conditions to add new capacity with the largest highway program. Both are good steps and we applaud them. However, the INVEST Act’s fix-it-first language still needs to be strengthened to ensure a true focus on prioritizing repairing what we have before building new things that come with expensive, long-term repair costs. There were three misses in the House’s approach, but all can be fixed if the House is truly committed to ensuring that we preserve and maintain our existing transportation network.
1) Too many definitions are either missing, or too vaguely defined
Because the committee left a lot of the vital details to the USDOT Secretary to determine via regulatory language, the final verdict on repair won’t be decided in the legislation (as it should). As an example, for states to add new capacity with core highway funds, they have to fulfill three conditions: They have to demonstrate that they are making progress on repair, they have to consider operational improvements and transit and show that expanding roadway capacity is more cost-effective than either, and they have to demonstrate that the expansion project would meet another performance target, like congestion reduction.
Those three terms in italics will be left up to the USDOT rulemaking process, and can already have a long history of being manipulated to add new capacity. It would help to put more explicit parameters on what defines “progress on repair.” Does it mean meeting the state or MPO’s own repair targets, which could be unambitious? And when it comes to measuring cost-effectiveness and benefit cost analysis, the way these have been applied to transportation projects in the past have overstated the benefits of highway capacity expansions and undervalued or failed to value climate, equity and public health benefits.
2) To truly prioritize repair, states should prove they can maintain the new things they build
Even if states fulfill these conditions above to add new capacity, there’s no language requiring the project sponsor to prove they can maintain the asset they are building. This is a big miss, and this is one of the primary reasons we’re all in this mess in the first place.
Even if states make valuable and measurable progress on state of good repair, it would be negligent to allow them to build new things without requiring that they consider and plan for how they will take care of them. You don’t buy a house when you manage to secure some of the upfront costs (a downpayment), you also have to prove to the bank that you have a plan for paying that monthly mortgage for the next 15 or 30 years. We already require transit capital project sponsors to provide a plan for long-term maintenance when they apply for federal funding. It’s time to start requiring this degree of stewardship and responsibility to a highway program that has been sorely lacking it. Simply adding this as a core requirement to the conditions for expansion via an amendment could bring about this powerful change.
3) All the tools the states have to fulfill this repair focus were designed to justify new highways
The biggest challenge here is that the House is counting on an entrenched culture that was organized around the building and expanding a national highway system to accomplish something entirely new. The tools that transportation agencies have at their disposal—the ones the House is asking them to use to fulfill this new focus on repair—were developed specifically to justify new highways. Without other changes, they will continue to do so.
The transportation demand models assume the same amount of driving in a neighborhood built only for cars as they do for a neighborhood built for walking. These models do not foresee that making space on a highway might invite more driving in the space cleared up. They often predict, strangely, that narrowing a lane in the city from 12 to 10 feet somehow means that the road can accommodate fewer 6-7 feet wide vehicles. These tools are old, flawed and often wrong. Comparing costs and benefits is a great idea, but we need to make clear that the benefits should be calculated in a way that is reasonably likely to be correct. And that can be done by simply asking the agencies to look back and report on how often their projections actually turn out to be right when making a justification for a massive new investment with taxpayer dollars.
We are hopeful that we’ll be able to report news of a specific amendment to make many of these fixes when the committee considers the bill, so stay tuned. We will need your support!
Wrapping up
If infrastructure is as bipartisan as everyone always claims then commonsense should prevail on this point. Republicans should care deeply about conserving taxpayer funds. Democrats should care about climate and equity impacts. Both should seek to maintain faith and public trust in the program. Strengthening these repair provisions should be an easy, bipartisan win and we urge Chairman DeFazio and House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee members to make it happen.
Expanding and improving our nation’s passenger rail network to bring better, more reliable passenger rail service to more people is one of the best ways to improve access for millions of Americans in big urban areas and small rural ones alike. The House transportation bill takes some important steps to balance passenger rail with the rest of our transportation investments. Here are the details.
Within the reauthorization proposal released by the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee last week is the Transforming Rail by Accelerating Investment Nationwide Act (TRAIN Act), which lays out ambitious investment priorities and important reforms specifically for the rail component of our national surface transportation reauthorization. The TRAIN Act authorizes an increase in passenger rail funding to five times current levels, for a total of $60 billion total over the next five years. It establishes new programs to help fund capital improvements for existing trains, while making existing programs more effective and usable. In contrast to Congress’s recent attempts to peel off the Northeast Corridor and cancel vital long-distance routes, it re-establishes the centrality of a complete national network of short- and long-distance rail service, including state-supported routes. And it gives Amtrak the legal tools it needs to address bad faith interference from freight carriers.
Capital investment
Passenger rail services often require sizable capital improvements to track, stations, or rolling stock upon startup or on an ongoing basis to keep the service viable. Historically, these hefty expenses have come from Amtrak’s annual appropriation and from states. More recently, beginning with the 2009 Recovery Act, a growing share of passenger rail capital projects have been funded by competitive grant programs administered by the USDOT.
The TRAIN Act authorizes $5.2 billion annually for rail capital improvements which will allow us to make our national passenger train network more reliable, while providing better service and improving the state of good repair across the network. After several years of legislators making attempts to peel off the Northeast Corridor and neglect the National Network, this bill reinforces the balance between them, while also including commuter rail in the capital grant program for the first time. Plus, with an 80 percent federal share for capital grants and a 90 percent share in the new PRIME grant program, local matching dollars will activate more federal investment per dollar than the existing 50-50 split, making rail projects more competitive for local funding when compared to highways that have 90 percent of their costs covered.
Federal loan programs for rail will also become more effective and user friendly by providing funding to offset risk premiums that borrowers must currently pay the government as insurance against possible default.
Operating support
Operating support is key for many new or expanded services. It may not be as flashy as a new station or high speed track, but it helps make tickets affordable and expand the reach of high quality passenger rail across the country.
The bill authorizes the Restoration and Enhancement grant program (REG) program at $20 million annually, a competitive grant program that provides a share of operating support for new or expanded passenger train services. The REG program provides a declining share of operating support to help new and expanded services get established and build a base of riders before transitioning completely to local funds for operating support. As an example, this program is helping the Southern Rail Commission get the new Gulf Coast service restored and established. The grants will enable the three-state commission to offset 80 percent of operating support in the first year of operations with federal funds. In the second and third years, federal funds will cover 60 and 40 percent of operating support respectively. State and local funds will make up the balance during the three-year period.
Shifting trips in a corridor or a city from highways or airports to passenger rail helps reduce emissions, mitigate climate change, and improve air quality. In another important set of changes, funds from the Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality program (CMAQ) could be used to pay for operating support on transportation networks that improve air quality, including state-supported Amtrak routes. Currently, CMAQ funding can’t be used for passenger rail operating support, and its use for transit is mainly for capital projects and procurement, and limited fare reductions when local air quality is worst.
Amtrak
Amtrak, America’s primary passenger rail operator, was established by Congress to take over passenger operations from the private railroads. Amtrak has received an annual appropriation from Congress every year of its existence for capital and operating expenses, though the adequacy of federal support has often been unreliable or insufficient.
The bill authorizes $5.8 billion annually for Amtrak, roughly triple what Amtrak currently gets today. This includes, on average, $2.6 billion for the route between Washington, DC, and Boston, and $3.25 billion for the rest of the National Network, a portion of which would be used to reduce costs for state-supported trains.
Amtrak’s mission gets some important reforms, to provide reliable national intercity passenger rail service while meeting the needs of all passengers and the national workforce. The bill would also reform the railroad’s board of directors to better reflect Amtrak’s stakeholders. Among the eight presidential appointees, seats would be reserved for mayors and governors from cities along the Northeast Corridor, and the National Network. A seat would be reserved for a representative from Amtrak labor, and two seats would be reserved for members with a history of regular Amtrak ridership and understanding of passenger rail service. This would better align the company’s priorities with the needs of the traveling public, employees, and the communities the trains stop in.
Preference over freight service and a right of access to the freight railroad network was fundamental to Amtrak’s creation. Because it still is critical for its continued viability as a national passenger carrier,, the TRAIN Act empowers Amtrak to seek relief in the federal court system when host railroads delay its trains. When Amtrak seeks to operate new trains, or more trains, over a route owned by a freight railroad, the bill provides a faster process to resolve any disputes between Amtrak and the freight railroad over costs and any disruption to freight service. As an example of how this is necessary, when Amtrak was negotiating with CSX for their right-of-way along the Gulf Coast to restore passenger service there, CSX first came to the table with a dollar figure that was so large as to defy rational explanation.
Many Amtrak trains operate overnight and cover long distances. Access to healthful and quality food is important. The bill ends the current disparity between coach and sleeping car passengers. It requires that Amtrak make all food available to all passengers, regardless of accommodation or ticket class, on long distance trains. The bill would still allow meals to be included in the cost of a sleeping car fare, but ensures other passengers the right to purchase the food that is currently only available to sleeping car passengers. The bill also recognizes that food and beverage service may not make a profit on its own, but contributes to the overall viability of the service, and removes legislative language that had required Amtrak to minimize losses directly associated with food and beverage service on its trains.
These reforms to how our country funds passenger rail improvements and operations, coupled with reforms to Amtrak, will bring a renaissance of passenger train development over the next several years that will pay dividends long into the future.
This post was written by Andrew Justus, Smart Growth America policy associate.
