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Hundreds tell Congress that we need a new framework for transportation

As the COVID-19 crisis continues to shift the political landscape, 293 elected officials and organizations from 45 states signed Transportation for America’s letter urging Congress to reform the federal transportation program in the upcoming reauthorization. Because rethinking transportation policy matters now more than ever.

When Transportation for America first wrote this letter advocating for groundbreaking changes in the upcoming federal transportation reauthorization, COVID-19 had yet to radically alter our everyday lives. But as the effects of the virus grew more and more dire, we’ve realized that establishing a new framework for U.S. transportation policy matters more now than ever. 

We’re not alone: 293 elected officials and organizations from 45 states signed this letter, with many signatories joining as the coronavirus accelerated. While focused on reauthorization, adopting the reforms in this letter is necessary for Congress to guarantee that any future COVID-19 stimulus substantially improves American lives—not just pump more money into a broken highway program that fails to create new jobs. 

“Americans can’t afford another six years of the status quo” said Beth Osborne, director of T4America. “Our transportation needs to better connect all people to jobs and services safely, affordably, and conveniently to get us through this current crisis and to aid our economic recovery. Congress needs to use the upcoming reauthorization to finally align transportation spending with today’s national goals—not as a vehicle to funnel more money into programs that fail to improve people’s lives.”

The letter asks Congress to adopt T4America’s three principles for transportation investment: Prioritize maintenance over expansion, design for safety over speed, and connect people to jobs and services. 

Road or bridge repair and maintenance projects actually create more jobs per dollar than building new capacity. Maintenance projects spend money faster, are open to more kinds of workers, spend less money on equipment and more on wages, and spend less time on plans and permits. In fact, roadway maintenance creates 16 percent more jobs per dollar compared to roadway expansion.

Designing roadways for safety would make walking to destinations or transit stops easier and more convenient. Millions rely on transit to get to work, access healthcare, go to the grocery store. With 2.8 million essential workers relying on transit to get to work, making transit trips more feasible is more important than ever before. 

The point of transportation is to get people where they need to go, meaning we should prioritize infrastructure and transportation projects that connect people to jobs and services. Since the dawn of the modern highway era, we have used vehicle speed as a poor proxy for access to jobs and important services like healthcare, education, public services, and grocery stores. The way we build roads and design communities to achieve high vehicle speed often requires longer trips and makes shorter walking, bicycling, or transit trips unsafe, unpleasant, or impossible. New data can help to address decades of disinvestment which have disconnected communities and worsened economic outcomes. 

Regardless of whether infrastructure will be included in a future COVID-19 stimulus, it is critical that Congress establish a foundation for transportation investment that guarantees that funding goes to projects that actually improve people’s lives. The ongoing economic and health crisis is the biggest testament to why the U.S. needs a new and better framework for our investments so that we can build stronger, more prosperous communities. 

Last fall, we published our in-depth policy recommendations for the upcoming reauthorization. Read them here.

Stop funding transit like it’s 1982, Congress

Congress has suggested that they may focus on infrastructure in an upcoming stimulus bill. It’s not entirely clear what Congress will do—or if spending on infrastructure is the right way to stimulate the economy right now—but if Congress does want to pass an infrastructure package, they should stop spending money like it’s 1982. 

Upset about this broken status quo? Sign our petition urging Congress to fund public transit and highways equally.

For decades, the U.S. has funded transportation based on the idea that the user pays for the infrastructure through a fee—the gas tax, which has filled the Highway Trust Fund since 1956. In 1982, Congress struck a deal to raise the gas tax, but 1 cent of the 5 cent increase would be dedicated to transit, with the remaining spent on highways. This established the infamous “80-20 split” in transportation spending: highways get 80 percent of funds, and transit only gets 20 percent (though in reality, transit gets much less).

Since then, transportation spending has essentially stayed the same. In the most recent spending bill, Congress appropriated $48.6 billion for highways and only $10.2 billion for transit. But the entire logic behind highways receiving a substantially larger portion of the pie—i.e. drivers were paying for it—came crashing down in 2008, when the trust fund ran out of money because the gas tax was no longer sufficient to cover expenditures. To stay afloat, the trust fund has received huge infusions of general taxpayer dollars totaling $144 billion.

Our transportation dollars are no longer based on a user fee paid by drivers, yet the 80-20 funding split persists. This no longer makes any sense. Even the influx of transportation funds from the Recovery Act in 2009 all came from deficit spending from the general fund—not a single dime came from gas tax user fees—yet the vast majority of funding (roughly 75 percent) went to roads.

Why should we continue to honor a nearly 40-year old system based on a nearly defunct user fee? If Congress pursues an infrastructure package or reauthorization as part of a stimulus bill, it will be wholly outside a user fee construct. Considering that, why shouldn’t transit receive more than 20 percent of transportation dollars? Why shouldn’t transit receive 80 percent or even 100 percent of transportation dollars? We are not saying that other modes should not receive any money. The point is that all assumptions should be questioned and funding should go to projects that create jobs quickly in a stimulus bill and support today’s needs and goals, not those of 40 years ago. 

It’s time for Congress to abandon this obsolete, untenable split in transportation funding.

Congress has already upended status quo

Whether legislators realized it or not, the recently passed $2 trillion CARES Act has already disrupted the status quo to deal with immediate needs. The act includes $25 billion in direct, emergency assistance for transit at a time when revenue is plummeting. That’s more than double what the federal government usually spends on transit in a year. Normally, transit agencies have been barred from using federal funds for operations, typically only providing funds for maintenance and capital (like building new stations, or buying new buses). 

With the passage of the CARES Act, Congress broke with precedent and provided essential funding for transit operations. But we should go further, and end the baseless 80-20 funding split. After all, this pandemic has made it obvious that transit is essential, and it should be funded as such.

With 2.8 million essential workers relying on transit to get to their jobs and countless others depending on it to access food and health care, we need transit to be robust, reliable, and frequent. And we’ll need transit to get tens of millions more people moving once this virus is contained. But giving transit only 20 percent of the pie just won’t cut it. 

According to the Federal Transit Administration, our transit systems face a $98 billion backlog in deferred maintenance. Unlike the road maintenance backlog which has more to do with state DOTs prioritizing new roads instead of maintenance, the transit backlog is due to insufficient funding. There is also great demand for more transit capital funding, and operating support will be critical to ensure that agencies can continue to provide this invaluable service and limit crowding.

We have underfunded transit for decades, and doing so has left too many communities with deteriorating systems and infrequent, unreliable service. It’s time to get rid of the 80-20 split. To get through this crisis and build a robust economy again, we’ll need to fund transit equitably and treat it like the vital public good that it is. 

Transit agencies need to keep telling Congress what COVID-19 is costing them

Update, 4/17: Our friends at TransitCenter are leading a sign-on letter to the White House Coronavirus Task Force requesting personal protective equipment for transit workers. If you represent an organization, please sign TransitCenter’s letter by end of day Monday, April 20th.

With costs rising to protect transit personnel from the pandemic and revenue streams simultaneously coming to a halt, public transportation likely needs more emergency funding than the $25 billion passed three weeks ago. Transit agencies have a responsibility to communicate their needs—and the major steps they’re taking to save lives—to their Congressional delegations. 

Transit workers—the bus operators, train operators, station managers, and other personnel that make public transportation thrive—are on the frontline of the COVID-19 pandemic. Without them, scores of essential personnel wouldn’t be able to get to work; at least 35 percent of riders during regular times work in healthcare, grocery, and other essential industries. 

But with revenue screeching to a halt, transit agencies don’t have the tools to protect their employees from this pandemic, let alone return to normal service after this crisis ends. The $25 billion in emergency assistance for transit provided by the federal government is a great start, but it’s almost certainly not enough—especially with TransitCenter estimating losses between $26-$38 billion. 

The best way to ensure that Congress provides transit with additional emergency assistance is for agencies to communicate these needs with their Congressional delegations. As an essential industry on the frontline of the pandemic, transit agencies are some of the only entities that can give Congress accurate and detailed accounts of how COVID-19 is impacting public services and hurting their personnel. And as recipients of federal funding, transit agencies have a responsibility to communicate that their ability to connect essential workers to jobs is shrinking due to dwindling resources. 

Congress hears from airlines. Congress hears from automakers. Congress hears from state DOTs. They don’t hear from transit agencies as frequently. Congress’s minimal understanding of transit agencies’ needs might partially explain why the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 only provided transit agencies with capital funding, meaning that they could use that money for maintenance or constructing new infrastructure, but not for the costs of actually running transit service. The lack of operating support meant that transit agencies across the country had to cut service—at a time when Americans needed an affordable, convenient, and safe connection to jobs the most. 

Transit agencies need funding to protect personnel from COVID-19

Nobody should die doing their job—which is why transit agencies are pouring resources into efforts to keep personnel safe. Transit agencies all over the country are suspending fare collection to minimize riders’ interactions with operators, allowing rear-door boarding, and distributing thousands of masks and gloves every single day—all incredibly costly but necessary measures. 

But without robust funding, transit agencies can’t do enough to protect employees. Over 1,500 employees of New York City’s transit agency, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), have tested positive for COVID-19—and 41 have tragically died from the disease. With 5,000 employees quarantined, maintaining already-reduced service for essential workers even more difficult. “If you have 10 people on a [transit] line and three of them are sick, you are going to have a schedule that’s not working and leads to overcrowding,” a spokesperson for the Transport Workers Union (TWU) told The Chief. 

It’s not just New York that’s struggling. According to the TWU, transit workers have also died from COVID-19 in Detroit, New Orleans, Philadelphia, Boston, Washington, DC, Rocky Hill, CT and Everett, WA. (The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released guidance for transit agencies on keeping personnel safe, but they know more guidance is needed—which is why they have invited transit agencies to submit feedback on improving these safety protocols.) 

The $25 billion in federal emergency assistance for transit agencies will certainly help agencies weather this unprecedented crisis, but with TransitCenter estimating that COVID-19 will cost public transportation between $26-$38 billion, agencies will almost certainly need more. A lot more. 

Transit agencies, please tell your Congressional delegation what COVID-19 is costing you. Tell them if funding from the CARES Act is or isn’t enough to get you through this crisis. Tell them about staff illness and quarantines, and what you need to get essential workers to jobs. Tell them what you’re doing to protect employees and the public, and what you need to keep them safe. Tell them that frankly, you don’t know what COVID-19 means for your agency. Just talk to Congress. They need to hear from you. 

If you’re not a transit agency but still want to tell Congress that transit is important, send Congress a thank you message for providing transit agencies with $25 billion in emergency assistance—and a reminder that more is needed.

Two bills put “access” at the heart of transportation policy

For too long, the focus of the federal transportation program has been vehicle speed, not helping Americans access jobs, schools, grocery stores and more. It’s time to focus our funding on improving people’s access to jobs and services—and U.S. Rep. Chuy García’s (IL-4) two new bills will do exactly that. 

An “L” underpass in Chicago.

Transportation is fundamentally a means for getting people and goods where they need to go. Making sure you get your children to school on time, and yourself to work; having a safe, convenient and affordable way to reach grocery stores and healthcare. 

But our federal transportation program doesn’t make improving these connections its goal. U.S. transportation policy focuses on avoiding any delay to vehicles, making our roads wider and our communities more spread out and disconnected in the process. As a result our transportation system is in crisis. Americans are stuck in congestion on crumbling roads and transit systems, often forced to travel further and further because our system fails to provide safe and convenient choices other than a car trip. 

That’s where two new bills from Representative Jesús “Chuy” García (IL-04) come in. Today, Rep. García—along with his two co-chairs of the Future of Transportation Caucus—introduced the Improving Access to Jobs Act and Improving Access to Services Act to Congress with 12 co-sponsors, including Representatives Ayanna Pressley (MA-07), Mark Takano (CA-41), Rashida Tlaib (MI-13), Raúl M. Grijalva (AZ-03), Steve Cohen (TN-09), Jan Schakowsky (IL-9), Nanette Diaz Barragán (CA-44), Bennie G. Thompson (MS-02), Jahana Hayes (CT-05), Bobby L. Rush (IL-01), Ann Kirkpatrick (AZ-02), and Darren Soto (FL-9). 

These two bills would finally align federal spending with how people intuitively think about transportation: whether or not they can access their destinations. 

“Our transportation systems are failing Americans who face growing congestion, roads and transit systems in disrepair, and long-standing inequities that disproportionately hurt marginalized communities,” said Rep. García. “Any future transportation policies must make smarter investments to improve access, cut travel times, and lower the financial barriers to mobility for all.”

The two bills will create performance measures that make improving access the goal of federal transportation policy, and hold states accountable to improving access by all modes of travel. The bills would prevent metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) from increasing the ratio of automobile to non-automobile access in urbanized areas, empowering MPOs and states to balance transit, bike, and pedestrian investments alongside new roadway investments over an entire region. This would guarantee that any new roadway investments do not degrade transit, bike, and pedestrian access. 

If states fail to improve access, they must invest 10 percent of federal transportation funds apportioned to a state from the previous fiscal year into efforts to improve access overall. This requirement is in effect until the Secretary of Transportation certifies that a state is in compliance.

This intuitive concept—prioritizing access, not speed—is revolutionary in the world of transportation policy, which adopted speed as a metric for success before we had technologies like cloud computing and GIS that make measuring access possible. Some states already use access to allocate state transportation funding, like Virginia DOT. 

Two bills, one goal

There’s an important reason why Rep. García introduced these transformative performance measures as two seperate bills, though: People perceive commutes to work and trips to services differently. This has implications for transportation planning. 

People generally have a higher tolerance for longer commutes to work. Tolerance is lower for long trips to services—like grocery shopping, doctor’s appointments, recreation, and more—because they are often linked in one trip, rather than multiple round-trip journeys to and from homes. So while people might consider a 30-minute commute to be manageable, an area that’s 30-minutes one-way to the grocery store qualifies as a food desert—hence the need for different performance measures. 

Together, these two bills are one huge step towards prioritizing access in federal transportation legislation. But there are additional actions the federal government can take to truly make access a priority. T4America has called for the U.S. Department of Transportation to develop a national assessment of access to jobs and services and set national goals for improvement; to phase out outdated metrics such as level of service; and to provide accessibility data to states, MPOs, and local communities. (You can read our full recommendations here.) 

Proposing a new way of doing things is never easy, particularly when it challenges how America fundamentally measures the success of our transportation system. We thank Rep. García for leading this effort toward a better, more accessible future.

Release: Senate deal provides vital $25 billion lifeline to ensure essential public transportation service can continue

WASHINGTON, DC — After news of the Senate’s tentative agreement on a $2 trillion stabilization package that included $25 billion in emergency operating assistance for transit, Beth Osborne, director of Transportation for America, released this statement:

“Public transit provides essential service for millions of Americans each day. When this deal is finalized, Congress will have provided a major lifeline for this vital public service to weather the most immediate impacts of a massive loss of ridership. After starting with zero dollars for transit in initial negotiations, we especially praise Senate leadership for negotiating the deal to ensure that transit can continue moving millions of essential workers during this crisis. Workers classified as essential during the COVID-19 emergency account for 36 percent of total transit commuters in the United States, according to research released just this week by TransitCenter. We applaud the White House, Senators Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer, and Representatives Nancy Pelosi and Kevin McCarthy for their work to reach this agreement. 

“Thanks to this deal, essential transit service has a better chance to survive until this unprecedented public health crisis subsides and we will need to depend on transit service to move millions of people and get the economy moving once again. 

“Transit riders, advocates, business leaders, elected leaders and the other thousands of people who wrote or called their Senators sent a clear message to Congress: transit is essential.

“Transit agencies will still face massive deficits and more will need to be done. Impacts from COVID-19 will cost U.S. transit agencies $26-$38 billion annually, according to other research also published by TransitCenter, depending on how long the crisis continues and the extent of the measures the nation undertakes to try and avoid the worst potential impacts.

“We are grateful to Congress for prioritizing the millions of people who rely on transit every day with this deal. And we are eager to continue bringing their voices to Congress as they consider further action to stabilize the economy and build a foundation for a long-term recovery.”

COVID-19 will cost transit agencies $26-$38 billion, TransitCenter estimates

We need you to take action to save transit: Please email and call your member of Congress asking them to support emergency funding for transit agencies. It only takes a minute.

In a new report, TransitCenter estimates the gargantuan funding shortfalls that U.S. transit agencies will experience due to impacts from the COVID-19 pandemic. Unprecedented drops in ridership, reduced economic activity, and increased costs to keep personnel and essential riders (including healthcare workers) safe are driving a funding gap that is only projected to grow. 

Transit agencies are doing a lot to slow the spread of COVID-19: They’re connecting healthcare workers to their jobs, urging non-essential workers to stay home, and cancelling fare collection in order to keep operators safe. And they’re bleeding money doing so. 

In a new report, public transportation foundation TransitCenter estimates that impacts from COVID-19 will cost U.S. transit agencies $26-$38 billion annually. This huge shortfall is being caused by rapidly decreasing revenue (a combination of low ridership and reduced sales tax receipts from an economy quickly coming to a standstill) and increased costs to combat the virus. 

TransitCenter calculated low-end and high-end estimates of what COVID-19 means for agencies’ budgets. The low-end estimate anticipates 75 percent decline in fare revenue; and high-end, 100 percent. 

The reality for many American transit agencies will be somewhere in the middle of these two estimates. Ridership on Washington, DC’s Metro dropped 85 percent, and the agency projects an unprecedented loss of $52 million a month. Chicago’s transit system saw rail ridership down 75 percent and bus use down 59 percent. BART in San Francisco says a sustained ridership loss of 85 percent and a 50 percent reduction of economic activity could reduce BART’s monthly revenues by $55 million. And New York City’s MTA is requesting $4 billion to stay afloat. (Trip-planning app Transit is documenting the unprecedented drops in ridership all over the world.) 

But service cuts won’t cut it, especially as transit agencies “must operate enough service so that riders are not subject to crowded vehicles,” according to the report. 

This means one thing: Congress cannot hesitate and must provide transit agencies with immediate emergency funding. Without emergency funding, transit agencies will be unable to get back to work once this crisis is over. That means millions of Americans will be stuck in place, even when we no longer have to stay at home, making it even harder for our economy to recover.

TAKE ACTION NOW

The time to rescue transit is now. The economic impacts will be far worse if we stand by and let it burn to the ground first and try to rebuild it tomorrow.

Transit agencies sound the alarm: COVID-19 is a long-term threat to service

We need you to take action to save transit: Please email and call your member of Congress asking them to support emergency funding for transit agencies. It only takes a minute.

The COVID-19 pandemic is decimating transit agencies’ budgets. Without emergency assistance from Congress, public transportation won’t be there when this crisis subsides—yet the Senate Republicans’ proposed stimulus bill doesn’t give transit a cent. Join transit agencies across the country and tell Congress that transit needs emergency funding. 

“Empty Metro” by Mike Maguire on Flickr’s Creative Commons

Transit ridership is plummeting as millions of Americans practice critically important social distancing to slow the spread of COVID-19—and transit agencies are happy about it. Both Washington, DC and New York City’s subway systems tweeted rapidly falling ridership numbers with joy, praising people for taking social distancing seriously. 

But despite the praise, transit agencies also know that this loss of ridership is devastating their budgets. New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) and the Washington, DC region’s Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) know that this is a recipe for long-term service reductions. Both agencies are calling for emergency funding from Congress, with the MTA specifically calling for $4 billion. “No agency of our size can find additional billions in savings equivalent to the damages we have and will sustain as a result of this pandemic,” MTA CEO Pat Foye said in the letter to New York’s Congressional delegation. “This is a national disaster that requires a national response.” Washington’s Metro is projecting a $52 million a month operating deficit.

Revenue from local or state sales taxes make up the other biggest portion of transit agencies’ budgets, and with the local economy being virtually shut down in many places, those funds will be rapidly dwindling as well. Increased costs from additional cleaning and measures to protect employees, such as the purchase of gloves, face masks, hand sanitizer, and other protective equipment, are evaporating funds faster than normal, too. 

That’s why with only 24 hours’ notice over 220 elected officials, cities, transit agencies and organizations across the country signed a letter written by T4America and the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) urging Congress to provide transit agencies with nearly $13 billion in emergency funding. We’re thrilled that so many people stepped up to save transit with such short notice. But it isn’t enough: the Senate Republicans’ stimulus bill was released yesterday, and it includes not one dollar for transit or Amtrak. 

We need you to step up for public transportation. Please call and email your members of Congress today. Demand them to support emergency funding for transit. 

TAKE ACTION NOW

Without federal financial assistance, many transit agencies and paratransit service providers will be forced to dramatically reduce or eliminate critical service. This could cut off health care and other workers from jobs, and make it even harder for the economy to recover once this crisis subsides. 

Please take action today. Transit needs you.

Coronavirus will have huge impacts on transit systems—here’s how Congress should help

Fired up? Please take action and tell your member of Congress to support emergency assistance for transit agencies.

Congress and the president are considering ways to provide much-needed boosts to the economy due to the impacts of the novel coronavirus. But simply pouring money into the existing transportation program as a whole will fail to help the people who rely on transit to access the health care system and will have impacts on transit service that will last for years to come. Here are some ways Congress could provide targeted assistance to transit and the people that rely on it in the weeks and months ahead.

MTA New York City Transit sanitizes stations and subway cars. (Marc A. Hermann / MTA New York City Transit)

As local and state tax revenues cratered during the recession of 2008-2009, transit agencies were forced to make enormous cuts to service and lay off thousands of employees, which had devastating impacts on riders and communities. T4America covered the massive impacts across the country as millions of people were left stranded in the wake of these massive cuts. As just one example, MARTA in Atlanta eliminated somewhere around half of their bus service and train headways grew to 30 minutes at certain times of day. Even after the crisis, MARTA spent the better part of the decade recovering and slowly adding that lost service back, with little assistance from the federal government—as did hundreds or thousands of other transit agencies.

Heeding public health officials’ advice, including “social distancing,” is critical to slowing the spread of COVID-19 cases. But these essential practices also will bring unfortunate side effects: cancelled events, new work from home policies, and other ways of practicing social distancing will result in millions of transit trips not taken and profoundly affect transit agencies’ viability. Revenue from riders makes up a huge piece of transit agencies’ budgets, and transit ridership will drop across the country. At the same time, transit agencies are investing in extra cleaning supplies and increased cleaning protocols, leading to increased costs which exacerbate the budgetary pressure from reduced ridership and revenue. 

The novel coronavirus will undoubtedly bring massive economic impacts on transit. If what happened in 2009 and 2010 repeats itself and Congress fails to take proper action, we will leave millions stranded without access to healthcare and other essential services, and not just in the short-term. Public transit service is and will continue to be vital and Congress must take strong action to support transit service—and ensure that transit will be robust and ready when this crisis is over.

We understand that this is a challenging time for all, and many sectors of our economy are in need of support. But we must ensure that investments made in transportation are targeted to the most impacted and most critical sectors, including public transportation. This will better address our needs today, and prepare our system for when this public health crisis subsides.  Policymakers should consider these principles when developing transportation policy as economic stimulus. 

1. Target funding to hardest hit transit agencies. 

This is not a spread-the-peanut-butter exercise. Regions are going to be impacted in different ways, with some losing ridership to a much greater extent than others.  Assistance should be appropriately targeted to the various needs of transit agencies. Sending more money to all transit agencies through the existing program is not targeted in this way and is not sufficient to address this problem.

2. Support transit agencies with operational assistance to avert service cuts or fare increases. 

In the last recovery act in 2009, additional transit funding was given for capital investment. During this crisis, it will be necessary to invest in public transit operations to ensure agencies are able to continue providing their essential services, especially to those who rely on it to reach medical services, and health care workers who rely on it to get to work. It won’t do any good to keep giving transit agencies money to buy new buses or railcars if they can’t afford to run them each day from A to B. Transit agencies will need money to preserve service.

Agencies receive money each year from the highway trust fund, dictated by federal formulas. But those funds are for capital spending, not operating. Current law (49 USC 5307) prohibits the use of these dollars for operational expenses in communities over 200,000 in population and therefore cannot address the loss of funds at the farebox used to fund transit operations in our larger metro areas where transit provides the greatest number of rides.

3. Prioritize investments which address equity and access. 

While loss of transit service is always an inconvenience, to those who depend on transit with no other option it can be particularly dangerous at this time. Those who rely on transit to reach medical care need to know that service will be there. And getting everyone who needs medical care to it early is essential to prevent a greater spread of this virus. In addition, there are scores of healthcare workers who will continue to need reliable transit service to get to their jobs caring for the sick.

While we encourage policymakers to consider these principles, we recommend the following specific policies to support public transit agencies and riders: 

Responding to the immediate crisis:

  • Provide targeted funding for transit operating expenses. This should address revenue shortfalls as a result of lost ridership, as well as increased expenses due to more cleaning. Funding should be targeted to those agencies with the most demonstrated need.  
  • Provide additional funding for purchasing personal protective equipment (PPE) (including gloves, antibacterial sanitizer, soap, etc). 
  • Provide funding necessary to cover costs for employees who must be quarantined, and any overtime necessary to make up for reduced numbers of employees. 

Sustaining essential service beyond the crisis: 

Traditional funding formulas are based on previous year ridership. If ridership were to go down this year, that could not only impact current budgets, but it would reduce what agencies receive through their formulas for next year. 

  • To protect impacted agencies from future cuts, Congress should create a hold harmless provision, or direct the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) to use ridership numbers from a year previous to the crisis.

The NTSB recommends safety standards for AVs. But Congress isn’t listening.

Update, 4/10/20: Republican staff of the House Energy and Commerce committee published a blog post arguing that the COVID-19 crisis is a great opportunity to pass automated vehicle legislation that prioritizes vehicle deployment over safety. To be clear, ventilators and personal protective equipment save lives during pandemics, not AVs. Don’t exploit a crisis to advance legislation devoid of any meaningful safety standards.

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) found in two investigations that the lack of safety standards contributed to fatal automated vehicle crashes. And polling shows that Americans overwhelmingly want these safety standards. There’s both evidence that safety standards are needed, and a desire among the public to establish them: so why isn’t Congress including safety standards in its draft automated vehicle (AV) legislation? 

A traffic jam in Texas. Photo by Open Grid Scheduler on Flickr’s Creative Commons.

To hear some in the  automotive and technology industries tell it, the only way we can ever advance as a society and develop AVs—”innovate” as they say—is to do so in a Wild West regulatory state. No basic, minimum performance standards to keep people safe. 

And that’s exactly what Congress is planning to gift to the automated vehicle industry. Congressional committees across party lines are writing legislation that allows AV manufacturers and developers to put this new technology on the road before it’s proven to be safe. 

This is incredibly disturbing in light of new findings from the National Transportation Safety Board, the U.S.’s premier transportation safety investigators. The NTSB found in not one but two investigations that the complete lack of federal safety standards contributed to fatal AV crashes. In its investigation of a fatal Tesla crash (released last week), the NTSB said that the main federal vehicle safety regulator “failed to develop a method for verifying that manufacturers … are incorporating system safeguards that are critical to ensuring the safety of the motoring public.” Translation: The federal government is doing nothing to check  that AVs are actually safe. 

The investigators at the NTSB aren’t the only ones highlighting the importance of safety standards: New polling from Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety found that Americans overwhelmingly want safety performance standards for AVs. 

Yet Congress is doing the exact opposite. For the last few months, a bicameral, bipartisan group of Congressional committee staff have been drafting pieces of a potential AV bill that deploys AVs before they are proven to be safe. In the drafts released publicly, the Secretary of Transportation has 10 years to set motor vehicle safety standards; in the interim, automakers must “self-certify” that their AVs are safe by submitting test results and data—but the Secretary is prohibited from banning AVs for sale based on any of those materials. 

These drafts directly contradict what the NTSB advises and what the public wants. The NTSB has now repeatedly recommended that the federal government verify that AV manufacturers include critical safety systems in their vehicles; but the draft AV bill sections doesn’t require that the federal government do this. The NTSB recommends that the federal government test AV technology themselves; the draft bill also doesn’t require this. The NTSB recommends that the federal government use “enforcement authority” to make automakers comply with safety rules, but the draft bill doesn’t give the federal government any imminent hazard authority—nor create any safety rules to comply with. Whether or not Congress adopts these specific proposals, it should concern us all that Congress is considering legislation which fails to include any safety standards before AVs are deployed. 

Safety standards are not a lot to ask for. Without safety standards, preventable crashes will happen; people will die. Yet it seems that Congress has fallen for the siren song of automakers and tech firms, believing the marketing tale the AVs are inherently safe. If that’s the case, then what’s the harm in enshrining that safety into law with minimum safety performance standards? 

AV technology is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to dramatically improve safety for all road users, not just people inside cars. And with more people dying while walking and biking than ever before, it’s an opportunity Congress would regret to miss. 

We’re not the only ones who want minimum performance safety standards. In August, we joined over 40 national advocacy groups to send a letter to Congress outlining what any AV legislation needs to guarantee safety and equitable access to this new technology. You can read that letter here.

Step 1: Electric vehicle chargers. Step 2: Real structural reform.

Last week, Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY-14) and Andy Levin (MI-9) released the “Electric Vehicle Freedom Act,” a bill that would aim to “establish a nationwide electric vehicle charging network within five years.” The creativity behind this bill is exactly what Congress needs—we just need to focus on more than EVs.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at SXSW 2019. Photo by NRKBeta on Flickr’s Creative Commons

You’ve (hopefully) heard it all before: transportation accounts for the largest share of carbon emissions in the United States, and those emissions are rising—even as other sectors have improved. 

Tackling those rising emissions is the goal of Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) and Andy Levin’s  new “Electric Vehicle Freedom Act.” The bill—released in tandem with the House majority’s new infrastructure framework—would build an electric vehicle charging network along the nation’s highways, according to the Hill. 

It’s rare to see a bill that uses transportation funding for something brand new, like EV charging. On that front, this bill is a clear winner. Now it’s time for Reps. AOC and Levin to completely rethink the transportation program overall—because the structure of the program itself sets the U.S. on a course to increase transportation emissions. 

Like a terrible prophecy, the federal transportation program spends billions every year to build new highways, encouraging more and more driving. With the limited funding for transit, rail, walking and biking overwhelmed by the billions spent on highways, federal policy is designed to keep us in our cars (which generates more congestion and pollution). 

More and more driving negates any emissions reductions from electric vehicles because the fleet of U.S. vehicles isn’t turning electric as quickly as vehicle miles traveled are increasing. Despite an admirable 35 percent increase in the overall fuel efficiency of our vehicle fleet from 1990-2016, emissions still rose by 21 percent because driving increased by 50 percent in that same period.

Electric vehicles are absolutely necessary to decrease our emissions, but they aren’t enough. We need to drive less. That means a complete restructuring of a federal transportation program built to increase driving. We would love to work with Reps. AOC and Levin on crafting a forward thinking transportation bill that will put the entire country on a path to truly lower carbon emissions.

House environment coalition demands real transportation policy reform to tackle climate change

Last week, leaders of the House Sustainable Energy and Environment Coalition (SEEC) urged Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman Peter DeFazio and Ranking Member Sam Graves to use surface transportation reauthorization as an opportunity to take serious action on climate change.

“A status quo highway bill will no longer serve the needs of our country or our planet; instead, it would risk putting us at a competitive disadvantage while leaving us all more vulnerable to the dangers of climate change.” 

We couldn’t agree more. The fact that those words came from sitting members of Congress is even more stirring. In a letter, the Sustainable Energy and Environment Coalition urged the U.S. House to use surface transportation reauthorization—the process that sets federal transportation policy for the next five years—as an opportunity to change our outdated transportation policy and make real strides reducing emissions in the transportation sector. We applaud their vision. The letter was led by SEEC Co-Chairs Reps. Gerry Connolly (VA-11), Paul Tonko (NY-20), and Doris Matsui (CA-6), and SEEC Vice-Chairs Reps. Chellie Pingree (ME-1), Alan Lowenthal (CA-47), Mike Quigley (IL-5), Matt Cartwright (PA-8) and A. Donald McEachin (VA-4). 

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. As the Coalition wrote in their letter, “Our current highway policy undermines our climate goals by favoring new highways, roads, and lanes that induce more driving, over transit, biking, and walking.” Without structural reform and reducing the distance people drive, we’ll never reduce our emissions enough and create a transportation system that works for everyone. 

The letter called for the creation of performance measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, vehicle miles traveled, and “cumulative criteria pollution” (which includes carbon monoxide, lead, nitrogen dioxide, ozone, particulate matter, and sulfur dioxide) in the transportation sector, similar to the GREEN Streets Act introduced in both the House and Senate. Further, the Coalition called for the use of accessibility, or destination access, to measure whether or not people can get to their destinations, replacing the outdated, ineffective, & car-centric proxies we currently use. As we’ve written about, we think the use of accessibility as a metric of success would be transformative. 

Using access to evaluate projects may show that building and repairing sidewalks in a community would dramatically improve access to jobs and services for more residents than redesigning one intersection for cars. It may show that a new bus line would make it easier for residents in a low-income community to access healthcare. Choosing to invest in these types of projects would make better connections within communities and would reduce the distance needed to drive, and in turn reduce emissions.

The Coalition also called for the “creation of a national complete streets program to provide technical assistance and incentives for the adoption of policies that facilitate better pedestrian, bicycle, and public transit travel.” The Complete Streets Act of 2019, supported by our sister organization, the National Complete Streets Coalition, would do just that and is currently pending before the House and Senate. This bill would incentivize states and metro areas to finally design and build safer streets for everyone, and give them federal funding to do it.

We need a new vision for our transportation system, and the leadership and vision from the Sustainable Energy and Environment Coalition indicates that fixing our transportation policy is possible. We know that electrification and fuel efficiency alone will not suffice to meet our decarbonization goals by 2050. To meet our emissions reductions goals, we need to create a more equitable multimodal transportation system. We look forward to working with the Coalition to turn these principles into policy.

“Voluntary safety assessments” for automated vehicles will result in more deaths

The National Transportation Safety Board agrees with T4America on automated vehicle safety: making safety assessments “voluntary” utterly fails to ensure public safety—and at least one person has already died as a result. The federal government’s current hands-off approach is unsafe for everyone, especially those outside of a car. 

A dangerous intersection in Scottsdale, AZ, near Tempe. Photo by Lawrence G. Miller on Flickr’s Creative Commons.

Last week, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) released its findings on Uber’s fatal 2018 Arizona crash, where 49-year-old Elaine Herzberg was killed by an automated vehicle (AV) while crossing the street with her bike. 

“When companies test automated vehicles (AVs) without minimum safety standards to guide them, we are virtually guaranteeing that people will be killed unnecessarily by this technology —though heralded by boosters as the technology that will end all traffic deaths,” said T4America director Beth Osborne. “While Uber was at fault in this tragic death, we are also encouraged to see a federal agency take a hard look at the underlying causes, namely the lack of uniform safety standards and the willingness of those charged with protecting the public to abdicate that responsibility and allow these companies to set the rules.” 

With no safety performance standards to speak of, Arizona—through an executive order from the governor—granted the ride-hail company the right to test AVs on all public roads, so long as a human driver is present to take over in emergencies. But that sole safety requirement failed Herzberg in numerous ways, the NTSB announced on Wednesday.  

At the time of the crash, the human safety driver was watching a video on her phone—violating the company’s policy for that position. But according to the NTSB, “The federal government also bore its share of responsibility for failing to better regulate autonomous car operations,” writes the Verge reporter Andrew J. Hawkins. T4America would add that the State of Arizona might have established such a standard before allowing AVs on their streets but similarly failed.

During the hearing this week, NTSB board member Jennifer Homendy further berated the federal government’s safety ineptitude, calling NHTSA’s automated vehicle safety plan “actually laughable. …They should rename it a Vision for Lax Safety,” she said.

The nation’s foremost transportation safety experts just called our automated vehicle regulations “laughable.” So what is Congress doing about it? Nothing. 

Fearing another safety-lite bill like the AV START Act—which lacked any safety performance standards, and merely contained “voluntary” safety assessments from automakers—Transportation for America and 46 other national groups wrote a letter to Congress spelling out exactly what needs to be in any future AV legislation to guarantee that this fledgling technology doesn’t kill people. That means concrete, enforceable performance standards, and the NTSB agrees. Such standards include “vision tests” to ensure an AV can properly identify and respond to its surroundings—including people crossing the street with their bikes, like Herzberg. (Uber’s vehicle was shockingly not even programmed to recognize Herzberg in this situation.) It also includes requirements that all AVs are built with proven safety technologies, like automatic emergency braking. 

We sent that letter in August. This month, congressional committees released three sections of a forthcoming AV bill, which show that Congress is still not getting the message and is failing to prioritize safety above all else.  

As a response, our coalition of national groups sent another letter to Congress criticizing the decision not to release the full bill and highlighting where these three sections failed. For example, the following essential components were not included in the released section: any mandatory rulemakings for necessary safety features to safeguard motorists and other road users; provisions for securing this advanced technology from cyberattacks; an explanation of how federal preemption of state laws would be avoided; how local policy control for safety on the roads would be ensured; a data sharing framework for consumers, cities, states, law enforcement, and federal regulators; adequate resources for NHTSA; and definitions of the terms used in the sections, among other issues.

Transportation for America, the 46 other national groups who joined us to fight for safety, and the NTSB agree that nobody wins when safety isn’t a priority. 

Three things we learned from talking about maintenance this week

Last week was “maintenance week” at T4America, a week spent focusing on our first new principle for transportation investment to prioritize repair and commit to reducing the repair backlog by half. After a Twitter chat on Wednesday, on Thursday we joined a briefing on Capitol Hill for congressional staffers focused on the issue.

The new Future of Transportation Caucus chaired by Representatives Ayanna Pressley, Jesús “Chuy” García, and Mark Takano held a briefing on Capitol Hill yesterday to hear firsthand from three state transportation officials about the importance of shifting the federal transportation program to focus on maintenance first. Here are three quick things we learned.

It’s hard to get people to focus on maintenance—much less get excited about it

Although there was a strong turnout of staffers, there were far fewer than our recent briefing on climate and transportation, reminding us yet again that maintenance is never sexy and it’s hard to get people excited about it—much less make it a fundamental organizing principle of the federal transportation program.

Even if you do get people together to talk about maintenance, it’s a struggle to keep the spotlight on the issue. Even in this setting, ostensibly focused 100 percent on discussing the importance and mechanics of prioritizing maintenance, when the floor was opened up to questions, many immediately turned to funding. “Do you think that a vehicle miles traveled tax would be easier to implement than raising the gas tax?” one staffer asked.

Unfortunately, this was not the last question about money. T4America director Beth Osborne tried to remind everyone that this is precisely backwards from how we should be doing business with the federal transportation program.

“Federal transportation policy is unlike anything else because we start things off by talking about money, not what we’ll do with it. States don’t do this. No one wants to talk about outcomes. It’s time to tell voters what we’ll do with their money before we talk about needing more of it,” she said.

Absent useful data, politics will always determine spending, and politicians want to cut ribbons more than anything else

Ed Sniffen with the Hawaii DOT shared a story about how they transformed the agency to focus on maintenance and started a new asset management program, which is just a fancy way to say that they started tracking the conditions of their assets and using data to prioritize funding.

As they started this shift, Sniffen said that the long-time promised projects that had been on the books for years were some of the biggest obstacles to a new approach focused on preserving and stewarding the things they had spent billions over decades investing their state’s wealth into. “We didn’t have an asset management program, so those who complained the most got their roads fixed,” he said. “But we changed that so data controls everything. Costs and benefits now matter.”

Current Mississippi DOT Commissioner Dick Hall shared that when he was once on the legislative side years ago, he also had a hard time fully grasping why the state couldn’t afford to both radically expand and also prioritize maintenance. To this day, when it comes to grasping why maintenance needs to be the top priority, “for some reason I can’t seem to explain it to members of our legislature. But the members of the rotary club get it.” When he explains why the lion’s share of state transportation money is now going to repair, the public gets it. But the elected leaders still want their ribbon cuttings.

Better data and clear priorities can help ensure that funds are better spent.

States won’t do it on their own — the federal government needs to be the one to make repair a priority

The conventional wisdom about state DOTs is that they have two priorities when it comes to transportation funding. More funding, and limitless flexibility to spend it however they want. And that was largely the deal struck by Congress with the influential state DOT lobbyists in MAP-21 in 2012 and the FAST Act in 2015: in exchange for a weak system of performance measures, states got even more flexibility for spending slightly more money however they wish.

So it was striking to hear state transportation officials practically begging the staffers in the room to make maintenance and repair a concrete, binding federal priority. When asked about the difficulty of selling a maintenance-first approach to elected leaders in his state, Commissioner Hall explained how internal political pressure so often leads to states spending money they urgently need for repair on new capacity projects. They’ve finally made some progress in Mississippi on making repair their number one priority, but he had a crystal-clear answer for the attendees at the briefing:

“If you want us to prioritize maintenance, then you’re going to have to tell us ‘you gotta do it!'”

The question remains: will Congress heed this request and render this debate moot in state transportation agencies across the country? Or will they allow states to continue buying things they can’t afford to maintain and then just return to Congress and beg for more money down the road?

That choice is in Congress’ hands.

Stay tuned next week for our “safety over speed” week, starting on Monday, November 4th. We’ll be diving deep into our second principle on why safety has to be the overriding consideration when it comes to street and road design.

Members of Congress launch a new caucus on transportation policy

Today, Representatives Chuy García (IL-4), Ayanna Pressley (MA-7), and Mark Takano (CA-41) launched a new caucus dedicated to creating a vision for the future of our transportation system that emphasizes equity, access, and sustainability.

Reps García, Pressley, Takano, and Earl Blumenauer (OR-3) at the launch of the Congressional Future of Transportation Caucus.

Transportation for America joined the representatives as they launched their new caucus in front of a packed room of constituents and transportation advocates. The “Future of Transportation Caucus,” as the members have dubbed their new group, will dedicate itself to revisiting the underlying policies that have built the transportation systems that continue to crumble into disrepair, fuel inequities, exacerbate climate change, and fail to connect people to jobs and services.

Speaking at the launch, the co-chairs of the caucus expressed the need for a more visionary and equitable transportation policy.

“Access to safe, reliable, and inclusive modes of transportation is a matter of social justice,” Rep. Pressley said during the event. She explained that the caucus would work to advance policies that prioritize “community connectivity, multimodal networks with seamless bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure so that every community has access to critical housing, education, employment, and the health services necessary to thrive.”

Rep. Garcia echoed this sentiment, saying, “It boils down to social justice. People cannot afford to get to where they need to go or stay where they grew up. We need to take a step back and start thinking about what it is we’re throwing hundreds of billions of dollars [at] every year.”

“This caucus will refocus Congress’s discussion on transportation that goes beyond just funding,” Rep. Takano said. He continued, saying that the caucus would “create an approach to transportation that centers on equity, accessibility, and sustainability.”

We couldn’t agree more with the caucus co-chairs. As we explained in our recent blog post outlining our new principles for transportation policy and investment, the one-dimensional debate about transportation funding leaves out an urgently needed conversation about the purpose of the federal transportation program. We need to ask ourselves what we’re trying to accomplish and provide accountability to the American taxpayer by making a few clear, concrete, measurable goals.

We know that existing policy exacerbates climate change, fails to maintain our roads, puts pedestrians and bikers in danger, and makes it nearly impossible to build new or expand transit systems.

We’re excited to see that some members of Congress agree with us on this. The Future of Transportation Caucus is a huge step in the right direction and shows the some policymakers are interested in actually writing new policy. This conversation desperately needs to be had on the Hill. We look forward to working with the caucus as they discuss new goals for our transportation system and the policies we’ll need to achieve them, not just some pie in the sky dollar amount for infrastructure.

Why we are no longer advocating for Congress to increase transportation funding

Since our inception in 2008, Transportation for America has always primarily advocated for reforming the federal transportation program. But raising the gas tax or otherwise raising new funding overall has also been a core plank of our platform since 2013. With the release of our brand new policy platform and principles coming this Monday, Transportation for America is no longer asking Congress to provide an increase in money for federal transportation program. Why?

Picture of Bellevue, WA light rail construction

For as long as I’ve been working in transportation and probably longer, the debate surrounding the federal transportation program has been a one-note affair: a never-ending fight over who gets money and how much money they get. Those who get money want more flexibility to spend it however they want. Those who get a little money want a bigger piece of the pie. And then both political parties come together in a “bipartisan” way to grow the pie and keep everyone happy.

This two-dimensional debate always leaves out an urgently needed conversation about the purpose of this federal transportation program. What are we doing? Why are we spending $50 billion a year? What is it supposed to accomplish? Does anyone know anymore?

Nearly seven decades ago we set out with a clear purpose: connect our cities and rural areas and states with high-speed interstates and highways for cars and trucks and make travel all about speed. These brand new highways made things like cross-country and inter-state travel easier than we ever imagined possible. We connected places that weren’t well-connected before and reaped the economic benefits (while also dividing and obliterating some communities along the way).

We’ve never really updated those broad goals from 1956 in a meaningful way. We’ve moved from the exponential returns of building brand new connections where they didn’t exist to the diminishing, marginal returns of spending billions to add a new lane of road here and there, which promptly fills up with new traffic.

Why in the world would we just pour more money into a program that is “devoid of any broad, ambitious vision for the future, and [in which] more spending has only led to more roads, more traffic, more pollution, more inequality, and a lack of transportation options,” as I wrote in the Washington Post during Infrastructure Week?

What the program should be about is accountability to the American taxpayer—making a few clear, concrete, measurable promises and then delivering on them. The program should focus on what we’re getting for the funds we’re spending—not simply whether or not money gets spent and how much there was.

Does anyone doubt Congress’s ability to successfully spend money? We all have supreme confidence in their ability to spend hundreds of billions of dollars. Our question is whether that money can be spent in a way that accomplishes something tangible and measurable for the American people.

Taxpayers deserve to know what they’re getting for their spending. Today, they don’t, and nothing about the debate so far in 2019 with Congress has indicated that will change. So we’ve scrapped “provide real funding” from our core principles. T4America has concluded that more money devoted to this same flawed system will just do more damage.

Coming next week: our new principles

With the conversation about money put behind us, on Monday we’re releasing three new principles for what we expect this upcoming surface transportation bill to accomplish. We believe that whether Congress decides to spend more money or less, these three things should be paramount.

Every time federal transportation reauthorization comes up, we hear endless cries about the poor state of our crumbling infrastructure. How many bridges are structurally deficient, how poor our roads are, the long backlogs of neglected maintenance, the (severely inflated) costs of congestion, perhaps even a few voices about the alarming increase in people struck and killed while walking…the list of woes goes on and on.

And then, predictably, states, interest groups, members of Congress and others call for more money for the federal transportation program as the only logical solution, with no clear promises made for how this money will solve any of the problems outlined above or precisely what will be better or different after five years of spending yet billions more.

So let’s stop limping along and spending billions with an unclear purpose and marginal returns. We need a clear set of explicit goals for the federal program. We’ll be back here on Monday as we unveil our principles.

See T4America’s new principles and outcomes for federal transportation policy >>

 

Shutdown averted; another crisis created

people waiting for a train

The U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) is refusing to obey the rules and Congress has so far been powerless to stop them. At stake are billions in federal funding for new and expanded transit systems that USDOT doesn’t want to award. But a policy change that attempts to reign in USDOT and make it obey the law could just be making matters worse.

Congress today has done its part to avert a government shutdown by passing a continuing resolution (CR) that will fund the federal government through November 21. The president has until Monday night to sign it. While a CR is generally just a continuation of existing policy, this one tweaks a key, but very wonky, policy for the Capital Investment Grant (CIG) program—the main source of federal funding for building new and expanding existing transit systems.

The CIG program has been under attack by the Trump administration, which is ideologically opposed to funding transit, since day one. Because Congress has continued to fund the program, USDOT has instead sought to sabotage the grant-making process by delaying grants, shutting down lines of communication, and making the whole process more opaque and confusing to everyone involved: Congress, project sponsors, and the public.

Now here’s where it gets wonky. In fiscal years (FY) 2018 & 2019, Congress tried to hold USDOT accountable by adding new language to their appropriations bills that required the agency to actually award (i.e. “obligate”) at least 85 percent of the funds for that fiscal year by the end of the following calendar year (so 85 percent of FY18 dollars would need to be spent by December 31, 2019 and FY19 dollars spent by the end of 2020).

The CR that Congress just passed changes that language to say that USDOT must “allocate,” rather than “obligate,” at least 85 percent of those funds. Allocation is not the same thing as obligation and results in zero dollars actually going to project sponsors.

The original “obligation” language was designed to force USDOT to advance projects through the CIG pipeline and actually award funding by signing grant agreements. The change comes from a concern that USDOT will simply ignore the law—let that statement sink in—which would result in Congress clawing back the CIG funding through a lengthy legal process.

In essence, USDOT doesn’t want the money even though Congress gave it to them anyway and ordered them to spend it because they know local communities are counting on it for their transit projects. But USDOT is ignoring the law and spending as little of the funding as they can get away with. To date, USDOT has only spent about a third of what Congress has authorized over the past three years. It’s understandable that Congress would seek another solution to get grants out the door—we agree more is needed—but focusing on “allocating” funds could create a new problem while failing to solve the original one.

Creating a new problem

Changing the requirement for “obligation” to “allocation” through the CR ignores the new realities on the ground. It used to be that an “allocation” meant something. USDOT would allocate funds to projects that were almost finalized and ready for construction to signal that a grant was to follow shortly. Under previous administrations, allocations would inform how much money Congress would provide in the budget for the CIG program and signal an imminent grant. But this administration has broken from precedent. “Allocations” from this USDOT are a big old nothingburger.

As we have previously described, an “allocation” is simply an internal accounting in the ledgers at USDOT. It doesn’t mean funding has been awarded nor does it guarantee that funding will ever arrive. In at least nine cases, communities have been waiting for months without funding despite receiving an allocation. One of those projects—the Purple Line subway extension in Los Angeles—has received two separate allocations without receiving a dime of federal money.

A table of nine nine unfunded transit projects with allocations and the date of the allocations

Congress’s new rules in the CR would unfortunately do nothing to ensure these communities receive funds and would give undue credit to USDOT for “allocating” these funds, regardless of whether that allocation eventually results in a formal grant.

Instead of simply swapping “obligate” for “allocate,” we’ve proposed that Congress requires a strict timeline for DOT between making an allocation and an obligation, along with requirements for the DOT to regularly communicate with Congress and project sponsors about the status of all projects that are seeking CIG funding. While Congress can’t do USDOT’s work for them, it can exercise aggressive oversight that would make it much harder for the agency to just sit on its hands. USDOT’s actions (or lack thereof) to date have more than justified such an approach.

Congress’s heart is in the right place; they’re trying to make USDOT obey the law and administer the CIG program as intended. The fact that Congress is even in this position speaks to the sordid state of affairs at USDOT. But their proposed remedy to this problem—changing policy in the CR to focus on tracking internal accounting (“allocations”) instead of executed grants—could just end up making things a whole lot worse.

The good, the bad, and the ugly in the Senate’s long-term transportation bill

Vehicles moving slowly on a congested highway in Seattle. The highway crosses a narrow river.

Last month, the Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works passed a long-term transportation policy bill. Unfortunately, billions of new dollars for the existing system overshadow its notable new programs, like a climate title and Complete Streets requirements. 

Vehicles moving slowly on a congested highway in Seattle. The highway crosses a narrow river.

Highway traffic in Seattle. Photo by Oran Viriyincy on Flickr.

The transportation authorization bill, known as America’s Transportation Infrastructure Act (ATIA), includes a few new, notable, programs related to Transportation for America (T4America) initiatives. But overall, it fails to meaningfully address the maintenance backlog, ensure safety, or create a system built around providing access to jobs and services. 

The new climate and safety programs, while welcome additions, will be undercut by substantial funding increases for high-speed roadways in the base formulas without any additional constraints to improve safety, measure or reduce vehicle miles traveled, and prioritize access to jobs and opportunities. 

The good: A pilot program for transportation accessibility data and Complete Streets requirements

We’ve long advocated for measuring the success of our transportation system based on whether it, and any new investment, improves connections to jobs and important destination by all modes of travel. After all, this should be the goal of transportation. 

That’s why we’re happy that the ATIA includes a provision based on the bipartisan COMMUTE Act. The “Accessibility Data Pilot Program” would establish a pilot program to provide states, metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs), and rural MPOs with the data and training to improve transportation planning by measuring the level of access by multiple transportation modes to important destinations (such as  jobs, health and child care, education, affordable housing, food sources, and connections to transit, bicycling, and ADA compliant sidewalks). This is a small but necessary first step toward reorienting the federal transportation program toward connecting people to jobs and services.

The bill also includes significant new formula and discretionary safety programs and language encouraging states and planning organizations to adopt Complete Streets designs and plans, tactics that are proven to improve safety for all road users. Specifically, the ATIA requires that 2.5 percent of state and MPO planning funds must be used for adopting Complete Streets standards or policies or developing Complete Streets prioritization plans, active transportation plans, transit access plans, transit-oriented development plans, or regional intercity rail plans.

However, historically programs like these are funded at low levels while 10-20 times as much is made available for status quo transportation, and this makes it impossible for these programs to make a mark on the system.  We see the same thing happening here. 

The bad: No requirement to maintain roads 

“We must fix our crumbling infrastructure” is a Washington, DC cliche. But it wouldn’t be a cliche if we actually did it. The ATIA will not be the bill that requires state DOTs to take repair seriously. 

The bill does not include any requirements that the core formulas or new programs must be spent on maintenance instead of expansion. Its only maintenance program—the Competitive Bridge Investment Program—represents a small amount of the overall funding and does nothing to change the way the rest of the formula funds are used. In fact, one of the eligible uses of this maintenance program is to address increasing traffic; this means expanding and widening roads. Further, there is nothing in this program that rewards states for putting more of their other formula funds to maintenance. DOTs get the same amount of money even if they use the rest of their funds for expansion.

Granted, the bill makes funding from some of the new programs eligible for maintenance and limits funding to projects that do not create new single occupancy vehicle capacity. But the maintenance impact of these funds will be limited as they are also available for a variety of other investments. 

The only way to actually reduce our backlog of maintenance needs is to require that funds are spent on maintenance, not anything else, until DOTs make real progress in reducing their backlog. Maintenance is too important to let states and MPOs opt-out.  

T4A expects Congress to design the national transportation program to reduce the maintenance backlog by half in the next six years. We are tired of hearing the same calls for fixing our crumbling roads and bridges as justification for ever more funding before every reauthorization and not seeing substantial progress.

The ugly: Congress has—once again—stuck to the status quo

Redesigning our national transportation policy is a powerful opportunity that comes only once every five years. By choosing what grant programs to invest in, Congress can massively influence what transportation projects states, MPOs, and cities build for decades. 

And once again, Congress missed its window. Despite including a climate title for the first time ever—a huge feat for a Republican-led Senate—and a new safety incentive program, the ATIA puts the bulk of its funding into programs that incentivize the building of high-speed roads. This negates the funding for the climate and safety programs  because high-speed roads are dangerous by design and increase transportation emissions. Here’s how. 

Vehicles need a lot of space to reach high speeds. Building communities where vehicles can go fast means building destinations spread far apart from each other—the suburban sprawl that many Americans are intimately familiar with. In these sprawling built environments, using any transportation mode besides a personal car becomes incredibly inconvenient and deadly (our report Dangerous by Design found that almost 50,000 people were killed while walking and biking between 2008 and 2017, and that number is rising). Hence, high-speed roads are both dangerous for pedestrians and encourage driving and increase vehicle miles traveled—which increases greenhouse gas emissions. 

Governments at all levels use vehicle speeds as a poor proxy for measuring how connected people are to destinations, like jobs, schools, and grocery stores. But high vehicle speed doesn’t mean that people actually reached their destination in a reasonable time. Our current federal transportation program prioritizes funding a 90 mile commute at 60 mph rather than a five mile commute in stop-and-go traffic. But which commute would you rather have? 

By continuing to prioritize new high-speed roads, the ATIA doesn’t focus on the outcomes of its investments. It doesn’t prioritize connecting people to jobs and services. 

Finally, the bill perpetuates the false notion that highways are the most important transportation mode. In keeping with recent  history, Congress has advanced a major highway bill before either of the Congressional committees dealing with rail and transit have even begun to act. At $287 billion over five years, this bill assumes more than the lion’s share of available funding for highways.

Why we’re thrilled to support the Build Local, Hire Local Act

A bike commuter wearing a suit, tie, and a helmet flashes a thumbs up to the photographer while biking on a busy road in San Francisco.

Last month, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (NY) and Representative Karen Bass (CA-37) introduced legislation that would create transportation accessibility performance measures and a grant program to reconnect communities divided by highways. 

A bike commuter wearing a suit, tie, and a helmet flashes a thumbs up to the photographer while biking on a busy road in San Francisco.

Last month, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) and Representative. Karen Bass (D-CA), chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, introduced the Build Local, Hire Local Act (S. 2404 and H.R. 4101 ), legislation that would use federal infrastructure funding as a tool to hire people who live near new infrastructure projects for high-quality jobs. 

In the process, the bill creates a new access to jobs and services performance measure, and a technical assistance program, and a construction grant program to improve transportation connections in communities divided by highways. We’ve worked closely with the Senator and Representative in developing this legislation and are thrilled to support the Build Local, Hire Local Act.

The performance measure included in the bill requires states and metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) to assess how well the entire transportation system—roads, public transit, bike lanes and sidewalks—connects people to opportunities, putting a particular emphasis on improving accessibility in low-income communities. States and MPOs must report these assessments to Congress, who will make the data publicly available online. Measuring accessibility would lead us to a transportation system that prioritizes efficient travel and a more equitable transportation system. 

These tools allow states and MPOs to better understand where people are traveling and to design transportation networks to maximize the ability of people to travel. It also allows states and MPOs to optimize their transportation networks to utilize all modes of transportation and even to understand how their investments interact with land use policies.

This connectivity and accessibility performance measure is similar to the COMMUTE Act, a bill that would create a pilot program for states and MPOs to use travel data collected by the U.S. Department of Transportation to measure and improve access to jobs and services by all modes. We’ve been advocating for this legislation for awhile, and a version of the COMMUTE Act is included in the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee’s recently passed long-term transportation policy bill. 

The Build Local, Hire Local Act’s technical assistance program and grant program take this performance measure a step further. To improve access to jobs and services by all modes, the bill will help communities—especially those bi-furcated by highways—find and build innovative projects that connect divided neighborhoods. 

This is an important step in the right direction. Too often, highway infrastructure tears apart communities, particularly disadvantaged communities, separating people from jobs, services, and connections to other neighborhoods. This not only exacerbates existing inequalities, it worsens air pollution and public health outcomes, turning neighborhoods from places where people want to be into places people want to get away from—via the highway. This bill seeks to fix that.  

“The goal of our transportation system should be to safely and efficiently connect people to jobs and services,” said our director Beth Osborne. “For too long, we have treated vehicle speed as a sufficient measure for this goal. Yet it fails to capture walking, cycling, and transit trips, and inaccurately measures vehicle trips.

“Transportation for America commends Senator Gillibrand and Representative Bass for this innovative legislation to measure and judge performance by what really matters in transportation: access by all modes of travel.”

Mayors tell the Senate that transit, biking, and walking are climate change solutions

Testimonies from mayors at a recent Senate hearing showed that cities understand that reducing driving and expanding other transportation options is key to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and boosting local economies at the same time. 

Walking in Southeast Portland. Photo by James Carnes.

Last week, the Senate Democrats’ Special Committee on the Climate Crisis held their first hearing, which focused on what cities across the country are doing to combat and adapt to climate change. In their testimonies, mayors from Atlanta, Honolulu, St. Paul, Pittsburgh, and Portland, OR highlighted the need to reduce emissions from transportation and maintain and expand their existing transit systems. 

Transportation is the single largest source of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, contributing 29 percent of the United States’ total GHG emissions. While states and cities are setting ambitious climate goals to reduce their emissions and to even achieve net-zero emissions, many are finding that they will not be able to achieve those goals without reducing emissions from the transportation sector. The best way to do that isn’t just switching to electric vehicles, but by also reducing how much people drive, or vehicle miles traveled (VMT). 

During the hearing, it was clear that cities recognize the need to prioritize biking, walking, and transit as a way to both reduce emissions and boost their economies. Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler hit on the connection between climate change and transportation, testifying that “switching to riding public transportation is one of the most effective actions individuals can take to reduce their carbon footprint. In the Portland region, there is 60 percent less carbon emitted for each mile taken on public transit, compared to driving alone.”

Honolulu came to a similar conclusion, with Mayor Kirk Caldwell stating that in order to meet their GHG reduction goals, they need to shift the transportation system towards “more biking, walking, mass transit, renewable fueled vehicles, and other new mobility options.” A  recent report from Smart Growth America and Rhodium Group found the same thing. In order for Hawaii to meet its ambitious climate goal of 100 percent clean energy by 2045, it will need to improve transit and land use to encourage walking and biking.

But the mayors weren’t just talk: they highlighted actions their cities are taking to improve biking, walking, and transit. St. Paul is working on “improving pedestrian and bike infrastructure to make it safer and easier to get around” and that Honolulu is “investing significant political and financial capital into transformational projects with high short-term costs and long-term gains, (e.g., rail, Complete Streets, bike lanes, electric buses).” Mayor Wheeler of Portland spoke extensively on the city’s push to “make walking, biking, and using public transit safer and more attractive to maximize the use of our limited road space and help the entire road system work more efficiently.” 

What should the federal government’s role be?

This hearing was meant to showcase what cities are doing to become more resilient, but it also offered a chance for cities to tell the federal government what they need in order to achieve ambitious climate goals. As expected, much of it came down to funding. 

Mayor Wheeler emphasized the need for a reliable federal partner in funding multi-modal transportation networks, stating that his city “continues to suffer from a severe shortage of transportation funding, even as local voters and state governments have recently increased transportation funding.” He encouraged the continued funding of the FTA’s Capital Investment Grant Program (CIG) and the BUILD program. As we saw during an oversight hearing this week on the FTA’s administration of the CIG program, there is a growing demand for federal funding of transit projects in a timely and transparent manner. 

Atlanta also needs additional funding to build out their transit system. Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms testified, “Atlanta taxpayers have also voted with their pocketbooks to build out sidewalks and last-mile connectivity to our transit system” in a recent election. The city is now moving forward with a $2.7 billion expansion of their transit system that will give people more transportation options and  increase access to 350,000 jobs. Mayor Melvin Carter of St. Paul asked for the federal government to “help us build for the 21st century, with major investments in pedestrian, bicycle, and transit infrastructure.” 

Taxpayers in these cities and others across the country are willing to pay more for better transportation. Unfortunately, the federal government spends the vast majority of its resources on expanding highways—exacerbating the climate crisis—while transit funding gets much less funding and there are many more hoops communities must jump through to access it. 

To wrest some of the funding away from building more highways and provide cities and towns with more flexibility in their spending, Mayor Caldwell explicitly encouraged the senators to support the Complete Streets Act of 2019, which was recently introduced by Senator Ed Markey (D-MA) and Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN). The legislation would require states to set aside money for Complete Streets projects, create a statewide program to award the money (and provide technical support), and adopt design standards that support safer, complete streets. 

Cities get it 

Cities understand that improving transportation infrastructure can have a wide range of benefits. Creating better and more connected multimodal transit systems not only reduces emissions, but it also enables people to move quickly and safely within cities and promotes vibrant economies. Much of the national discourse on reducing emissions from transportation counts on electric vehicles saving us, but cities know that’s simply not enough. Providing transit, safe bike infrastructure, and walkable areas is just as important and the federal government has an important role in helping our country rise to meet that challenge. Mayor Wheeler summed it up best: “The investments that have helped reduce carbon emissions are also what make people want to live, work, and play.” 

U.S. Senate passes transportation appropriations bill with robust funding for transit, rail programs

press release

Washington, DC—Today, the United States Senate again rejected the Trump administration’s proposal to eliminate or severely cut vital transportation programs that local communities rely on by adopting its FY19 Transportation Housing and Urban Development (THUD) appropriations bill. In perhaps their strongest rebuke of the president’s disdain for transit, the bill language specifically requests that USDOT manage the BUILD program (formerly TIGER) as it did during the Obama administration.

“Today the United States Senate reaffirmed the importance of investing in transportation and in particular public transit. The Senate’s vote signals that funding public transit is and should remain a federal priority, despite the objections of the current administration,” said Kevin F. Thompson, director of Transportation for America. “Millions of Americans are counting on new or improved transit service to provide options for reaching jobs and opportunity, and local governments are counting on federal funds to leverage local taxpayer revenue and bring these projects to fruition.”

President Trump has twice sent recommended budgets to Capitol Hill that have eliminated most or all funding for public transit.

The Senate THUD appropriations bill funds:

  • The BUILD (Better Utilizing Investments to Leverage Development) Grants program at $1 billion. The bill language specifically directs USDOT to administer this program as it was in 2016 (under Obama’s DOT) in response to changes the agency has tried to impose which would have added greater financial and administrative burdens on local communities. The BUILD program is one of the most popular programs administered by the federal government, providing grants directly to local communities across the country for all manner of transportation systems from biking and walking infrastructure to port projects to transit systems. Communities can continue to rely on BUILD to help make upgrades to their ports (like in Mobile, Alabama) or shared-use trail systems (like in northwest Arkansas).
  • The Capital Investment Grants (CIG) Program at $2.5 billion, a $1.6 billion increase over the administration’s FY19 request but $92 million below FY18. This funding will allow projects like the Indianapolis Purple Bus Rapid transit (BRT) line, the Raleigh-Durham light rail line and the Tempe, Arizona Streetcar to move forward. Each of these communities raised tens or hundreds of millions of local dollars based on the promise of federal matching funds. The Senate, through this bill, keeps that promise.

The Senate strongly endorsed continuing Amtrak’s long-distance service, despite objections of the Trump administration, by virtually prohibiting Amtrak from reducing or eliminating rail service on the Southwest Chief line as Amtrak proposed. The Senate also adopted an amendment supported by Transportation for America that expressly prohibits the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) from changing its federal loan policy that would have raised costs for local taxpayers (see FTA’s “Dear Colleague” letter). The letter sowed confusion about FTA’s standards and we’re pleased the Senate rebuked the agency’s actions. The Senate sent a clear message that FTA should continue carrying out the CIG program as Congress intended.

We applaud the Senate for taking a firm stand in support of these programs and the communities that rely on them; we hope the U.S. House of Representatives will do the same.

On May 23, 2018, the House Appropriations Committee approved their THUD bill. Like the Senate bill, the House bill rejects the president’s proposal to eliminate or severely cut vital transportation programs that local communities rely on. We encourage Speaker Ryan to bring the bill expeditiously to the full House of Representatives for a vote.