Skip to main content

Tag: House

House transportation proposal focuses on updating nation’s outdated transportation policy to get better results

press release

The House Transportation & Infrastructure Committee’s proposal for long-term transportation policy makes repair, safety, climate change, and access to jobs and services core goals for the bill’s spending, rather than just nice add-ons— taking a dramatically different approach than the Senate’s long-term proposal. 

WASHINGTON, DC — “Federal transportation policy has been on autopilot for two decades, blindly pouring money into the same old programs and hoping for miracles when it comes to producing a transportation system that works for all Americans, keeps them safe, is well maintained, and helps meet our goals for reducing emissions and addressing climate change,” said Beth Osborne, director of Transportation for America. “As with the House’s proposal in the last Congress, Chairman DeFazio once again lays the groundwork for finally updating our country’s 1950’s approach to transportation to meet 21st Century needs.

“The proposal that Chairman DeFazio released today takes last summer’s fairly groundbreaking INVEST Act and improves on it. We are particularly happy to see the inclusion of a program to address transit deserts and another program to reconnect communities divided by transportation infrastructure, like highways. 

“Like last summer’s bill, this proposal includes reforms to the core, fundamental programs to ensure that states prioritize repair, make safety a primary goal, and make access to jobs and opportunities a priority for the billions we invest each year. This is a paradigm shift from the approach of the last 30 years of proposing small, exciting new programs to fix recognized problems while allowing the much larger core program to exacerbate and further those same problems.

“That’s the kind of fundamentally new approach we need, and we are excited to work with the Committee to make it even better. We hope the Senate takes some cues and that both Democrats and Republicans focus their efforts on a proposal that generates better outcomes, rather than agreeing to prop up a stale and destructive status quo,” Osborne said.

###

The Senate needs a new transportation bill—and over 120 elected officials and organizations agree

Current long-term transportation policy expires this September, giving Congress a rare opportunity to fundamentally rethink American transportation. That’s why the House passed a transformative bill last summer—but the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee passed a status quo bill that would just make our problems worse. Over 120 elected officials and organizations signed our letter urging the Senate to take a new course. 

A floating bus stop with a bike lane in Montgomery County, MD. Photo by Beyond DC on Flickr’s Creative Commons.

Last summer, the House of Representatives passed a long-term transportation bill completely unlike any we’ve seen before. 

The bill—called the INVEST Act—required states to maintain their roadways before building new ones; use Complete Streets design standards, among other policies that make the safety of people walking and biking a priority; and measure how well their transportation investments connect people to jobs and services, and prioritize investments that improve those connections—regardless of mode. 

These policy changes would start the work of focusing our transportation policy on outcomes, not dollars—building a transportation system that connects people to what they need affordably, safely, conveniently, equitably, and sustainably. 

The Senate was a different story. The Environment and Public Works (EPW) Committee is responsible for writing the highway portion of the long-term transportation law, and the bill they passed in summer 2019 was, kindly, so-so:

  • No requirement to maintain roads with the overwhelming amount of funding dedicated to highways; 
  • Nothing to curb the skyrocketing number of people killed while walking every year; 
  • The bill included a pilot program to measure access, but nothing to reorient the federal transportation program from mindlessly pursuing vehicle speed as a goal. 

As we wrote then, we’re tired of the same old transportation bills that pump money into building highways at the expense of our crumbling roads and bridges, people’s access to essential jobs and services, and human life.

But there’s hope: The new chair of the Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee (the Senate committee responsible for the public transit portion of the long-term transportation bill) has said that he wants his committee to take a much bigger role in passing this legislation. (Historically, EPW has taken the lead, leaving transit policy and funding in the dust.) In addition, the new EPW chair has requested feedback this month from members on surface transportation priorities.

To capitalize on this, 124 elected officials and organizations from 35 states signed our letter urging the Senate to pick a new path—like the INVEST Act—to the long-term transportation bill. It’s time for the Senate to pass a bill that fundamentally updates the 70 year old federal transportation program to prioritize maintenance, design for safety over speed, and connect people to jobs and services—and so many agree. 

To achieve this vision, the EPW and Banking committees must work together—a critical piece of our message to the Senate. Our letter reads: 

“Climate change, racial and economic equity, safety, and maintenance are interrelated transportation challenges—just like highways, public transit, biking, walking, and passenger rail are interrelated. We can no longer consider these issues in legislative and policy silos; coordination among your committees is essential to delivering the transportation system Americans deserve. 

“As an example of the committee coordination needed, we support significant new investment in public transit and passenger rail—including operating support for public transit—to provide more people with safe, reliable, and convenient service. At the same time, every trip begins and ends as a pedestrian and we also support investments in safe streets and more connected communities that are necessary to leverage investments in transit and rail. “

As Senators hit the drafting board this spring, we urge them to take our recommendations to heart. It’s long past time for visionary transportation legislation that meets the moment. 

Read our full letter here, and check out our blogs on the Senate and House bills: 

Will Congress hold Amtrak accountable for providing essential passenger rail service?

Communities large and small, urban and rural, are served by Amtrak’s national network of long distance routes, providing essential connections to jobs, services, and the broader economy. Amtrak is threatening to dramatically cut these services, severing essential connections despite clear directives from Congress. Here’s a rundown from a recent hearing on this issue in the House Transportation and Infrastructure’s railroad subcommittee. 

An Amtrak train in Grand Rapid, MI, this past July. Photo by Russell Sekeet on Flickr’s Creative Commons.

Amtrak has been hard hit through the pandemic. Ridership has cratered—especially on the Northeast Regional and Acela services—but the railroad has continued to operate nearly all its routes especially as many places have cautiously reopened. Reduced ticket revenues, combined with extra costs for cleaning and protective equipment, have led the company to a point where they are considering cutting many daily long-distance service down to just three-days-a-week in many places and making significant cuts to its workforce. 

These massive cuts would have an outsize impact on rural communities and take away valuable lifeline services that often are the only connection between smaller areas and bigger cities, connecting thousands with vital services. Noting that ridership is actually down the least on the long-distance routes, T4America chair John Robert Smith told the Daily Yonder that rural communities consider these services essential, and that “you greatly limit communities served by 7-day a week service when you go to three.” (Read more from the Rail Passengers Association about the impact of these cuts)

Members of Congress from both sides of the aisle have expressed deep concern about these perhaps penny wise but definitely pound-foolish plans. This week the members of the House’s main rail subcommittee held a hearing this week to understand Amtrak’s decisions during the COVID-19 pandemic—and ask some pointed questions. 

T4America worked to educate committee staff about the consequences of Amtrak’s planned cuts to long-distance services from daily to three-days per week on most routes. T4A provided resources to committee staff with sample questions and expected responses based on Amtrak’s recent and past assertions. 

Opening the hearing, Chairman Dan Lipinski (D-IL) echoed many of the same priorities we share. Lipinski affirmed past lessons from deep cuts made back in 1994, that cutting long-distance trains from daily to three-days per week doesn’t work for passengers or taxpayers, as utility of the service collapses, and subsidies per rider increase. He praised the work of former Senator Trent Lott (R-MS) to restore daily long-distance services, and emphasized Amtrak’s role as a national public service rather than a purely profit-making enterprise.

No member of the committee sided with Amtrak in its position that cutting service and furloughing staff was necessary or prudent. To the contrary, many members, including Republicans and Democrats alike, criticized the railroad for first taking supplemental funding, then planning to still lay off staff and cut services. One of the biggest critiques is that the massive service cuts and layoffs would only save Amtrak a marginal amount of money in the end, especially when the costs are factored in to restore service and train new staff down the road.

Some members took issue with Amtrak’s plans to restore a 7 percent employer 401k match for management employees, that is timed to coincide with the railroad’s service cuts and frontline staff furloughs. Amtrak’s CEO Bill Flynn defended the decision as necessary to retain management personnel, especially at the lower levels, after making cuts earlier in the pandemic. Flynn also went on record saying that executive bonuses and incentive pay would be suspended for three years, but it was not immediately clear when the three-year prohibition began.

When asked about continuing the long-distance services long term, Flynn said Amtrak would run services as directed by Congress, but that he “100 percent supports” the long-distance trains as part of Amtrak’s future. Flynn cited Amtrak’s recent purchase of 75 new locomotives for the long-distance services as proof of this commitment. However, locomotives can be reassigned to other services, and his statement made no mention of allocating specialized equipment for long-distance service like sleeping and dining cars which the railroad has recently taken delivery of but still does not fully utilize. 

Rail Passenger Association President and CEO Jim Mathews testified powerfully about the impact of  service cuts not only on long-distance riders, but to the hundreds of communities served by Amtrak trains across middle America. “It is not — it is only required to minimize subsidies,” Mathews said. “A conversation about [Amtrak] profit ignores the benefit that communities receive.”

Mathews outlined a study that we helped the RPA produce which estimates losses in visitor spending of over $2.3 billion to station communities and regions if Amtrak’s planned service cuts last for nine months. The study uses a methodology T4A helped develop as part of our longstanding work to restore service to the Gulf Coast, in partnership with the Trent Lott Center at the University of Southern Mississippi.

When it comes to those who are on the frontlines of providing Amtrak’s service, members from two of Amtrak’s unions focused on the sacrifices they and their members have made to maintain service across the Amtrak network, and the public health dangers Amtrak workers are still facing.

Arthur Maratea, National President, Transportation Communications Union (TCU/IAM); and Amy Griffin, President of America Local 1460, Transport Workers Union of America spoke on behalf of Amtral’s frontline workers. They also addressed a shortage of coach cleaners on the railroad, and say Amtrak is not hiring to fill open positions despite the increased need for sanitation, endangering workers and the traveling public.

One of the best perspectives came from an urban Democrat from Massachusetts, who understands that service for people in states far away from his district is what’s at stake, but that a unified national system is vital for everyone. From Trains Magazine:

Near the end of session, Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.) told Flynn, “I fully support using money you make on the north end of the Northeast Corridor to provide service to some of those rural areas — the ‘red’ states. Those lines don’t necessarily benefit my district but they benefit the country. … I hope you take very seriously the credibility that you will lose by engaging in these furloughs, and the representational damage that comes to Amtrak management. I’m asking you to reconsider that [because] it is not going to save the day.” Cutting 2000 employees, Lynch said, “is going to reduce service and spiral that bottom-line deficit. You’re going to lose the faith of members of Congress like me, who are behind you, because of this decision.”   

Here’s how the new House bill prioritizes getting people where they need to go

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. 

The House transportation committee is marking up and voting on the INVEST Act this week. View our amendment tracker here, get real-time updates by following @t4america on Twitter, visit our hub for all T4America content about the INVEST Act, and take action by sending a message to your representative if they sit on this House committee.

There’s a reason why Transportation for America’s third principle for transportation policy is to connect people to jobs and services, because instead of measuring transportation success by how many jobs and services people can get to, our current federal transportation policy considers how fast cars can drive on specific segments of road.

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.

UPDATED: Amendment to the House’s INVEST Act *will* close the repair loopholes

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.

The House transportation committee’s markup of the INVEST Act starts at 10 a.m. on Wednesday, June 17th. View our amendment tracker here, get real-time updates by following @t4america on Twitter, visit our hub for all T4America content about the INVEST Act, and take action by sending a message to your representative if they sit on this House committee.

As we wrote last week about some of the shortcomings in the INVEST Act’s repair provisions: 

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.

TAKE ACTION

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.

House transportation bill goes big on climate

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. 

The House transportation committee’s markup of the INVEST Act starts at 10 a.m. on Wednesday, June 17th. View our amendment tracker here, get real-time updates by following @t4america on Twitter, visit our hub for all T4America content about the INVEST Act, and take action by sending a message to your representative if they sit on this House committee.

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 bill needs some changes to make repair the number one priority

UPDATE, June 17: A bipartisan amendment to fix the issues we detailed below 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. View our amendment tracker for the INVEST act here, get real-time updates by following @t4america on Twitter, and take action by sending a message to your representative if they sit on this House committee.

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.

House builds on the FAST Act’s change to provide better and more balanced passenger rail service

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.

This is the first of a series of deeper dives into specific areas of the House’s transportation reauthorization proposal. Stay tuned for longer looks at repair (and how it can be improved), climate, access, and others. Read our statement on the bill, how it stacks up to our core three principles, and a quick look at nine other things—good and bad—to know.

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.

How well does the House’s new transportation bill advance T4America’s core principles?

Update, June 29: This bill passed the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure (T&I) and will be voted on in the House of Representatives this week. A bipartisan amendment to fix the issues with the bill’s repair provisions was accepted by unanimous consent in the House (T&I) Committee. It’s our pleasure to change our scorecard below from 2/3 to a 3/3. We thank Chair Rep. Peter DeFazio, Rep. Jesús G. “Chuy” García, and Rep. Mike Gallagher for their tremendous support and leadership on this specific issue.

Federal transportation policy is in desperate need of an overhaul. This week, the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee released a bill that makes substantial changes to connect the program to outcomes that Americans value. Here’s more on how the House bill starts to redirect transportation policy toward maintaining the current system, protecting the safety of people on the roads, and getting people to jobs, schools, groceries and health care. 

You can read our full statement about the bill here.

1) Takes steps to prioritize maintenance across the board

Prioritize maintenance is the first of our three simple core principles for federal investment in transportation. (Read more about all three here.) This bill doesn’t go as far as our specific call to cut the road, bridge, and transit maintenance backlog in half by dedicating formula dollars for maintenance, but it does push transportation agencies to prioritize maintenance in other concrete ways. Everyone in Congress talks nonstop about raising new money to “repair our crumbling roads and bridges,” and then they never make the requisite policy changes to guarantee it’ll ever happen. With this bill, the walk is starting to line up with the talk.

We should note that the overall highway funding in this bill is indeed growing overall, but we hope the language included in this proposal would lead to that money being spent in a different way. For one, 20 percent of the two biggest sources of state DOT highway funds are dedicated to bridge repair.1 For another, states will have to demonstrate three things before they can add new capacity with funds from the National Highway Performance Program, the largest highway program.2 DOTs would have to 1) demonstrate they are making progress on repair, 2) consider operational improvements and transit and show that expanding roadway capacity is more cost-effective than either, and 3) demonstrate that the expansion project would meet another performance target, like congestion reduction. This is a good step; however, this will only work if it’s matched with a strong standard to determine what defines “progress on repair” as well as a requirement that DOTs base their decisions and cost-effectiveness calculation on transportation models with a strong history of accuracy—and most currently do not.

Additionally, even if they 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, like we require transit project sponsors to do. That’s a big miss.

On the transit side, a new $600 million program is intended only for local transit projects which improve state of good repair (or other vital performance measures like emissions reduction, safety, or access.) There’s also a new formula program for keeping transit buses up to date that will always prioritize the agencies with the oldest buses, creating a rolling funding increase targeting the oldest buses as we try to modernize the nation’s transit fleet.

2) Institutes a comprehensive approach to safety

Designing for safety over speed is our second principle, with a call to save lives with road designs that support and encourage safer, slower driving. The conventional approach to designing highways—wide lanes and wide roads to allow for high speeds—has resulted in an epidemic of death on our nation’s roads and the highest number of people being struck and killed while walking and biking in three decades—disproportionately killing Black Americans and people in other communities of color. In this bill, safety goes from a talking point to action, focusing on making our roads safe for everyone and providing the money and standards for transportation agencies to build Complete Streets.

For starters, this proposal would take away the ability of state DOTs to set negative annual targets for safety. In other words, they can’t set a target for more people to die on their roads next year. Last year the National Complete Streets Coalition pointed out that not only were more people walking and biking being struck and killed by drivers in many states and they were 7 times more likely to be people of color, but many of those states were setting “safety targets” that assumed more people would die and there was nothing they could or would do to stem the tide. (Many “succeeded.”) The House bill should push those states to realize that there are things they can and must do in the design of their roadways to improve safety.

The proposal also dedicates more funding to protect the most vulnerable users and make communities more welcoming to pedestrians and bicyclists. This includes: 1) requiring states with the highest levels of pedestrian and bicyclist fatalities to set aside funds to address those safety needs;3 2) increasing Transportation Alternatives Program (TAP) funds by 60 percent from $850 million per year to an estimated $1.5 billion per year (which typically funds biking and walking projects); and 3) preventing states from transferring any of those TAP funds to other programs unless they make funds available to local governments who could identify no suitable projects. In a typical year, states transfer $150 million from this small program into the much larger highway programs.

There are also several provisions to embed safety into the planning and standards of transportation agencies. The bill would require FHWA to update its Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD) to require speed limits to be set with a consideration of the community surrounding the corridor, the number of bicyclists and pedestrians, and crash statistics (as opposed to just traffic conditions). Right now, speed limits are set by how people behave; so if you build a wide street and people drive too fast, the speed limit is often raised to accommodate the rule breakers. States would also be allowed to use various funds to create plans for Complete Streets and Vision Zero plans—an effort to completely eliminate traffic fatalities, in part through street design. Finally, the bill would require each state to conduct a vulnerable road user safety assessment as part of its strategic highway safety plan.

This bill is markedly different than its predecessors and if enacted it will most certainly create a safer transportation system and save lives.

3) States and metro area planners must determine how well their system connects people to jobs—drivers and non-drivers alike

Our third principle is measuring transportation success by how many jobs and services people can access, not how fast cars can drive on specific segments of road, as our current program does. If the goal of transportation spending is to connect people to jobs and services, then that must be measured and considered when funding decisions are made.

Access to technology like GIS and cloud computing allows us to now measure travel by all modes from residential areas to jobs and services. With this information, we can consider all kinds of transportation projects and all transportation users equally. We can also see when it is more cost-efficient to build the things people need closer to them, rather than defaulting to building more transportation projects to make far away necessities less inconvenient to travel to.

This is where this bill most hits the mark. For the first time at the national level, recipients of federal transportation funding will be required to measure how well their system connects people to the things they need, whether they drive, take transit, walk or bike. Right now, the program assumes if vehicle traffic is moving that trips are easy and access is high. This ignores those who can’t or don’t drive, which are much more likely to be those who are low-income, people of color, or those who are mobility-impaired. Under the House bill, state DOTs 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.

Additionally, the House proposal creates an Office of Transit-Supportive Communities within the Federal Transit Administration to provide funding, technical assistance, and coordination of transit and housing projects within the USDOT and across the federal government. Putting housing (and especially attainable housing) close to transit is a powerful way to increase access to jobs and necessities. Further, this proposal adds affordable housing into the planning considerations for MPO and state DOT Transportation Improvement Programs, as well as for future transit capital grants. Through this legislation, the House authors recognize the connection between transportation, housing and development and propose bringing them together in federal policy and investments.

The score:

The INVEST Act checks two of the three boxes in our scorecard, but especially access and safety where the authors showed real comprehension of the problems and innovation on the solutions. On repair, the final verdict will be decided in the regulatory work that is done by USDOT, which is not ideal. We strongly recommend that the House strengthen their language on repair to ensure that we don’t end up with a much larger overall program with the same problem as before: neglected maintenance needs while states find creative ways to continue building things they can’t afford to maintain. On the whole, we’re glad to see the House move the program in a new direction, which is a vast improvement over the current proposal from the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, which got an “F” for their costly status quo approach.

Learn more: Read our follow-up post that delves into nine other (mostly positive) things to note about this bill.

House bill charts a course for updating country’s outdated transportation policy

press release

The Transportation & Infrastructure Committee (T&I) in the U.S. House released a draft proposal for long-term surface transportation policy today that would replace the existing FAST Act, which expires this year. 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.

WASHINGTON, DC — “Past reauthorizations have been an exercise in spending more money and magically wishing for better outcomes with outdated policy, which was always foolish,” said Beth Osborne, director of Transportation for America. “With this new proposal from Chairman DeFazio, the INVEST in America Act, the House is charting a welcome course toward updating our country’s 1950’s approach to transportation.”

“The typical fixation on the price tag has prevented us from realizing a path forward. First propose a new set of policies for accomplishing some key goals—fix it first, safety over speed, and improving access to jobs and services—and then rally people to pay for that vision. The House is proposing significant changes to the core highway program by requiring states to prioritize road and bridge repair (and setting money aside for that purpose), measure and reduce greenhouse gases, improve access to jobs and opportunity with every dollar spent, and make safety—for everyone—paramount. Many of the changes made on the transit side are also oriented around improving access, like incentivizing transit agencies to increase frequency rather than merely reducing operating costs, which can help provide better service where it’s needed most, rather than just adding service in places where it’s the most cost-effective,” said Osborne.

“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,” said Emiko Atherton, director of the National Complete Streets Coalition. “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.”

“This is a transportation bill, but the committee is to be commended for also recognizing the inextricable connections to land use, specifically affordable housing,” said Christopher Coes, vice president of land use and development at Smart Growth America. “We’ll never be able to realize our climate goals or an equitable economic recovery without also providing more attainable housing in places where people can drive less and walk or take transit more. This bill takes some important steps forward by moving to integrate housing and land use into existing transportation planning and creating a new federal office to coordinate these plans equitably. But more is needed, including new standards to reduce overall housing plus transportation costs, which are often far out of reach for many Americans.”

“Let’s hope some of the leaders in the Senate take a look and transfer their enthusiasm to this more ambitious approach, instead of their expensive proposal to nibble around the edges of a broken status quo,” concluded Osborne.

###

Transportation for America, the National Complete Streets Coalition are all programs of Smart Growth America. Smart Growth America envisions a country where no matter where you live, or who you are, you can enjoy living in a place that is healthy, prosperous, and resilient. We empower communities through technical assistance, advocacy, and thought leadership to realize our vision of livable places, healthy people, and shared prosperity. www.smartgrowthamerica.org

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.

House principles could finally connect transportation spending to tangible outcomes

Transportation for America and the National Complete Streets Coalition released this statement regarding the principles for infrastructure released today by the House majority of the Transportation & Infrastructure Committee:

The new transportation policy framework released today by the House majority and Chairman Peter DeFazio could finally represent a long-awaited step toward aligning the billions we spend on transportation with the outcomes people care about: fixing crumbling infrastructure, prioritizing saving people’s lives on our roadways, and connecting people to jobs and daily necessities. For the last 40 years, lawmakers have largely focused on pouring more money into a broken federal program that fails to hold states accountable for maintaining our infrastructure, produces more congestion, makes safety secondary, and fails to affordably and efficiently connect us to the things we need. It’s high time to stop spending billions on a broken system, and these principles would be a transformative guide as Congress crafts a transportation law to serve the country’s greatest needs.

These structural changes to core formula programs are the highest priority, particularly:

1. Fix it first. For decades, presidents, governors, and members of Congress have decried our crumbling infrastructure with increasingly dire warnings. However, funding has gone to fund expansions that we can’t pay for rather than focusing on repair needs. Taking a fix it first approach will deliver on the age-old promise to fix what is crumbling.

2. Safety over speed through Complete Streets. Since the beginning of the highway program, the priority has been to move vehicles quickly, creating unnecessary danger on roads in cities and towns, especially for those outside of a vehicle. Implementing Complete Streets policies is an essential tool in prioritizing the safe movement of all road users, and stemming the current increase in non-motorized deaths. A forthcoming bill that focuses on Complete Streets and other safety improvements within the transportation formula funds would be a huge step in the right direction.

3. Access to jobs and services. The point of transportation is to get people where they need to go. 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 or bicycling trips unsafe, unpleasant, or impossible. Having transportation agencies consider how well the system connects people to the things they need whether they travel by car, transit, bike or foot would be a game changer.

We are also happy to see a focus on retrofitting vulnerable infrastructure to prepare for inevitable natural disasters, funding public transportation and getting transit projects done more quickly, and putting real funding into the country’s passenger rail network. These changes, along with proposals to address safety and access for all users, would have a very positive impact on providing economic opportunity to more people and reducing greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation sector.

As the proposal moves from an outline to full legislative draft, we will watch with interest to see how the House Transportation & Infrastructure Committee chooses to craft the program to fund projects of regional and national significance to support community investments. We are also interested to learn whether the committee believes a 80/20 split between highways and transit is still warranted considering that nearly a third of the program is paid for with general funds instead of user fees.

As long-time advocates for structural reform to the transportation program, we’re cautiously optimistic that the House majority can translate this framework into policies that are tied to clear outcomes and will leave the status quo behind.

Broad coalition takes the offensive on federal automated vehicle policy

Instead of waiting for Congress to release a new bill to regulate autonomous vehicles worse than last year’s notorious AV START Act, T4America joined a diverse coalition of safety, public health, consumer, and transportation groups to urge lawmakers to take a smarter approach than last year’s reckless hands-off approach for the driverless car industry. 

We’re living through the first time in a hundred years a truly new transportation mode has hit American streets. While electric scooters, shareable mopeds, and electric bikes are all variations on a theme, automated vehicles (AVs) represent a truly transformational change to the world of mobility.

Yet federal policy hasn’t kept up. Current long-term transportation policy law—The FAST Act— which passed in 2015, didn’t even mention the phrase “automated vehicles.” When Congress did finally attempt to set basic rules for them, the House unanimously passed a bill before anyone knew what was in it and then the Senate attempted to pass the AV START Act. Both bills were a giveaway to the nascent industry which would have allowed hundreds of thousands of AVs on the road while preempting states and localities from not only regulating the vehicles in their jurisdictions, but even from knowing basic information about where and how they are operating.

But this issue isn’t going away. And if advocates fail to engage with Congress on this policy, these vehicles could undermine safety, exacerbate inequities, and worsen land-use policies that promote sprawl and create congestion. Rather than waiting for Congress, T4America and a host of other advocates want to do things differently this time. Instead of fighting to stop dangerous legislation from passing, T4America would rather fight for a bill that the public can support because they know it’s clearly in their best interests and protects their safety above all else.

We teamed up with a variety of stakeholders—including Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, National League of Cities, and the League of American Bicyclists—to send a letter to Congress with specific AV policy recommendations. The final letter was signed by 47 national groups with a range of interests, and it covered seven broad recommendations, all of which were either ignored or handled poorly in last year’s legislation:

Any federal AV legislation must prioritize safety for motorists, pedestrians, motorcyclists, transit riders, and cyclists; ensure access for everyone including people with disabilities; protect local control; and provide appropriate data to consumers and local authorities while also equipping the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) with the resources and authorities it needs to oversee this new technology.

AVs are certainly complicated, but getting the policy right shouldn’t be that difficult. But it does require an open, deliberative process of gathering feedback from everyone with a stake in how they’re rolled out and how they operate. 

For a new transportation mode that has the power to dramatically reshape our communities, Congress can’t just ask the industry what they think and then hastily rush a bill through based on their limited feedback. We need our deliberative bodies to do better.  By keeping safety at the forefront, we can craft legislation that works for everyone. 

We are optimistic we can work together with Congress on a bill that enhances the federal government’s ability to regulate auto safety, protects states and local governments’ authority to promote safety for all road users in their communities, and ensures that this new transportation technology is accessible to everyone. 

The full letter with the list of all signatories can be found here.

House oversight hearing on transit grants left unanswered questions

The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee held an oversight hearing on Tuesday, July 16, to question the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) about its ongoing failure to release billions of congressionally-appropriated funds for local transit construction projects in a timely fashion. We still have questions. 

A platform at Los Angeles’ Union Station, with a subway train arriving in the distance. LA Metro’s Purple Line has been waiting for allocated funding from the FTA since November 2018.

While Acting FTA Administrator K. Jane Williams provided some answers to the numerous good questions from members of Congress about the impacts of FTA’s slow-walking of construction grant agreements, we came away from the hearing with more questions than answers about the FTA’s process.

What’s causing the delays?

In our last blog post on the hearing, we noted that Williams was asked very directly about delays for transit projects. She gave a carefully-worded answer,  stating “there is not one single project waiting for my action as I sit here today.”

It may be true that there’s nothing sitting on her desk at this moment. But projects are certainly being held up at various stages in the pipeline; local communities, Congress, and the public just don’t know why. While projects sponsors have to turn in paperwork correctly and on time, it’s literally FTA’s job to do everything they can to help projects progress efficiently through the pipeline. If there are significant delays, it’s unlikely that it’s resulting from every single project sponsor failing to turn in their homework. At some point the spotlight has to shine on FTA’s role with the delays.

There are many ways that the FTA could be slowing down a project that prevents it from even getting to the point where it would be waiting for the Acting Administrator’s signature. That’s really just the last step before it goes to the Secretary for approval.4 In addition, local communities have told us about poor or non-existent communication, unexplained delays, and bizarre requests for information from the FTA, all of which could be slowing projects down. 

The FTA has also changed a small but significant rule in the middle of the game, upending historical precedent that quite logically allowed local funds used to repay federal loans to count toward the local contribution to the project. That makes sense: For the handful of transit projects partially financed by a federal loan from another program, the federal government gets repaid and the local dollars are the ones actually spent. Now communities will have to  scramble to come up with more cash to pay back federal loans and also fulfill their local matches.  

How long should a project have to wait after FTA’s “allocation” announcements to sign a grant agreement?

Both the Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) Red and Blue Line Platform Extensions and the Minneapolis Orange Line BRT received an allocation for their project back in November 2018. But as we’ve repeatedly pointed out,  these misleading allocation announcements do not mean that these communities received funds for their projects or signed a grant agreement. 

In the hearing, Acting Administrator Williams claimed that an allocation was their way of signaling that the project would receive a grant. But how long should communities be expected to wait after an allocation? Dallas and Minneapolis eventually received their grants this summer, three quarters of a year after the allocation. The money was just sitting there for them, waiting to be given out.  The Tempe Streetcar project in Arizona and the LA Westside Purple Line also received allocations in November 2018, but still haven’t received their grant agreements. There should be a deadline for the FTA to sign a grant agreement after an allocation, as well as clear communication about what to expect, so communities can plan for when they’ll receive their money.

And what about that $500 million for new projects?

This administration made their feelings about funding transit known when they tried to eliminate the program outright in consecutive years by requesting $0 for new projects and suggested that transit was only a local concern. In his most recent budget request, President Trump requested just $500 million for new projects. Asked to justify this seemingly arbitrary figure at the hearing, Acting Administrator Williams responded by explaining that the FTA only expected $500 million-worth of projects would be ready for funding. 

The FTA controls when projects will be ready. If the FTA is only expecting $500 million worth of new projects, then FTA is just failing to do its job.

Just $500 million? Seems like a strangely round number. In reality, there are dozens of projects in the pipeline waiting for funding that, collectively, are seeking a lot more than $500 million.  As we explained above, the FTA has an immense amount of control over when projects will be ready, and if the FTA is only expecting $500 million worth of new projects, then FTA is just failing to do its job. 

The FTA certainly has some idea of which projects will be ready for a grant agreement and when, but they are failing to publicize this information. The FTA has broken with precedent and no longer provides Congress and the public with annual reports clearly detailing which new projects will receive funding that year and when. This makes it impossible for communities, the public, or their representatives in Congress to know where their projects stand and makes it nearly impossible to hold FTA accountable for keeping to their timeline. 

The hearing underscored the fact that this administration at FTA needs to be far more transparent about this lone federal program dedicated to building new transit systems and expanding/improving existing ones. FTA should do so without having to be called before Congress to answer questions that they should be answering via clear public reports, easily accessible information on their website about each project, and detailed reports to Congress about where projects are in the process on the way to being approved and getting underway.

116th Congress Begins

This information was supplied to members via email on January 4, 2019. We are posting it here today so members can use this option to find it.

There are a lot of issues in play as the 116th Congress starts this week: a continuing government shutdown, new leadership in the House of Representatives, a new FY19 Appropriations bill from the Democratic-led House, committee leadership decisions, and discussions on an infrastructure package, reauthorization of the FAST Act, and the beginnings of FY20 appropriations discussions looming in the next few months. To keep you informed and prepare you for what almost certainly will be an interesting year, our policy team has provided what you need to know in this memo.

For those of you who like charts, and to help place the Democratic House FY19 Appropriations bill funding levels in context, check out this slide deck.

Also, not on the memo linked above because it just happened a a few hours ago ago: Senate Republicans finalized their committee memberships. As a reminder, committee assignments for Senate Democrats are here.

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.

Tax reform proposals would cut more than taxes

Though presented by Congress as a sensible approach to provide relief from a complicated tax code, Congress’ tax reform proposals would actually increase the deficit and trigger $150 billion in automatic reductions that are likely to end up resulting in deep cuts to vital transportation and infrastructure investments.

A Harvard-Harris poll released yesterday showed widespread support for a simplified tax code, as well as tax cuts for individuals and small businesses. That is good news for the Senate as it considers tax reform this week. However, the same poll found that 54 percent of Americans oppose the current tax reform proposals because they will hurt them financially.

More Americans might consider joining the ranks of the opposition if they truly understood the net impact of the tax reform measure. Namely, because the proposed tax cuts actually increase the federal deficit by $1.5 trillion over ten years, they trigger a little known or understood federal law that will automatically require $150 billion in cuts to federal entitlements every year for the next ten years to make up the difference. (Learn more about the Statutory Pay-As-You-Go Act here.)

The potential loss of deductions for state and local income and property taxes or the possible elimination of the write off for interest paid on your mortgage are small potatoes compared to the real cost and impact of these future cuts.

Federal spending in 2016 was about $3.5 trillion. Nearly, 65 percent of that money paid for entitlements like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other discretionary programs for health care and unemployment. Another 15 percent went to national defense and six percent went to service the interest on our burgeoning national debt. Just seven percent, about $245 billion, paid for everything else — affordable housing, economic development, job training, education, natural resources, public safety and yes, the $2.4 billion we invest annually in public transit improvements and construction.

The current tax proposal will require Congress to cut $150 billion dollars annually from federal spending. And considering that the President wants to increase defense spending and avoid cuts to entitlements, these cuts will likely come from other discretionary programs, like infrastructure. The end result will leave our country poorer, sicker and less secure. Cities and towns, big and small, will continue to struggle with more traffic congestion, poor air quality, and less competitive regional and local economies.

The impacts of deficit-driven tax reform couldn’t come at a more inopportune time for transportation infrastructure. The Highway Trust Fund, which funds most surface transportation investments, is solvent only because of massive transfusions of cash and creative accounting gimmickry. The President’s 2018 budget proposal is already recommending deep cuts, phase-outs or the complete elimination of popular and oversubscribed programs like the program that supports all transit capital investments and the popular Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER) Program.

The law requires Congress to pay for the tax cuts in this budget-busting bill. But unfortunately, Congress will likely choose to pay the tab by cutting the programs that reinvest in our people and their communities, including critical transportation programs.

After clearing committee late on Tuesday, a final vote on the Senate proposal could happen as soon as this Thursday. It is time to tell your elected officials that the price of this tax bill is too high to pay.

Stories You May Have Missed – Week of November 17th

Stories You May Have Missed

As a valued member, Transportation for America is dedicated to providing you pertinent information. This includes news articles to inform your work. Check out a list of stories you may have missed last week.

  • Everyone, including President Trump, wants to build infrastructure projects faster. The NY Times highlights some case studies to explain why some infrastructure projects can get slowed down. (NY Times)
  • “How the House tax plan could kill Trump’s infrastructure plans.” (The Hill)
  • The NY Times published their first article from an 8th month investigation into the factors that have contributed to the problems the New York City Subway is experiencing today. (NY Times)
  • The Florida Times-Union and Pro Publica have released an investigative report highlighting the racial disparity in pedestrian violations in Jacksonville. (Florida Times Union)
  • NY Times Op-Ed: “America Is Now an Outlier on Driving Deaths.” (NY Times)
  • San Francisco has procured its first fire truck that is designed specifically for vision zero streets. (Wired)

A bipartisan move to give states and metro areas access to better data to shape their transportation planning decisions

Congress took a bipartisan step today to provide states and metro areas with powerful data and accessibility tools that will help them better measure the destinations that their residents can easily reach, equipping transportation agencies to plan smarter transportation investments to address those gaps.

Congresswoman Esty (D-CT) — along with cosponsors Congresswoman Comstock (R-VA), Congressman Davis (R-IL), and Congressman Lipinski (D-IL) — introduced a bill this morning (Friday) to provide communities with valuable tools that can help them understand how well their transportation networks provide access to jobs and daily needs.

The Transportation Access & System Connection (TASC) Act would create a Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) pilot program to purchase new, precise data tools for 15 states and metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) to calculate how many jobs and services (such as schools, medical facilities, banks and groceries) are accessible by all modes of travel. The bill ensures that at least six small communities are included in this pilot via their MPO.

Connecting people to work is arguably the most important goal for our transportation system, yet we generally do a pretty poor job of measuring how successfully our local roads and transit systems performs this base function. But as important as measuring jobs access is, only 20 percent of all trips and only 30 percent of vehicle miles traveled (VMT) are to and from work. This means that 80 percent of trips (70 percent of VMT) are for our other daily essentials — going to the store, shopping, or dropping the kids off at school, etc.

Until recently, transportation agencies could only monitor incredibly blunt metrics, like overall traffic congestion and on-time performance for transit, and while important, these paint a grossly two-dimensional picture of the challenges people face while trying to reach their needs within a reasonable period of time. And these limited measures certainly don’t provide enough information to help these agencies make the hard decisions about what to build to best connect people to the places they need to go.

Too often, the use of simple metrics results in the consideration of simple “solutions,” like adding expensive additional lanes to existing highways and road networks —costly solutions that often don’t solve the problem, or make it worse.

But today, there are precise new tools available that allow communities to more accurately calculate accessibility to employment opportunities, daily errands, public services, and much more. (Similar tools were used to run this analysis of Baltimore’s new bus overhaul, for example.) They allow states and MPOs to analyze a metro area and produce detailed data to help them optimize their transportation networks and utilize all modes of transportation as well as understand the interaction between transportation investments and economic development.

States like Utah, Delaware and Virginia and the cities of Sacramento and Los Angeles are already utilizing this data and seeing results. But unfortunately, states and MPOs must pay for this more helpful accessibility data while the more limited congestion data is made readily available to them. This bill will start to change that by creating a pilot program that will 15 states and MPOs free access to the data, helping them make better use of their limited taxpayer dollars to bring the greatest benefits.

We recognize Representative Esty and her cosponsoring Reps. Barbara Comstock, Rodney Davis, and Dan Lipinski. Let your representatives know that you support this bill – urge them to cosponor the Transportation Access & System Connection (TASC) Act (HR 4241)