investment Archives - Transportation For America

Would increasing federal transportation investment be enough to solve our problems?

Flickr photo by Paul Nicholson http://www.flickr.com/photos/paulnich/457162590/

Two mayors from very different cities penned a joint op-ed in the New York Times highlighting the need for Congress to pass a long-term transportation bill and raise new revenues to increase the United States’ overall investment in transportation infrastructure. But their strong piece begs another question: Would raising the level of federal investment be enough to meet our pressing local needs without some major policy changes and reforms to the federal transportation program?

A Republican from a red state mid-sized city and a Democrat from a blue state big city, Mayors Mick Cornett (Oklahoma City) and Bill De Blasio (New York City), teamed up to write an op-ed showing that mayors of all stripes agree: America needs to invest more in transportation to be competitive for the long term:

Working Americans pay the price of federal apathy. Those with little means have the fewest options; mass transit is often their only way to get around. Transit ridership is at record highs, with 10.8 billion trips in 2014. Meanwhile, in the 102 largest metropolitan regions, motorists take more than 200 million trips every day across deficient bridges. Freight volumes are expected to increase by 24 percent in the next seven years.

Federal investment has not kept pace with this demand, resulting in an outdated, overburdened surface transportation system that is ill equipped to handle current, let alone future, need. Spending on infrastructure in the United States has sunk to 1.7 percent of gross domestic product, a 20-year low.

And they rightly point out that, though many states and localities — including their own — have responded to the crisis by raising their own new revenues to invest, they still can’t do it alone.

This isn’t for want of local resources. Over the past decade, New York City has increased commitments to capital projects by 50 percent.In Oklahoma City, among the most politically conservative cities in the country, voters passed a temporary sales-tax increase in 2009 to build, among other projects, a $130 million streetcar line. The nearly eight-year program will raise $777 million, and it passed with 54 percent approval. There is an appetite among voters to fund these critical transit projects.

But we could not do it all on the local level even if we wanted to. In New York City, we cannot even deploy traffic cameras to catch speeding without Albany’s permission, let alone raise major revenue for transportation. Without a strong federal partner, the demands of maintaining infrastructure and preparing for future needs are beyond local means.

They end by urging “both parties to make a deal that will prevent our cities from becoming casualties of gridlock and impasse” by passing a multi-year transportation bill that raises current transportation spending over the 50 billion per year.

These are laudable sentiments that we heartily endorse across the board — strengthening the nation’s transportation fund and raising new revenues to invest is the very first point in our platform.

But is the only problem — especially for the leaders of America’s cities and towns of all sizes — that we’re not investing enough, or also that current revenues aren’t being strategically directed to the most pressing needs in our communities?

We’ve spoken to plenty of mayors and other local officials that have made it clear that the current method of doling out federal funds just isn’t cutting it. State politics continue to drive infrastructure projects and local leaders rarely have a seat at the table to help make decisions about where to spend the money. A little (or a lot) more money funneled through the current federal transportation program isn’t going to solve that problem.

As the American Association of Chamber Executive wrote to Congress two months ago:

Innovation is happening at the local level and yet our local decision makers don’t have enough of the tools, and control less than 10 percent of the funding, which limit the ability to advance key projects that can grow the economies in communities big and small.

These two mayors are writing while representing a bipartisan coalition of mayors, and it can always be tough to stake out a position that everyone can endorse. But many of these undersigned mayors might also agree that they’d like to have a little more control and say over the process of where and how federal transportation dollars get spent in their communities. Just spending more than the status quo isn’t going to bring our communities the kind of economic prosperity that we’re all seeking.

We need to find ways to give the local communities represented by these mayors and many more increased access to federal funds. And we should be rewarding the communities that take action to address their own needs — such as raising local revenues as referenced in the editorial — with opportunities for additional funding.

The Innovation in Surface Transportation Act would be a great place to start, as would instituting reforms to ensure that we prioritize repair and invest our dollars in the projects that have the greatest bang for the buck.

With public confidence in government at low levels, it’s more important than ever to quantify the public benefits of transportation investment and let voters know what their money is going to buy — especially when attempts are being made to raise any new money for transportation to fill the gap.

CBO: Highway Trust Fund hole even deeper than expected

New revenue projections for the Highway Trust Fund released this week from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) show that, not only is the nation’s transportation fund going in the red sooner than expected, but the gap to maintain promised funding levels has increased by about $5 billion.

On Tuesday, CBO released its biannual projections of the Highway Trust Fund as part of their much larger “Budget and Economic Outlook: 2014 to 2024.”

The gloomy news from the CBO report is twofold: (1) The “transportation fiscal cliff” is likely to come before the end of September; and (2) fully funding MAP-21 for another year after it expires this September is projected to now require $19 billion — $5 billion more than originally thought.

Though the news from CBO is worse than many in DC expected, the bottom line hasn’t changed: If Congress doesn’t act sometime in the next eight months, nearly all of the federal transportation program will be halted in fiscal year 2015.

Specifically, the CBO report estimates the Highway Account of the Trust Fund will run out of cash to pay for day-to-day operations before the expiration of MAP-21 on September 30th. This is due in part to the fact that the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) is supposed to reimburse states every business day, but gas tax receipts are deposited in the Trust Fund only twice a month. The uncertainty between gas tax receipts and cash outlays will require FHWA to slow payments to states and/or pay smaller sums should Congress not address the “transportation fiscal cliff” in a timely manner.

These forced actions by FHWA will result in states and local communities stopping investments in transportation projects that are critical to their long-term economic development. As a result, communities across the country that are raising their own taxes and hoping for a strong federal partner to support their efforts might have to shelve their ambitious plans.

Looking past the expiration of MAP-21 this September and into the future, the CBO report also gives us a sobering picture of just how much additional transportation revenue is needed to move forward. To fund a six-year authorization bill at the same spending levels as MAP-21, the trust fund needs an additional $100 billion in tax receipts or, however unlikely, transfers from the general fund for the fiscal period from 2015 to 2020. To fund a two-year bill similar to MAP-21 would require an additional $35 billion more than the trust fund currently brings in.

This picture won’t magically get any better, either. Inflation marches on and cars will continue using less and less gas. The roughly $39 billion of incoming gas tax revenues of today aren’t projected to grow a dime ten years from now, and many intelligent people think this projection could be too rosy, considering that the previously mentioned shifts in fuel efficiency and driving habits are expected to persist.

We absolutely must invest more money in America’s transportation system, and Transportation for America’s alliance of elected, business and civic leaders are working to move Congress toward timely action on this vital issue. Please read Transportation for America’s plan for an increase in federal transportation funding that rewards smart, locally driven transportation projects and guarantees local communities get the money they need to fix an aging system while also building the new infrastructure their economies depend on.

Ensuring economic prosperity for the future by investing in transportation

We’ve fallen behind the world on investing in transportation and our physical infrastructure, but Building America’s Future lays out a clear path forward to help restore America’s prominence and lay a strong foundation for our economic future.

Falling Apart and Falling Behind lays out the economic challenges posed by our ailing infrastructure, provides a comparative look at the smart investments being made by our international competitors, and suggests a series of recommendations for crafting new innovative transportation policies in the U.S. This report frames the state of our infrastructure in terms of the new economic realities of the 21st-century economy and presents the challenges we currently face.

America’s railroads — once the fastest and most comprehensive in the world — opened up the interior of the country but America truly forged its status as a world economic superpower in the decades following World War II as our booming country awash with wealth embarked upon building new infrastructure, airports and an interstate system that was the envy of the world.

There was a time when we led the world in the very real physical infrastructure that drives economic success in our cities and states but those days are behind us as we’re failing not only to build the next generation of transportation systems, but failing to even properly maintain our past investments to ensure they continue serving us and our economy.

The last great vision for transportation our country rallied behind was a national interstate system laid out in the 1950s, but we’ve been rudderless for the last 20 years since completing that system with no grand vision. While we’ve been treading water and spinning our wheels, other countries have been investing the kind of money we once did in their transportation systems, positioning them to succeed for years to come.

This report from BAF is a concise summary of the problem we face and the perhaps obvious solution staring us in the face: If we want to continue leading the world in economic dominance, we’ve got to lead the world in investing in our transportation networks — and casting a vision for the next 50 years of investment.

Read the report here, and you can see an interview with two of the BAF co-chairs, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Governor Ed Rendell yesterday on MSNBC’s Morning Joe.

Americans want Congress to ‘fix it first’, invest in and improve our transportation system

I-5 Repair Originally uploaded by WSDOT to Flickr.

In the midst of the fervor about the House’s budget resolution for 2011 released Friday, and the President’s budget proposal for 2012 dominating the news today, a new bipartisan poll from the Rockefeller Foundation contains compelling arguments from a majority of Americans in favor of increased and accountable investment in transportation.

The poll shows unequivocally that voters from across the political spectrum are tired of bickering and want Congress to seek compromise. And almost nowhere else is their desire for cooperation and solutions greater than with the issue of transportation infrastructure.

Americans largely see investments in transportation as a way to improve the economy and make communities safer, while improving the quality of life for more people. They clearly see a need for reform when it comes to paying for and choosing the transportation projects we need, according to the results.

This poll shows that we believe strongly that providing a safe transportation systems that works is a primary role of our government, and that it should be above partisan divisions, more than most other issues. The Administration’s budget proposal, released this morning, also delivers on the desire reflected in the poll to prioritize the maintenance of what we’ve already built, and for giving local communities more say in how they solve their transportation issues and build for the future.

It’s fitting that the release of this poll is sandwiched between the House’s 2011 plan to gut transportation spending and the Administration’s 2012 plan to invest more money in transportation (within a budget laced with overall cuts). This poll makes it abundantly clear that the House 2011 budget resolution – which would cut support for communities that want better public transportation and safer streets — is at dramatic odds with the desires of a majority of Americans.

Here are some of the detailed top-line findings from the poll:

Should Congress find some way to work together on the issue of transportation? 71 percent of voters say there should be common ground on this issue — higher than other major issues — while 19 percent say leaders should hold fast to their positions, which is lower than other major issues.

The connection between investing and building the economy: Four in five (80 percent) voters agree that federal funding to improve and modernize transportation “will boost local economies and create millions of jobs from construction to manufacturing to engineering.” Just 19 percent disagree with this. 79 percent agree that “in order for the United States to remain the world’s top economic superpower, we need to modernize our transportation infrastructure and keep it up to date.” Only 19 percent disagree.

What should greater investment on transportation net us in the end? What would the benefits be? Voters’ top goal by far is “safer streets for our communities and children.” 57 percent say this should be one of the top-two priorities if more money is invested in infrastructure. The second-highest priority for voters overall (32 percent) is “more transportation options.” In addition, 85 percent agree that “spending less time in traffic would improve quality of life, make communities safer, and reduce stress in people’s daily lives.” Moreover, the vast majority also believe the country (80 percent) and their own community (66 percent) would benefit from an expanded and improved public transportation system.

What should we change about how we invest money in transportation? Two-thirds of respondents favored 9 of 10 reforms offered, with 90 percent supporting more accountability and certification that projects are delivered on time and fit into a national plan. Among the specific reforms to the system that were proposed, 86 percent supported a “fix it first” policy that focuses on maintaining existing transportation systems before building new ones.

This poll was conducted by two Republican and Democratic polling firms from Jan. 29-Feb 6 2011. Disclosure: T4 America is a grantee of the Rockefeller Foundation.

More infrastructure investment will create jobs, boost economy, according to Treasury Sec. Geithner

U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner hammered on the job-creation and economy-boosting effects of the Obama administration’s plan for infrastructure investment in a blog post on the department’s website.

Writing the same day Vice President Biden and Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood were in Philadelphia promoting a $53 billion, 6-year passenger rail package, Geithner argued that investing in our nation’s roads, bridges, rail and transit systems creates “both immediate and long-term economic benefits.”

Treasury Department analysis reveals an unemployment rate among American workers building infrastructure at 15 percent, significantly higher than the national average. Investing in infrastructure would create jobs in construction, manufacturing and retail trade, all sectors hard hit by the economic downturn, and nine out of ten jobs created would pay middle-class wages.

Geithner emphasized the administration’s commitment to spending federal dollars in a targeted and fiscally responsible way, writing: “our strategy is designed to make crucial investments in infrastructure while bringing our deficits down to sustainable levels.”

Simply increasing spending levels is unacceptable, Geither wrote, adding “we must also reform the ways in which we invest.” He continued:

Not all infrastructure investments are good investments, and too often we have seen transportation projects exemplify the worst of Washington – the bridges to nowhere that rightly make American taxpayers cringe. The President’s Budget recognizes this and will make some difficult choices, proposing significant spending cuts, including to some programs we would preserve in better times.

President Obama’s plan includes a National Infrastructure Bank, which would “select projects on the basis of rigorous analysis,” Geithner explained. The Bank would evaluate and fund projects that generate the best return on investment, leverage private capital to do it and promote increased transportation options along the way. House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee chairman John Mica, a key player in Congress, has cited securing private capital for projects as a key priority for federal transportation spending.

Infrastructure investment benefits all Americans, even in ways we do not always think about. Upgrades and additions to the New York City subway system allow millions to “get to work faster, increasing their productivity and quality of life by decreasing the amount of time lost to commuting,” Geithner notes. But it also means that “the far-away Kawasaki plant in Lincoln, Nebraska that manufactures the subway cars will increase production, putting Nebraskans to work.”

You can read Secretary Geithner’s entire post here.

Photo: Washington Post