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Senate budget restores some sanity to transportation programs

Just a few weeks after Rep. Paul Ryan released his House budget that proposed cutting or eliminating many important transportation programs, the key Senate committee’s budget for transportation (and housing) for next year contains some good news. Thanks to all of you who sent emails last week to your Senators on the committee!

TIGER, one of the most important programs that communities depend on to fund innovative local transportation projects, was well funded after the House proposal totally eliminated it in their budget.

Whether repairing a pair of deficient bridges that connect two communities in Michigan, extending transit service into an underserved area in Orlando, improving a busy rail crossroads in Texas to move freight faster cross-country, or bringing different modes of transportation together under a brand new roof in Moline, Illinois, the competitive TIGER grant program has been a huge boon to more than 130 communities, funding many innovative projects that often have a hard time getting funding from the state DOT or federal formulas.

New Starts, the small, oversubscribed program that funds almost all new transit construction across the country, was funded at a little more than $2 billion after being also totally eliminated by the House. It’s a prudent move: transit usage is booming across the country while vehicle miles traveled peaked a few years ago and has been slowly declining ever since — especially among people under age 34.

And the small but very influential Partnership for Sustainable Communities was funded again after receiving no funding last year. This program brings together the federal environmental, housing and transportation agencies to make decisions in concert and make small grants to communities that want to engage in better planning to ensure that their communities become or remain great places to live.

This doesn’t mean that the fight is over for this year — this budget will still have to be reconciled with the House, which is no easy feat. And we’ll have a battle at that point once more. It’s been tougher and tougher in the last few years to pass actual budgets for these individual programs. This year will be no different, especially heading into an election this fall.

The full list of notable programs and their funding levels:

  • Highways: $39.1 billion.
  • Transit: The summary doesn’t explicitly give an amount but it’s fairly safe to assume that it’s $8.4 billion, in line with MAP-21 levels, just as the above funding for highways matches MAP-21.
  • TIGER: $500 million
  • New Starts: $2.05 billion. This is the core program that funds construction of new and expanded transit systems.
  • Amtrak: $1.45 billion
  • Passenger Rail Grants: $100 million
  • Partnership for Sustainable Communities: $50 million

Are you confused about the difference between the long-term transportation bill and these yearly budget battles? In short, it’s the difference between “authorizations” and “appropriations.”  The multi-year transportation bill is an authorization, which means the policy is put on paper and the targeted overall funding amounts are determined. We are still working to see that multi-year bill passed with important policy reforms. But in the meantime as we roll along under extension after extension of the old law, it’s still up to appropriators in the House and Senate each year to decide how much money to actually spend on transportation —especially how to divvy up the discretionary money between different programs, like Amtrak, TIGER grants, or high-speed rail, just to name a few.

Transit and TIGER funding preserved in compromise spending bill

Leading negotiators in the House and Senate released a compromise spending bill to fund the U.S. Department of Transportation, alongside several other departments, through the end of the current fiscal year in September 2012. The measure is known as a “minibus” because it collapses several appropriations bills into one package,

The conference agreement between the two chambers preserves funding for transit and the innovative TIGER grants program, while zeroing out high-speed rail. The Federal Transit Administration is provided a total of $10.608 billion. Amtrak, with $466 million for operating and $952 million for capital, would be funded at a level lower than what the Senate requested but higher than the House-proposed amount. But Amtrak did receive more capital funding than either the House or Senate originally proposed.

$500 million for TIGER constitutes a 5.1 percent cut from current levels, but is a significant improvement over the House proposal to eliminate the program entirely. Every round of grant applications for TIGER has yielded far more interest from communities that USDOT has been able to accommodate, and the program rewards projects that meet local needs. Streetsblog is reporting that the third round of TIGER applications outstrips the available grant amount by 27 to 1.

The New Starts program receives $1.95 billion. New Starts is a key funding source for transit projects across the country, particularly in large metropolitan areas. The WMATA transit system in Washington, DC gets $150 million.

Traditional highway funding under the Federal Highway Administration is funded slightly below current levels, with $39.143 billion.

In a disappointing move, negotiators did not include funding for Partnership for Sustainable Communities grants. The partnership is a joint venture between USDOT, the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. While no new grants will be awarded under this agreement, the office will remain open and negotiators notably refused to include House-proposed language that would have disallowed the three departments from working collaboratively.

Both chambers will need to pass the “minibus” agreement by Friday to avoid a government shutdown. With bipartisan sign-off on these funding levels, passage is almost assured.

Check out the chart below, which compares the 2010 budget, 2011 budget and the House/Senate proposals that got us to the proposed 2012 budget.

Federal Transportation, Housing and Urban Development Budget: Highlighted transportation and sustainable communities programs.

Program 2010 Budget 2011 Budget House 2012 Proposal Senate 2012 Proposal Final 2012 Budget Difference: 2012 vs 2011
Federal-Aid Highways ~$42B $41.1B $27.7B $41.1 B (FY 2011 enacted) $39.14 B (equal to MAP-21) —$2.B
Transit Formula Grants ~$8.3B $8.34B $5.2 $8.36B $8.36 B +$20M
High Speed Rail $2.5B $0 $0 $100M $0 —
TIGER $600M $527M $0 $550M $500M —$27M
Partnership for Sustainable Communities Grants $150M $100M $0 $90M $0 —$100M
Amtrak Capital $1.002B $922M $898M $937M $952M +30M
Amtrak Operating $563M $562M $227M $544M 466M —$97M
Transit ‘New Starts’ $2.0B $1.6B $1.55B $1.955B $1.955B +$355M
TIGGER (energy efficiency grants for transit agencies) $75M $50M $0M $25M $0 —$50M

House appropriators make deep cuts to transportation for 2012

The House Appropriations Committee released their draft bill for 2012 spending in the transportation program, and the cuts are severe, with some key programs facing more of a reduction than others.

The Transportation, Housing and Urban Development spending bill, or THUD, as its called, contained similar cuts for transit and road/bridge spending that we saw in Rep. Ryan’s budget earlier this year. Transit and highway spending both get cut proportionally, around 34 percent.

While cuts are proportional in those main two areas, other areas and innovative programs face deeper cuts.The innovative TIGER grants, TIGGER grants and high-speed rail programs are cut entirely.

The New Starts transit program, which essentially funds all new transit system construction, gets cut to $1.55 billion down from $2 billion in FY10. In addition, a policy tweak is made that requires state or local funds to make up more than 50 percent of any new grant agreements. Or put another way, the feds will no longer cover more than half of any New Starts transit project, exacerbating an existing gap between the share the government will pay for transit vs. highway projects. (Highway projects get around 80 percent of their funds from the federal government.)

Existing passenger rail service faces deep cuts of its own. Amtrak’s capital budget (new rolling stock, new lines, equipment, etc.) is cut by $24 million, but the operations budget is where Amtrak takes a big hit, going from $563 million to $227 million. On top of that, an important policy change will prevent Amtrak from using any of their operating funds on state-supported lines — lines where a state has partnered with Amtrak to increase passenger rail service and ridership. To put that change in perspective, in 2010 9 million rides were taken on state-supported routes.


Amtrak State-Supported routes, from the T&I Committee “A New Direction” report (pdf).

Another notable policy change is for the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The bill prohibits HUD from using any funding for anything related to the Sustainable Communities Partnership with DOT and the EPA. Essentially, this bill would require HUD to stop coordinating with the other two agencies and go back to the outdated siloed approach on housing, ignoring the effects on and the impacts of transportation and the environment.

The silver lining is that it’s unlikely that this appropriations bill will make it through the full process to passage anytime soon. Instead, Congress will likely pass a continuing resolution (CR) before September 30 to stop the government from shutting down — which means at least for a while, the 2012 funding levels could be more in line with last year’s levels, preventing some of these cuts. Whether it passes or not, it’s important to note that this is the House appropriators opening position on transportation funding for next year.

Here’s a full list with details on the cuts.

  • Cuts highway funding from ~$41B to $27B
  • Cuts transit funding (excluding New Starts) from $8.3B to $5.3B
  • Cuts New Starts from $1.6B to $1.55B and requires that any new grant agreement include at least at 50% non-federal share; Note, FY10 New Starts funding was $2B, separate cuts were made last year.
  • Includes funding for Washington’s Metro system – $150M
  • No funding for TIGER, HSR, or TIGGER (transit energy efficiency grants)
  • Prohibits any new RRIF (a loan program like TIFIA for rail projects) loans or loan guarantees.
  • Cuts Amtrak capital funding from $922M to $898M; FY10 funding was $1,002M
  • Cuts Amtrak operating funding from $563M to $227M

Proposed budget would gut transit spending, passenger rail funding

Sound Transit underground Originally uploaded by Transportation for America to Flickr.
A Seattle Sound transit light rail car moves through a tunnel south of downtown. Sound Transit’s new line was funded in part by the federal New Starts transit program.

The budget proposal from the Republican Study Committee, which consists of 165 of the 242 GOP House members, released a week or so ago, calls for completely eliminating the main federal transit program, zeroes out Amtrak, cuts all funding for the metro system in the nation’s capital and slashes $2.5 billion in high-speed rail grants.

This shortsighted proposal would derail with uncanny precision exactly the kind of investments that are most critical for creating jobs and developing a 21st Century transportation infrastructure. And as far as transportation spending goes, these are some of the investments that create the most jobs per dollar spent.

The proposal eliminates New Starts, the transportation program that funds all new transit projects in the country, and slashes high-speed rail funding — the same program touted by President Obama to great fanfare in last week’s State of the Union.

It even chops all federal funding for Washington DC’s transit authority, the very transit system that these legislators’ staff and neighbors rely on every day to get to and from work.

This budget is a trial-balloon for the budget fight to come. We need to waste no time making it clear that these kinds of cuts are short-sighted and unacceptable.

Sign our petition objecting to this assault on public transportation funding. We’ll deliver the petition with your signature along with a letter from us and our partners to lawmakers. (Are you a T4 America partner who wants to sign your org onto the letter? Contact Heather Brutz for more info.)

The lawmakers who crafted this budget clearly aren’t aware that millions of Americans — including their own constituents — rely on passenger rail and the types of transit projects these programs fund.

These are also the very projects that pay some of the most far-reaching economic dividends. Study after study has shown that every dollar spent on public transportation generates more jobs than any other form of transportation spending. This proposed budget cuts the investments that create the most jobs – an especially poor decision in the face of a recovering economy.

We can keep this proposal from becoming law if we speak up now and make it clear that Americans aren’t going to sit by as federal investments in transit are gutted.

Sign our petition to protect federal support for transportation and jobs!

Feds announce change to consider livability in funding transit projects

TriMet MAX on the Transit Mall Originally uploaded by paulkimo90
From the Transportation for America Flickr group.

Following through on a policy change hinted at for much of 2009, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood announced this morning that federal transit officials would begin considering expanded criteria as they select which transit projects to fund, bringing a new focus on improving livability and sustainability.

At the Transportation Research Board’s annual conference this morning, Secretary LaHood made it clear that a wider range of positive benefits would be considered in the application process for new transit lines or systems. These applications were being unfairly burdened by the previous administration’s cost-effectiveness measurement, which left out such benefits as energy efficiency, economic development and reduced emissions.

“Our new policy for selecting major transit projects will work to promote livability rather than hinder it,” he said. “We want to base our decisions on how much transit helps the environment, how much it improves development opportunities and how it makes our communities better places to live.”

Of course, the one problem that this will not fix is the very high demand for a limited supply of New Starts funding. Even under the old narrow rules for winning approval, only a small percentage of the many applicants were receiving limited funding, and even then, the federal government was only matching about half of local funds, compared with at least 80 percent for road projects.

Still, this change is keeping in line with the positive reforms contained in Chairman Jim Oberstar’s draft reauthorization bill released back in the summer. In June, we quoted the bill’s section on New Starts reform, noting that the proposal to remove the cost-effectiveness requirement and include other “livability” criteria “equalizes the treatment of proposed transit projects and elevates the importance of the benefits that will occur in the community once the project is built.”

The Obama administration and all the leaders at USDOT and the Federal Transit Administration are to be praised for their leadership in changing this program for the better. The next step is securing a greater share of funds for public transportation in the upcoming reauthorization and improving federal match rates to equalize the choices state or regional leaders face between new highways and new transit lines.

Update: Chairman Oberstar responded with a statement of his own praising the change, also observing that New Starts needs greater funding to meet the overwhelming demand. “Now we need increased investment dollars to follow this reform, so that we can move forward with transit projects that relieve congestion, reduce emissions, increase our energy independence, and promote more livable communities across the country,” he said. (From Elana Schor’s post on Streetsblog Capitol Hill)

What does Oberstar’s proposal do for the New Starts transit program?

MetroRail, Preston Station, Downtown Houston Originally uploaded by euthman
Riders wait for the train at a stop on Houston’s new light rail line

Americans are taking the train (and the bus) like never before, and public transportation ridership reached its highest level in more than 50 years in 2008. More than 25 new light rail or streetcar systems have opened in the last 30 years, and communities across the country are looking to relieve congestion, spur urban development, and provide their residents with more options for getting around.

In the last two years, new light rail lines have opened in what might be considered the unlikely locales of Phoenix, Arizona, Houston, Texas, and Charlotte, North Carolina. According to numbers from Reconnecting America, the newly-opened Hiawatha Line in Minneapolis and the Red Line in Houston outperformed their ridership projections 15 years ahead of schedule.

What’s clear from these examples is that cities of all sizes are looking to meet the burgeoning demand for quality public transportation service. Of course, with Chairman James Oberstar’s 90-page proposal for the next transportation bill coming out this morning from the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, we are left with an important question — how would these current or future transit systems fare under his proposed program?

Getting approval for New and Small Starts — two federal programs that distribute funds for the construction of transit capital projects — has become a cumbersome process, taking an average of 10 years for transit projects to move through planning and design phases to receive a grant.

Under the previous administration, the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) began unduly weighting cost-effectiveness (CEI) — or how much travel time was saved per dollar spent — as the primary factor when considering which projects to fund. As Oberstar’s proposal states, this method has given “inadequate consideration to other important benefits that new transit projects bring to communities.” Benefits such as economic development spurred by new transit lines, increased access to jobs and housing, reduced emissions and energy consumption per capita and the efficient land use and walkable neighborhoods that often result from new transit investments have been swept aside in favor of this “cost effectiveness” metric.

Chairman Oberstar’s proposal for the transportation bill contains some proposed revisions to the New/Small Starts program that could speed up the approval process and make sure that all of the benefits of new public transportation service are considered.

Oberstar’s proposal contains two key reforms: The first would streamline the program application and approval process by eliminating overly burdensome steps and paperwork. (p.43) And perhaps more importantly, his second proposal “equalizes the treatment of proposed transit projects and elevates the importance of the benefits that will occur in the community once the project is built.” This essentially means that the other positive benefits from transit would be considered when deciding what projects to fund.

Underneath that recommendation in the proposal is a list of some new requirements that could even the playing field and broaden the range of grants given out to new transit projects. Here are three notable ones:

  • Require the FTA to consider all benefits of proposed projects in relation to the proposed Federal investment level.
  • Eliminate the requirement that projects be rated based on “cost-effectiveness,” which considers time savings to users as the only benefit of projects.
  • Require FTA to weigh all benefits comparably, including economic development, energy savings, increased mobility and access, and congestion relief.

Hopefully, these two reforms would streamline the New & Small Starts process and ensure that the federal governments considers more of the benefits that transit brings to communities when deciding which projects to fund. But the details in the full bill will be key. The outline lacks some concrete information on how much focus will be placed on creating transit-oriented development and affordable housing — both of which can help boost ridership numbers and cost-effectiveness. If we want to accurately account for all potential benefits of transit investments, T4 America believes that we need to link development, housing and public transportation to reflect the deep connection between these issues.

Schumer amendment in Senate could boost transit funding

Take Action! Write your Senator!

UPDATED: Sen. Schumer has the release posted on his web site now. Copy updated to reflect that below. Coverage of the Grand Central press conference today from Bloomberg News

Sen. Chuck Schumer and fellow New York Congressman Rep. Jerrold Nadler released a statement today detailing Sen. Schumer’s amendment to increase funding for transit in that chamber’s version of the economic recovery package. (Rep. Nadler authored the amendment that passed the House last week.)

Sen. Schumer’s amendment would boost transit funding from $8.4 billion up to $14.9 billion, with additions to the vital program (New Starts) that would provide funding for new, ready-to-go transit projects across the country. Currently, the House version has $2.5 billion for New Starts, where the Senate version has zero. This amendment would correct this imbalance, while also boosting the overall amount for transit.

You can read the full release here. An excerpt:

“Last week, we scored a major victory in Washington, as the House of Representatives approved my amendment to increase transit funds in the stimulus bill by $3 billion, bringing the total amount of transit dollars in the package from 9 billion to 12 billion. This additional funding would mean hundreds of millions more in transit money for New York, creating thousands of local jobs, protecting our environment through green projects, and improving public transportation across the region. These funds would go a tremendous distance toward stemming the advance of our deepening economic recession. And now, with the support of Senator Schumer in the Senate, we have taken one great step closer to realizing this essential goal.”

Schumer’s amendment would boost funding in the Senate version of the stimulus package by $6.5 billion, from $8.4 billion currently in the bill to $14.9 billion. Specifically, Schumer’s amendment would increase funding in the transit capital pot from $8.4 billion to 10.4 billion, add $2 billion for rail modifications, and $2.5 billion for New Starts. The last two funding increases would match funding in the House bill.

Contact your Senator today to send a message. Tell them to support increased transit funding — and Sen. Schumer’s amendment — in the Senate package.

Let them know that this is exactly the kind of spending you want to see in the stimulus package — spending that can boost the economy while investing in long-lasting infrastructure that will help us meet our national goals of improved infrastructure, less oil dependence, and lower emissions.

You can check back here or with Streetsblog NYC for more breaking news on the Schumer amendment and transit funding in the Senate bill.