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Tag: transportation and infrastrustructure

Three ways reconciliation can restore funds taken from transit and equity

Nancy Pelosi speaking into a microphone with Chuck Schumer on her right, AFGE behind her
Nancy Pelosi speaking into a microphone with Chuck Schumer on her right, AFGE behind her
Image from Flickr/AFGE

With the bipartisan infrastructure deal approved by the Senate, opportunities to shift long-term transportation policy will shift to the House and to program implementation. The opportunity in the House is through targeted investments via the budget reconciliation bill that will accompany the House infrastructure bill vote.

(UPDATE 8/18: Clarified details on the passage of the Affordable Care Act)

After a strong five-year reauthorization proposal was approved by the House, the Senate transformed their reauthorization offering into a larger bipartisan infrastructure deal, funding everything from broadband to water infrastructure, which passed the Senate last week. This deal, which was crafted and passed in the Senate with the White House’s backing, doubled down on maintaining the status quo in regards to transportation policy, focusing on highway construction and expansion without incorporating maintenance of roads and bridges as the priority, improving transportation safety, and better connecting communities. 

Rep. Peter DeFazio criticized the deal, specifically citing the bill’s treatment of public transportation.

From Washington Post Live

Speaker Nancy Pelosi reportedly refused to approve the Senate’s deal, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act without the Senate first approving a sweeping budget reconciliation bill that focuses on strategic national investments across a broad spectrum of infrastructure concerns, including but not limited to agriculture, environment (air and water), education, first responders, and public health. The Senate granted her wish, passing a budget resolution, kicking off the reconciliation process, and this bill provides an opportunity to invest more in transit funding, including transit operations.

What is budget reconciliation?

As noted in the graphic below, the Senate budget resolution provides key directions to specific committees on both the House and Senate side on how to program the specific budget called for in the resolution. (Budget reconciliation is often used to pass more controversial or partisan legislation. For example, the final Affordable Care Act package resulted from the House passing the Senate’s healthcare bill and then amending it through the reconciliation process. However, reconciliation only happens once each year as part of the annual budget-making process.) The House will return next week, with respective committees deliberating how they will program and craft legislative text to the directives of the Senate’s budget resolution, before cobbling together the final reconciliation bill for passage in both chambers of Congress.

Diagram listing the steps of budget reconciliation
Image from Peter G. Peterson Foundation

As the respective committees in the House and Senate contemplate legislative text for the final reconciliation bill, there are key restrictions for what can be included. Unfortunately, introducing brand new policies or making major policy changes not connected directly to new funding are difficult if not impossible. 

As the graphic illustrates, any legislative text in the final reconciliation must pertain to policy that has budgetary impacts and stays within the programming directions and funding limits of the budget resolution.

Table showing changes that are permitted and not permitted in budget reconciliation
Image from Twitter/ House Budget GOP

As it pertains to transportation, the resolution allocates $60 billion to the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee to program as they deem prudent, while also adding unspoken pressure not to revisit items called for in the IIJA. The resolution also calls for an additional $30 billion for respective Senate committees focused on surface transportation to program accordingly.

Within those constraints in place for this reconciliation process, T4America has outlined three key investments that need to be made to better connect communities and improve equity and climate outcomes.

1. Increasing public transportation funding levels by $10 billion

The original bipartisan infrastructure framework, agreed to and announced by the President and the Senator’s part of the negotiations in June, called for $49 billion for transit. As the final IIJA was set, transit was the only part of the plan that took a cut (of $10 billion) from that original proposal, down to $39 billion. Less money for transit means greater challenges for transit agencies, for keeping transit running, and making the necessary capital investments, including transit electrification. There is much more that can be done to improve transit, but advocating simply for restoring the agreed funding amount is an easy fix within the limits of the budget resolution.

2. Increasing funding for the reconnecting communities program by $12 billion

President Biden’s American Jobs Plan (AJP) contained approximately $24 billion for reconnecting communities (tearing down highways that separate marginalized communities, reintegrating community mobility and streetscapes). The Senate’s deal slashed that program down to just $1 billion. (The House’s INVEST Act allocated $20 billion.) By restoring at least some of this program’s funding, meaningful progress can be made to reconnect and reinvest in diverse communities across the United States.

3. Increasing funding for zero-emission vehicles and charging infrastructure by $7.5 billion

Currently, transportation is responsible for a significant portion of climate change-inducing emissions, but emerging technologies are making it possible for reliable zero-emission vehicles (ZEVs). Meeting the moment with significant investments in ZEVs (especially medium and heavy duty vehicles such as transit, school bus, and municipal fleet vehicles) and their associated charging infrastructure will help drastically curb emissions. This funding would also involve investments in domestic manufacturing to help ramp up capacity and lower costs to deliver on ZEVs and their charging infrastructure.

While Congress is in recess and members are in their home districts, it is a great time for constituents to engage their members on these issues. Share these three simple, key investment priorities for reconciliation with your members of Congress, while explaining what these investments can mean in your local community in regards to jobs, equity, and climate change.

Senate takes aim at essential transit relief dollars to cover the cost of their infrastructure bill

woman in MTA subway carriage cleaning the ceiling
Image Source: Flickr/ MTA NYC

With the bipartisan infrastructure framework legislative text nearing a vote, unused transit COVID relief dollars have become a target for scrounging together enough money to pay for that deal’s cost. Our communities still need these funds—here’s why:

Most of the United States shut down last March 2020, as stay at home orders were enacted and many people were placed in remote work and school arrangements. However, our essential workers, including transit operators, continued to work on the frontlines. The CARES Act, Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriations (CRRSA) Act, and the American Rescue Plan provided vital funding to keep transit agencies and their communities moving. While overall ridership numbers drastically decreased, transit agencies continued to transport the essential workers who never stopped serving their communities every day through the pandemic. As our nation moves towards recovery, even amid growing concerns around the COVID-19 Delta variant, transit agencies will continue to need these funds to fully recover.

It will take a few years before transit ridership returns to pre-COVID levels. That is exactly why Congress allowed the American Rescue Plan’s transit relief funds to be available until 2024. While some agencies have fully exhausted all their relief funding, others have made plans to draw down those funds over time to avoid financial disaster. Taking this money away from transit agencies now, with so many political and public health unknowns, will put many of those agencies right back on the fiscal cliff Congress sought to avoid at the beginning of the year.

Here is what some transit agencies have spent their COVID money on:

Some transit agencies had the ability or need to fully utilize all of their COVID relief dollars while others have used different strategies to recover from stay at home orders. Why is that? Every transit agency’s financial flexibility is different. Many agencies pay for much of their operating costs through a combination of state and local taxes and fares. Many transit agencies moved to a fare free system in order to make drivers and operators safer by reducing interaction with riders. This decision to protect the public health of operators and riders had a strong impact on revenue. In addition, some parts of the country were hit harder than others by the economic downturn, greatly impacting the amount of taxes collected. Smaller agencies and larger agencies typically don’t depend on fare revenues to the same degree. 

The labor market for transit agencies has also been severely impacted by the pandemic. The ability to train and hire new operators while implementing social distancing guidance has become a challenge while traditional retirements and attrition rates continue. If Congress were to pull these funds, it would put an even greater strain on transit agencies’ ability to recruit and retain operators and staff—right at the time when ridership is going to start picking up once again.

Investment in transit is investment in people, our communities, and our economy. COVID relief dollars have been and continue to be a lifeline to transit agencies that serve our communities and will drive economic growth through recovery. Yanking those relief dollars at this juncture would be pulling the rug out from under these agencies, driving their operations to ruin, deteriorating and cutting mobility for millions of Americans, and stymying the recovery of many communities reliant on public transit.

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.

T4 America co-chair John Robert Smith tells key House subcommittee to repair infrastructure and invest in transit options

T4 America co-chair John Robert Smith encouraged members of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee to enact “bold new policy” to repair our nation’s crumbling infrastructure, increase transit options and demand accountability for results, in testimony delivered on Capitol Hill today.

Smith, the former 16-year Republican mayor of Meridian, Mississippi and President and CEO of Reconnecting America, was one of 40 transportation experts testifying before the Subcommittee on Highways and Transit this week.

Pointing to today’s release of our report assessing the condition of the nation’s bridges, Smith emphasized T4 America’s dual mission of repairing the infrastructure we have while building a transportation system for the 21st century.

He spoke about his own experience leading Meridian and seeing first-hand how improved transportation options improve quality of life in smaller cities and rural areas. “It may come as a surprise to some, but Americans who live in small towns have the same transportation needs as those that live in big cities,” Smith said. “They need access to their jobs, healthcare, education and services. Long commutes, rising gas prices, and shifting demographics all impact the prosperity of these communities and the people that live in them.”

During his tenure as mayor, Smith leveraged a mix of public and private investment to restore Meridian’s historic train station and build the South’s first multimodal transportation center. The station was “a catalyst for transforming our main street, increasing public transportation ridership, and helping to generate millions of dollars in private economic development in the surrounding neighborhoods,” he told the Subcommittee.

“Livability” has become a loaded and sadly partisan term in Congress, but as Smith pointed out, it describes something that really shouldn’t be controversial at all. He said:

When I came to Washington, D.C. almost two years ago, I realized as I heard this new word, livability, that that was just what we were doing in Meridian. The transit connections and ensuing economic development that occurred in my sixteen years as Mayor were empowering people to make decisions without being hindered by distance and gas prices.  You can put whatever label on it you want – but people should be able to live where they want to live, work where they want to work, and get there in a cost-efficient and timely manner.

Congress has the opportunity to heed Mayor Smith’s vision for repair, increased options and higher quality of life as the Subcommittee and full Committee consider a six-year, transportation reauthorization in the coming months.

You can read Mayor Smith’s entire testimony here.