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BUILDing a better competitive grant program, in 5 steps

Under President Trump, USDOT has hijacked the TIGER/BUILD competitive grant program, taking it far from its intended function. After a decade of experience with the program there are a number of simple steps that lawmakers could take to get it back on track and even improve it.


This is the second post in a series about the BUILD program. Learn more about the Trump administration’s dramatic changes to the BUILD program in the first post. Read the third post or download the full analysis. 

The BUILD program’s greatest strengths lie in its differences from other federal transportation funding programs, which should be reinforced, rather than diminished in order to award funding to the same kind of projects as core federal transportation programs. BUILD has the potential to continue to fund great projects only if Congress stays diligent and ensures that USDOT executes the program as intended. BUILD is not a roads program, it is not a rural funding program, and it is not another vehicle for funneling more money without any accountability to state DOTs.

Recommendations to improve BUILD

1. Eliminate the $25 million cap on awards.

Even though the program is now larger (average of $967 million during the Trump administration) than it was in most years of the Obama administration ($596 million per year on average), the most recent appropriations bill included a $25 million cap on BUILD grant awards. This has the unintended consequence of making it more difficult to advance innovative, multimodal, and far more transformative or nationally significant projects. For such projects, $25 million simply isn’t enough.1

The maximum award of $25 million was an informal practice established by USDOT early on when the program was funded at substantially lower levels, in order to help them equitably distribute a small amount of funds across the country, as mandated by Congress. However, with Congress providing larger amounts of funding for BUILD, this unnecessary cap serves only to limit the program’s ability to support larger projects that also bring more benefits.

2. Award planning grants, particularly for transit-oriented development and transit projects.

While recent appropriations bills have made planning grants eligible for funding, no such grants have been awarded. Many local communities desire investments in transit, transit-oriented development, and other multimodal infrastructure, but lack the resources or expertise to adequately plan for such investments.

Congress authorized planning grants within TIGER/BUILD four times—in 2010, 2014, 2018, and again in 2019, and USDOT awarded a combined 64 planning grants in 2010 and 2014. These grants helped local communities advance projects that were ultimately funded by a subsequent TIGER/BUILD construction grant, or other sources. For example, the 2014 funding of the San Francisco Bay Area Core Capacity Transit Study helped enable the advancement of the Transbay Corridor Core Capacity project in the federal transit capital program. In Indiana, another 2014 planning grant helped locals to advance the Red Line BRT project which also successfully received funds from the transit capital program and is currently under construction.

Innovative projects can struggle to get off the ground because transportation agencies can be hesitant to spend money on planning a project if there isn’t going to be any funding available to build it. But a program like BUILD can’t cover the capital costs of a project if no basic planning has been done. That’s why these BUILD planning funds are so important. USDOT should use its authority to make planning awards where appropriate, and Congress should also encourage USDOT to use this authority as well.

3. Strengthen requirements for modal parity.

This administration has made a dramatic shift to use the BUILD program to fund traditional road projects which can already be easily funded without restriction through a variety of conventional federal programs. This misuse of the program should prompt Congress to strengthen requirements to allocate funding to multimodal projects, including transit and passenger rail. Alternatively, Congress should consider dedicating more trust fund money to these modes if BUILD funding is not going to be made available to them.

4. Require a more equitable urban/rural funding split.

Congress should make clear that a more equitable urban-rural split is appropriate and provide more clear guidance to USDOT about how they are expected to consider the needs of both urban and rural America. Currently, USDOT awards grants to either urban or rural projects, with a set-aside for rural projects. This creates a false choice between the two.

For example, the CREATE project in Illinois, which will relieve freight rail bottlenecks and allow goods to more easily move to market through the country, is considered an “urban” project. This, despite the fact that about 25 percent of rail traffic in the United States travels through the Chicago region, and farmers and businesses from rural areas will benefit from reduced freight congestion. The benefits of an urban or rural project are not limited only to the jurisdiction where construction will take place. USDOT should consider the full impact of a project, on both urban and rural areas when determining a projects classification.

5. Authorize the BUILD program in long-term transportation policy.

The TIGER/BUILD program stands out as the only major federal transportation program that has not been authorized by the FAST Act and previous authorizing legislation, leaving its fate in limbo each year. While Congress has continued to fund it through the annual appropriations process, authorizing the program over multiple years at $1.5 billion annually would provide some certainty to potential applicants and allow Congress to establish more policy guardrails to ensure it operates as intended.

Many of these recommendations currently have support in Congress. In particular, 20 members of Congress recently signed a letter led by Representative Mark DeSaulnier (CA-11) to USDOT expressing concern about how they have been facilitating the BUILD program. That letter endorsed some of these recommendations.

The BUILD program has long been a bipartisan winner because it is so flexible. It gives communities a unique opportunity (and in some cases the only opportunity) to win direct federal assistance for a priority transportation project that would otherwise be hard or impossible to fund. However, the dramatic shift in focus underway at USDOT seriously undermines the utility of the program by directing dollars away from innovative, multimodal projects and instead heavily favoring conventional road projects that can already be more easily funded.

The recommendations above will help Congress keep TIGER roaring (or BUILD building) as the program enters its second decade.

Up next, lessons from the past 10 years of TIGER/BUILD that should inform federal transportation policy at large. Read the final post or download the full analysis.

Sean Doyle was the primary author of this report for Transportation for America, with contributions from Beth Osborne, Scott Goldstein, Jordan Chafetz, and Stephen Lee Davis.

Taming the TIGER: Trump turns innovative grant program into another roads program

Under President Trump, the U.S. Department of Transportation has effectively turned the formerly innovative BUILD program—created to advance complex, hard-to-fund projects—into little more than a rural roads program, dramatically undercutting both its intent and utility.

Following this week’s announcement of an 11th round in BUILD competitive grants ($900 million) available to almost any public entity for transportation projects, Transportation for America is releasing this new comparative and constructive critique of USDOT’s BUILD program (formerly known as TIGER) in three parts. Up first today, what we found after examining ten years of awards. Read the second post in the series or download the full analysis.

The Better Utilizing Investments to Leverage Development (BUILD) program has been one of the most popular and impactful transportation programs in the federal arsenal. Conceived during the first few months of the Obama administration at the height of the financial crisis in 2009, the program originally bore the name TIGER: Transportation Investments Generating Economic Recovery.

This unique program was powerful precisely because of how it differed from most other federal transportation programs.

The program is uniquely popular because of its flexibility.
Funds can be awarded to any public entity—like a city government, public university, or tribal government—and can fund almost any kind of transportation project—roads, bridges, transit, freight, ports, bike, pedestrian, or any combination—in a wide variety of contexts. Given that most federal transportation programs award funding to state DOTs and restrict funding to one particular mode, the BUILD program has provided a much needed avenue for local entities to finance multimodal or complicated projects that cross numerous jurisdictional lines.

The program’s competition resulted in projects with greater benefits.
Unlike nearly all federal transportation dollars that are awarded automatically by formulas based on population, lane-miles, or other simple criteria, USDOT receives, scores, and awards BUILD funding based on the extent to which projects improve safety, state of repair, economic competitiveness, quality of life, and environmental sustainability. If you have a great project that’s multimodal, crosses city lines, and includes multiple partners, BUILD is an opportunity to fund it—and often the only way to do so with direct federal resources. Over the 10 rounds of the program so far, USDOT received more than 8,443 applications from all 50 states and U.S. territories requesting more than $156 billion in funding.2

The program encouraged more non-federal investment in transportation.
Since 2009, the program has awarded nearly $7.1 billion to 554 projects across the nation, leveraging billions more in non-BUILD funding. Over the first eight rounds, on average, projects attracted more than 3.6 additional, non-federal dollars for every TIGER grant dollar.

The focus has shifted since the Trump administration took over the program

A program which once heavily funded multimodal, transformative projects of regional and national significance which would otherwise be difficult to fund is now focused on expanding road capacity with an extreme bias for projects in rural areas. By comparing the projects selected for funding over the last 10 years and their level of funding, we identified four dramatic shifts in the program.

More roads, less multimodal

In the two most recent rounds of TIGER/BUILD awards—the first two years the program was managed by the Trump administration—only about 10 percent of funding went to transit projects. This is a big departure from the previous eight years when transit projects received between 28 and 40 percent of funding. Conversely, the share of funding dedicated to traditional road projects has grown to all-time highs; in 2018, road projects—most of which are eligible to receive normal formula dollars from their state—received more than 60 percent of the funding for the first time, after hovering below 30 percent for years.

While the name of the program may have been changed to BUILD in 2018, the congressional intent did not change. The small amount of funding for multimodal projects is inconsistent with the law which directs USDOT to invest “in a variety of transportation modes.”3 TIGER was created in part because most federal transportation dollars are already focused on roads via the highway formulas.

If a road project didn’t rank high enough to be funded from a state’s share of the $42 billion guaranteed to be spent annually from the Highway Trust Fund, it likely isn’t essential and shouldn’t displace other more creative projects that can’t be funded through conventional federal transportation programs.

More capacity, less repair

A closer look at the road projects selected over the years shows that the Trump administration has focused more heavily on capacity expansion (i.e. new roads and road widenings) versus repair and bridge replacement. The first year of BUILD (round X) set two records: not only was a record share of total funding devoted to roads, a record percentage of that funding (70 percent) was dedicated to capacity expansion.

Note: this graphic only includes projects that were categorized as “roads” in the first graphic above. It does not include complete streets projects.

While policymakers of all stripes echo the constant refrain of “repairing our crumbling roads and bridges,” the Trump administration has prioritized doing the exact opposite with the BUILD program, largely opting to build new infrastructure (increasing the amount of infrastructure that needs to be maintained) rather than focusing on caring for our existing assets.

More rural, less urban

The past two of years of awards have disproportionately favored rural areas. While rural areas certainly deserve transportation investments, they should be proportional. The U.S. Census Bureau found that in 2016, approximately 19 percent of Americans lived in rural areas while 81 percent of Americans lived in urban areas.4 Reflecting where most Americans live, during the first eight years of the TIGER program (2009-2016) projects in urban areas received, on average, 75 percent of funding. Yet in the past two rounds of the program, projects in urban areas have only received an average of 33 percent of funding.

When providing BUILD funding in the last two appropriation bills, Congress directed USDOT to fund projects in rural and urban areas “to ensure an equitable geographic distribution of funds.”5 Disproportionately awarding grants to projects in rural areas is hardly equitable and is inconsistent with the intent and letter of the law.

Critics often complained during the earlier years of the program that it was too urban-focused based solely on the location of the chosen projects. However, many projects classified as urban were actually projects of national significance that have great utility and benefits for rural areas. For example, Port of New Orleans Rail Yard Improvements were funded during TIGER II “to reduce congestion, facilitate the movement of marine and rail cargo, stimulate international commerce, and maintain an essential port.” This project brings immense benefits for the city, the rural areas around it, and the country even though it was classified as an “urban project.” It creates jobs in New Orleans at the port and moves exports like poultry, paper, and pulp to market, a critical need for farmers and manufacturers across the country.

While the Trump administration has made investment in rural communities a key talking point, USDOT’s project selection reflects a very narrow and overly simplistic understanding of what can actually help those communities. Projects that get goods from rural America to market are left off the table just because they might be located in an urban area.

A new rail flyover at 63rd and State in Chicago that eliminated an at-grade crossing. TIGER I provided $100 million to a package of rail infrastructure projects in the Chicago region known as CREATE. While classified as an urban project, CREATE is addressing a series of bottlenecks that result in passenger delays in Chicago and freight delays throughout the country, bringing benefits to urban and rural communities alike across the region, state, and country. Photo by Mark Llanuza.

More funding for state DOTs, less for anyone else

One of the greatest strengths of the BUILD program is that it’s one of the few ways for local governments (or any public entity) to directly receive transportation funding from the federal government to advance their own priority projects, without having to go hat-in-hand to the state. If a municipality or public transit agency conceives of a great project that ticks the required boxes under the law—and if they can identify a local matching contribution—BUILD funding is an option.

Most other federal transportation funds are directed to and controlled by state DOTs. (A smaller share goes to regional metropolitan planning organizations.) As most mayors or other local elected leaders know from firsthand experience, a state DOT’s priorities for spending within their community’s borders are often not the same.

Under the Trump administration, more funds have been going to state DOTs—an average of 37.5 percent awarded to state DOTs compared to 28 percent under the Obama administration.6

Up next, our recommendations for re-BUILDing the program in the second post. Or download the full analysis.

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Sean Doyle was the primary author of this report for Transportation for America, with contributions from Beth Osborne, Scott Goldstein and Stephen Lee Davis.

A new countdown for USDOT transit funding

As Congress enters negotiations for the next long-term transportation bill and works to pass a new annual budget, our Stuck in the Station resource has been updated to provide a complete list of transit projects awaiting funding in 2019 and track USDOT’s progress towards meeting hard and fast deadlines imposed by an impatient Congress.

Last August, we launched Stuck in the Station to catalogue the Trump administration’s efforts to hamstring federal transit funding. From day one, the administration has proposed to defund the largest federal grant program for new transit projects and system expansions. Congress said “no” and gave them more than $2.3 billion dedicated to getting new projects off the ground, and the political appointees over at the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) decided they just wouldn’t spend any of that money. Maybe they thought no one would notice. Except we did, and we called out their foot dragging with Stuck in the Station.

That was six months ago, at which point the administration had not signed a single new full funding grant agreement in a year, despite being flush with funds appropriated by Congress. Now, after months of increasing pressure from Congress, the public, and inquisitive media outlets in scores of metro areas, USDOT has signed 10 grants, accounting for about 45 percent of their available funds.

That’s progress, but it’s still woefully inadequate. After updating Stuck in the Station to add additional projects in the transit pipeline that have been rated “medium” or higher and are therefore eligible for funding, there are at least 26 projects in 20 communities that are waiting for a piece of the $1.1 billion available right now. And once a new transportation appropriations bill is signed (it’s among the funding bills being held up in the current government shutdown/funding standoff), USDOT will likely receive even more money to get these project rolling—perhaps another $2 billion or more.

Update: a new government spending bill signed by the president on Friday, February 15 adds another $1,491,505,856 in funding for new transportation projects. The new total is reflected in Stuck in the Station.

Every delay means that bulldozers and heavy machinery are sitting idle. Steel and other materials are getting more expensive. Potential construction workers are still waiting to hear about jobs that should have materialized yesterday. And everyday travelers counting on improved transit service are left wondering if their government will ever start doing its job.

Congress took unprecedented steps to require USDOT to act

The administration’s previous actions to slow roll transit funding proved that it couldn’t be trusted to execute transit grants in good faith, so Congress made a bipartisan move to add strings. In the 2018 transportation funding bill, Congress specified that USDOT must spend at least 80 percent of these transit capital funds by the end of the (calendar year) 2019. While USDOT has made progress as they advanced some projects in 2018, they still have hundreds of millions of dollars left to obligate to meet that statutory requirement.

Our updated Stuck in the Station resource now includes a countdown to the end of 2019 and a tracker showing how much USDOT still needs to award before the clock strikes zero, based on the most up-to-date information available about USDOT’s progress.

View Stuck in the Station

It’s important to note that even if USDOT reaches their 80 percent benchmark—which is an open question—that’s only a ‘B-‘ grade. Satisfactory. Whether the administration is willing to believe it or not, transit is a critical solution for looming crises like climate change and burgeoning inequity in our communities.

Failing to use the funds at their disposal would be a dangerous abdication of responsibility by USDOT leaders to carry out the agency’s mission: “ensuring a fast, safe, efficient, accessible and convenient transportation system that meets our vital national interests and enhances the quality of life of the American people, today and into the future.”

Government shutdown previewed a future without federal transit funding

With federal employees at the Federal Transit Administration furloughed during the recent record-length shutdown, transit funding wasn’t being distributed and grant/loan programs ground to a halt. New projects were further delayed and transit providers were faced with hard choices about service cuts, showing the vital importance of federal funding for transit.

Since taking office, the Trump administration has been hostile to federal transit funding. The president’s first and second budget requests both called for eliminating critical programs that provide funding to transit—the competitive TIGER program, Capital Investment Grants (CIG) for building new transit and funding major improvements, and intercity passenger rail funding.

Taken to the extreme, eliminating federal transit funding would require shuttering or at least crippling the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) which awards transit grants and ongoing funding. While such a radical position would almost certainly never pass Congress, it has been analyzed by the Congressional Budget Office as a possible deficit reduction strategy. And last month, we got a preview of a future without federal transit funding when staff at the Federal Transit Administration were furloughed for over a month.

The FTA doles out approximately $250 million a week in payments and reimbursements to local providers and state governments to support transit—payments that halted during the shutdown. After a 35-day shut down, there is a backlog of about $1 billion. Although the government has been reopened it will likely be months before the staff at FTA are able to clear this backlog. (Similar federal payments to states for road-related funding through the Federal Highway Administration were not interrupted because FHWA staff positions funded by the Highway Trust Fund were not furloughed.)

In many communities—particularly smaller and more rural ones—the local transit system watched as an approaching fiscal cliff left them with little option but to cut routes or shutter the system without federal funding. As Politico noted, “The government shutdown is pushing some of the nation’s small, midsize and rural transit systems to an existential crisis, prompting bus agencies to scale back service, prepare for furloughs, or even contemplate closing their doors entirely.”

In the Wilmington, NC area—still recovering from Hurricane Florence last September—Wave Transit faced service cuts and construction projects were suspended. In Frederick County, MD, TransIT Services was faced with a similar dilemma. In Arizona, at least 27 rural transit providers that offer critical lifelines to residents were left high and dry without federal funding; the prospect of shuttering entirely was a possibility for some transit providers. And in Missouri, OATS Transit wasn’t facing a future service reduction; it reduced service to stretch its emergency funds for as long as possible during the shutdown. The Community Transportation Association of America (CTAA) has more on the specific impacts for many of those communities.

Some states with the means were able to throw a lifeline to local transit systems by deploying available funding to cover the sudden evaporation of federal funding. But with some federal transit funding already slowed down over the last year, states wouldn’t be able to pick up the slack indefinitely.

For example, the construction of the final leg of the Purple line extension in Los Angeles—which is home to the third largest public transit service by ridership in the country—was impacted by the shutdown as low-interest loans and grants (which would be eliminated if the Trump administration had its way) were held up. And LA Metro had already been waiting for months for a final funding agreement with the FTA for the extension—an agreement that FTA could have signed already—which could not be advanced or signed during the shutdown.

Federal transit funding is critical

Transit is critical to the economies of communities large and small, urban and rural. If residents can’t get to work without transit, then it’s awfully hard to grow a strong local economy. And it’s impossible to build a strong national economy on the backs of weak local economies. Federal transit funding is vital for making this possible.

Furthermore, the construction and maintenance of transit vehicles and facilities supports high-paying, skilled manufacturing jobs across the country. In places like Elkhart, IN and Crookston, MN, the bus and parts manufacturers are a big part of the economy. As we’ve noted, steady federal transit funding is critical to maintain these jobs; they can’t be switched on and off at a whim.

What is clear post-shutdown is that federal funding for transit is critical. This shutdown was a test drive down a path without such funding and that isn’t a future worth pursuing.

Federal transit funding delays grab headlines across the country

President Donald Trump reportedly consumes a lot of media, so what better way to get the administration’s attention than by going to the media. Since we launched Stuck in the Station this summer—which catalogues the egregious (and wholly avoidable) delays in transit funding under this administration—dozens of media outlets across the country have covered the news.

Some of the outlets are those you might expect, which regularly cover transportation and urbanism issues. Streetsblog USA declared that the Federal Transit Administration has “gone rogue.” CityLab cited the “splashy countdown clock” in cataloguing the inexplicable delays to major transit projects.

Understandably, reporters and editorial boards in cities with transit projects on the “awaiting funding” list also are taking a strong interest. News outlets in Tampa, FL, Tempe, AZ, Sacramento, CA, Atlanta, GA, and New York, NY all questioned how the delays will ultimately affect long-awaited projects in their cities, and the taxpayers who are already committed to footing half or more of the bill in most cases. In an editorial, the Los Angeles Times highlighted the central role of the Purple Line Subway extension in the 2028 Olympics. The line will eventually connect athletes housed at UCLA with sporting venues across the city, if it’s completed on time. But due to funding delays, “whether the project meets its deadlines is in the hands of the Trump administration.”

“But local and state dollars cannot replace federal funding. Nor should they. The federal government has a shared national interest in a country that’s safe and well-connected, and where people and goods move efficiently. The Purple Line subway is the perfect example. It will help move people through one of the country’s most congested corridors.”

–The Los Angeles Times.

Similarly, the Star Tribune editorial board (in Minneapolis, MN) pleaded with the Trump administration to approve funding for a major light rail extension before civil contractor bids were set to expire. At this point, according to the paper, the only thing holding back the project is the lack of expected federal funding. “A longer delay would almost certainly mean higher costs and could unravel the project’s painstakingly woven funding arrangements, achieved through years of arduous political exertion by jurisdictions along the proposed 14.5-mile line,” the editorial board notes.

None of the cities mentioned here have received grant agreements from the USDOT as of this writing, leaving the future of their projects (and years of hard work) in limbo. Los Angeles and Minneapolis both received Letters of No Prejudice—though such letters do not guarantee any future federal funding—and have begun construction. In essence, these two cities are taking multibillion-dollar gambles, though ones predicated on the expectation that USDOT will continue approving transit grants as they always have through the last decade or two.

President Trump has been in office for almost two years now, but the administration has only spent a measly 23 percent of the $2.3 billion that Congress appropriated to fund new transit capital projects since 2017. (Though USDOT has reportedly approved the Lynwood light rail project in the Seattle region, no final funding agreement has yet to be signed or money sent out the door. That could happen before the end of the year and would represent the first multi-year, big-ticket full funding grant agreement advanced solely by this administration.)

While the president himself hasn’t responded to any of this media coverage—based on his tweets at least—USDOT definitely has. During a recent speaking engagement, Jane Williams, the top administrator for the department that oversees the transit grant program, seemed irritated by all the coverage the funding delays have been getting. “It seems to occupy 80 percent of the attention,” Williams said, “it is the elephant in the room.”

But when you’re failing to do your job, people, including the media, tend to notice. So get to work.

Ten things to know about USDOT’s new framework to guide the future of automated vehicles

The USDOT’s newly released policy guidance for automated vehicles is consistent with Congress’ attempts to limit regulations and give private industry carte blanche to operate mostly in secret with little public oversight.

Recently, the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) released Preparing for the Future of Transportation: Automated Vehicles 3.0, the Department’s latest effort to try and describe a plan for integrating automated vehicles. This updated version of 2017’s Automated Driving Systems 2.0: A Vision for Safety fails to answer basic questions, leaves local communities with few tools to safely integrate this technology onto their roads, and puts private industry in control of what data local communities can access about automated vehicles.

This policy guidance is voluntary, but it does start to provide a big-picture view of how USDOT is approaching this emerging industry at the same time that Congress is trying to pass their first comprehensive law to regulate it. Here are 10 key things you need to know about this guidance:

1) USDOT is doing nothing to help states and cities receive vital data on AV operations

Local governments recognize that in order to properly manage their roadways, ensure safety for all, and provide service to the residents who face the most transportation barriers (low-income people, communities of color, and people with disabilities), they need data on operations and travel patterns of automated vehicles. Yet this guidance is virtually silent on this critical issue, only restating the principles outlined in 2.0 for developing “voluntary data exchanges.”

This is simply unacceptable.

Without a robust federal framework to set expectations and requirements for sharing data, the likeliest outcome is that local communities will be pitted against each other in a race to the bottom to attract AV companies by enacting little to no regulation, thus ensuring the public will stay in the dark about AV deployment on their local roadways, leaving millions of Americans in harm’s way. Such was the case with Arizona’s move to create a highly permissive and opaque regulatory climate, where a pedestrian was struck and killed by an automated Uber earlier this year.

2) Public safety officials will be left in the dark

Tacked onto the very end of the guidance is a section in which USDOT encourages “engagement” with first responders and public safety officials. However, once again, the guidance does not provide any instruction or best practices for how manufacturers, communities, and public safety officials should engage with one another. Further, without access to data, public safety officials will have zero idea about how these vehicles are operating and will likely be unable to fully execute their responsibilities.

3) It ignores the impact on land use and curb space in cities

The guidance contains 120 words on two of the most pressing impacts of automated vehicles for cities: land use and curb space. Continuing with the theme, the guidance tells cities to consider the implications of automated vehicles on the built environment, but doesn’t provide cities any of the tools (like data) necessary to do so.

4) Automation will almost certainly increase congestion, but that’s just a problem for cities to figure out on their own

The guidance contains even fewer words—only 85!—on the congestion impacts of automated vehicles. USDOT correctly notes that automated vehicles can create an entirely new problem of zero occupancy vehicle trips and potentially drive riders away from transit, further increasing vehicle miles traveled and road congestion, but does little to even start a discussion about how to deploy AVs without increasing congestion.  A study from the SFCTA released just a few weeks ago noted that the overwhelming majority of new congestion on San Francisco County’s streets are due to ridesourcing companies, the same companies most eager to deploy AVs on a wide scale. We are working hard through our Smart Cities Collaborative to help communities plan for integrating automated technology without increasing congestion, but communities need USDOT to provide more than a one-paragraph acknowledgement that there may be an issue.

NTSB investigators in Arizona examining the automated Volvo operated by Uber that killed a pedestrian. Photo by the NTSB.

5) Safety assessments are still voluntary—and not that helpful

Previous iterations of federal AV guidance encouraged manufacturers to provide “voluntary safety assessments” to help build “public trust, acceptance, and confidence through transparent testing and deployment of ADSs [automated driving systems].”

If you tell your kids that making their beds is voluntary, do you think most will still go to the trouble? Only a few of the companies that are testing have even met this low bar, and most are just glossy marketing docs with little to no substantive information. This new guidance encourages manufacturers to make these voluntary safety assessments public, but if a manufacturer fails to provide a useful assessment and make it easy for the public to find and understand, there are no repercussions. It’s also important to note that the template from NHTSA isn’t really asking for the kind of information that would be most helpful for the public.

6) USDOT will adapt definitions for “driver” and ”operator” to incorporate driverless vehicles, but crucially fails to define “performance.”

This action, while a potentially useful step that recognizes a changing world, does not address an even bigger question about terminology: how to interpret the word “performance”. Why is the definition of this single word important? The AV legislation currently being considered by Congress (The AV Start Act) would preempt most state and local laws and regulations that affect the “design, construction, or performance” of a highly automated vehicle or automated driving system.

“Performance” has traditionally referred to the mechanical operation of a vehicle or vehicle component. But now, given that the driver of AVs will be both mechanical and software-based in nature, the lack of a definition for “performance” in the AV START Act (or any other federal law for motor vehicles) will likely lead to lengthy and costly legal fights over the definition and whether or not proposed state and local laws or regulations will affect it.

While USDOT acknowledges that they want to “strike the appropriate balance between the federal government’s use of its authorities…and the State and local authorities’ use of their traditional powers,” the guidance provides no indication of how USDOT’s views on what the appropriate roles are for federal, state, and local governments. The lack of clarity is a significant concern for local communities who are left unsure if current control over their roads will, in the end, apply to this new technology.

7) USDOT says it already has the authority to set testing and regulatory standards for vehicles configured without human controls. What?

If true, this begs the question: why do we even need federal AV legislation? This guidance states that, for high-level and full automation, “NHTSA’s current safety standards constitute an unintended regulatory barrier to innovation” and that, “in an upcoming rulemaking, NHTSA plans to seek comment on proposed changes to particular safety standards to accommodate automated vehicle technologies and the possibility of setting exceptions to certain standards.” If USDOT feels that they (through NHTSA) already have this authority to set safety standards for AVs, why are the House and Senate even considering legislation? The guidance is completely silent on further explaining this critical topic for local communities and the public.

8) USDOT wants to update the federal manual that governs street design to “take into account” automated driving

As with anything, the devil is in the details. AV 3.0 provides no details on when or how the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD) will be updated, only that the FHWA is conducting research. As previously stated, this guidance does nothing to provide communities with data about how automated vehicles are performing, so how would communities or even the FHWA have the foggiest idea what kinds of updates are required for the MUTCD to incorporate AVs in a productive and safe way?

9) The guidance advises state legislatures to adopt common terminology and assess roadway conditions

USDOT really leaves states holding the bag with this one. The guidance tells states to use voluntary, consensus-based terminology when discussing automated vehicles. While it provides an example, in practice, it allows 50 states to select 50 different ways of discussing this new technology.  In the next paragraph, the guidance states that “states may want to assess roadway readiness for automated vehicles, as such assessments could help infrastructure for automated vehicles, while improving safety for drivers today.”  How would states or cities have any idea how to “assess roadway readiness” considering that the guidance (as with the AV START Act,) completely and utterly fails to provide communities with any data about how and where automated vehicles are operating?

10) Complete Streets get a welcome shout out, but only in the “transit” section.

We were pleased to see that this guidance recognized the value of complete streets policies in improving safety. However, the guidance refers to these  policies only in the context of transit, in encouraging transit providers to review complete streets policies when planning for automation. Complete streets are a proven tool to make streets and cities safer, with or without transit or automation, and the most potentially dangerous impacts of AVs will be felt by those who are not driving and attempting to share the road with them while walking and biking, as well as taking transit.

USDOT’s AV Guidance: Preparing for the Future of Transportation: Automated Vehicles 3.0

On October 11, 2018, the US Department of Transportation (USDOT) released ​Preparing for the Future of Transportation: Automated Vehicles 3.0​.​ According to the USDOT, this document builds upon, but does not replace the voluntary guidance previously released in 2017 as ​Automated Driving Systems 2.0: A Vision for Safety​. An analysis exclusively for Transportation for America members on this latest guidance is here.

Cities eager to receive transit dollars from USDOT are receiving letters instead

Instead of approving projects and providing the money cities have applied for, USDOT is “allowing” cities to move ahead with construction on transit capital projects and incur costs that might one day be reimbursed by USDOT.

A few weeks ago, Streetsblog LA reported that Metro in Los Angeles had received a letter from USDOT that allows them to proceed with construction on their Purple Line subway westward toward the beach. (Bold type ours):

At this morning’s Metro Construction Committee, CEO Phil Washington announced that Metro had received a federal letter of no prejudice (LONP) for construction to proceed on the third phase of the Westside Purple Line. Washington aptly described this as a “big deal,” as this was the first major transit project that this administration has approved to proceed to the federal New Starts engineering phase. The federal letter of no prejudice covers an initial $491 million, nearly all for tunnel construction. The LONP guarantees that the feds will reimburse the local expenditures under a forthcoming full-funding grant agreement (FFGA).

Guarantees? Not quite. Los Angeles is right to treat this as a positive development, but these types of letters do not guarantee any federal money for transit projects.

Here’s what Obama’s USDOT said about these types of letters in a batch of policy guidance from early 2017, just before the transition:

Pre-award authority is not a legal or implied commitment that the subject project will be approved for FTA assistance or that FTA will obligate Federal funds. Furthermore, it is not a legal or implied commitment that all items undertaken by the applicant will be eligible for inclusion in the project. …Federal funding…is not implied or guaranteed by an [Letter of No Prejudice.] (pp 20, 22.)

By starting construction on this project without the full guarantee of funding, LA Metro is taking a risk, but they are still making a pretty rational decision. Just like the other cities with transit projects in the pipeline, Los Angeles is fully expecting that USDOT will do their job as required by law—something they’ve always done—and approve projects in a timely matter in order to obligate the $2.3 billion Congress provided in 2017 and 2018.

LA has a project with expiring construction bids due to USDOT’s delays up to this point, is on a tight timeline to have service running in time for the 2028 Olympics, and has already raised billions in local funds to pay their share.

Under previous administrations, whenever a city received one of these letters, their project was typically approved. So why should anyone be skeptical when this USDOT provides these letters? Here are two reasons:

  • This particular administration at USDOT has no established track record of advancing multi-year transit projects. If they were sending out these letters at the same time as they were routinely signing other grant agreements and obligating dollars to other multi-year transit projects, there would certainly be a level of trust established, as has been the case with previous administrations.
  • This administration has gone on the record multiple times asking Congress to provide them with zero dollars for multi-year transit projects that don’t yet have signed funding agreements — projects just like those in Los Angeles and Minneapolis, a region that is also awaiting final approval.

Cities are only in this difficult position because USDOT has failed to advance transit projects through the process in a clear, transparent, and timely manner.

While USDOT will hopefully approve LA’s project and award them funding, possibly before the end of this year, what about the other cities who are a little further behind in the process?

On the one hand, you can get a letter from USDOT that says you’re free to proceed and spend your own dollars on a big-ticket transit project, and that they won’t “prejudice” the eventual review of your application with the fact that you started building a project that wasn’t yet fully approved.

On the other hand, this administration at FTA and USDOT has twice asked Congress to eliminate all transit capital dollars, save for the money they’re already on the hook to provide for the projects that have pre-existing funding agreements.

Los Angeles is in a position where they can spend their own money to get started, counting on USDOT to (eventually) follow the law and award the money Congress appropriated. But other smaller cities or cities with more tenuous local funding might not be able to spend millions with the non-binding promise that they’ll eventually be reimbursed.

USDOT is creating an unnecessarily risky situation for cities. If you are one of the cities that’s ready or nearly ready but awaiting funding from USDOT, why trust a non-binding letter from an administration that’s already asked Congress to appropriate zero dollars for your project in the budget?

We’re eager to give credit to FTA when it’s due and they get these projects moving, but that time hasn’t yet arrived.

Cities left in the dark by an agency that once partnered with them to build new transit

Many local transit project sponsors are in the dark about the status of their applications for federal transit funds, left to wonder why the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) has not granted funding to their projects. But these cities have remained publicly quiet about it for fear of harming their chances of eventually receiving funding, taking the pressure off the administration to fund and support transit projects.

As we have previously identified, the Trump administration is sitting on almost $1.8 billion to build and expand new public transit projects. What was once a collaborative process with clear communication and milestones between FTA and project sponsors has become opaque, murky, and unclear.

For this reason, over the last few months, we at T4America have spent some time interviewing the majority of these communities. While each community’s story is unique and none wanted to go on the record, several common themes emerged:

  1. A lack of transparency
  2. Unexplained delays from FTA over processing final paperwork, most often connected to political offices within USDOT
  3. FTA’s poor communication and slowed-down process is leading to potential delays and cost increases for local taxpayers
  4. Not all projects have faced delays

1) A lack of transparency

Both of President Trump’s budget proposals so far have asked Congress to provide zero dollars for new transit projects. FTA has cited these budget requests (twice rejected by Congress) as a rationale for breaking with precedent and no longer providing Congress (and the public) with annual reports clearly detailing which new projects would receive funding that year, if Congress appropriates the dollars (which Congress has done.) This lack of transparency has eliminated local project sponsors’ ability to point to their project in these annual reports and, therefore, hold FTA accountable for keeping to their timeline.

In addition, FTA has privately told some project sponsors that the failure of the Wave Streetcar project in Ft. Lauderdale, FL, required them to delay other projects, ostensibly to evaluate the risk of cost increases. According to a number of communities, FTA staff communicated that they would not sign new grant agreements for a period of months after the Wave Streetcar failure. But FTA has done nothing to explain (to the public or sponsors) precisely how the failure of a single project in Florida has any bearing on other projects in other states that have been advancing through the pipeline. Further, while the Wave Streetcar is certainly a failure in that it is not being built, the federal government never lost a dime on the project—a win for the process from their standpoint.

2) Unexplained delays from FTA over processing final paperwork, most often connected to political offices within USDOT

Several local project sponsors we spoke to described many months of bizarre hurdles and unexplained delays. In virtually all instances, project sponsors described helpful and productive conversations with the career FTA staff, which were subsequently undermined by kafkaesque levels of bureaucracy within the offices of the Secretary and Deputy Secretary at USDOT. One community described regional FTA career staff informing them that they just didn’t know why their project was delayed. Ultimately, it took personal inquiries from their House and Senate delegations before FTA provided information and ultimately advanced the project.  

Another community described productive conversations with regional career staff until the project was elevated to the USDOT Secretary’s office, at which point communication stalled, and the project was inexplicably delayed for months. Again, personal involvement by their House and Senate delegation was required to get the project moving again.

Ultimately, it appears that high-level political influence is the only surefire method for finally advancing a project, as happened with the Caltrain electrification project approved early last year, where members of the California congressional delegation wrote to Sec. Elaine Chao, and/or set up meetings with her or her staff.

Still other sponsors described situations where FTA staff who would highlight flaws in an application without providing instructions or a timeline for addressing them. Imagine taking your car to the mechanic and being told only that the car is broken, leaving you on your own to guess what’s wrong with it. This has resulted in countless wasted hours attempting to understand the flaw, guessing at what FTA would consider an acceptable solution, and having multiple conversations with FTA staff to present updated applications. Under previous administrations, the FTA was a partner, cooperating with cities to both put together the best possible projects and help actively shepherd them through the process toward receiving funding and getting built.

That is clearly no longer the case.

3) FTA’s poor communication and slowed-down process is leading to potential delays and cost increases for local taxpayers

The two major construction bids for the SW light rail project in Minneapolis expired at the end of September while the agency waited for word from USDOT & FTA.

For many localities, the delays described above have affected project sponsors’ contracting schedule, either jeopardizing their ability to pay contractors or delaying their ability to award contracts (leading to cost increases). In Los Angeles, some construction bids were set to expire in early October. In Minneapolis, where they were hoping to begin construction this fall on the SW light rail extension before the weather gets harsh, their biggest construction bids expired at the end of September as they awaited word from FTA. (One bidder has given an extension, the other has not.) Both cities are still waiting for approval from FTA to fund their projects.

Several localities described cost increases associated with these delays. And one community described a prime contractor that was turning away work because it was committed to working on their project, yet the locality was unable to pay the contractor because its grant was delayed.

To address this issue, some localities have requested something called letters of no prejudice which allows them to begin spending their own money on a project and later receive reimbursement from FTA (if they are awarded a grant). But these letters are really a formality, providing zero guarantees from FTA that their projects will ever be approved. In this scenario, these communities are spending more local money up front for aspects of a project that should have been funded by a federal grant. By delaying and refusing to sign grant agreements, FTA is putting the onus on locals to spend more money to keep these projects alive while waiting for FTA. This is occuring all while FTA is often unable to articulate what is standing in the way of their approval.

4) Not all projects have faced delays

Finally, in the interest of fairness, we note that not all projects have been delayed. A small number of localities we spoke to have described a consistently productive relationship with FTA, and this is indeed good news. Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of communities are either waiting or are unclear about the status of their projects.

And this is also true: USDOT has yet to approve a major multi-year full-funding grant agreement for a larger rail transit project, after signing two early in 2017 that were largely processed by the previous administration. All of the other approvals thus far have been small or single-year projects that don’t come with future fiscal obligations for FTA — an important distinction considering the fact that they’re likely to (once again) only ask Congress for enough money to fund the in-progress projects for which FTA is legally required to continue funding.

And the numbers do not lie. FTA is sitting on almost $1.8 billion dollars. How much longer must communities wait?

Alex Beckmann and Stephen Lee Davis contributed to this post.

With the 2018 fiscal year over, how much money has USDOT obligated to transit projects?

The 2018 fiscal year closed yesterday, wrapping up a year in which USDOT received more than $1.4 billion from Congress to invest in new transit construction and improvement projects across the country. With another infusion of cash for FY 2019 coming (eventually), it’s time for a look at how much USDOT still has on hand from 2018—as well as the unspent funds from FY 2017.

With fiscal 2018 now in the books and 2017 more than a year behind us, USDOT still has nearly $1.8 billion in unspent funds at their disposal from these two years for new transit. They’ve obligated a total of $532 million in 2017-2018 dollars to just eight transit projects, with just $100 million of that from FY 2018.

Perhaps one reason why USDOT has awarded so little of the funding from this year is because they still have almost half of the $925 million that Congress gave them back in May 2017. That fiscal year now closed more than a year ago.

USDOT’s bank account is actually about to get even bigger.

While the 2019 budget is still awaiting final action by Congress, the relevant committees from both chambers have already approved their 2019 budgets for transportation (and housing) programs. And as it stands now, both the House and Senate would infuse the transit capital program with more than $2.5 billion. While about half of that money would be for advancing ongoing multi-year transit projects that USDOT already approved, approximately $1.5 billion would be intended to advance new projects in the pipeline that are expecting to sign agreements with USDOT sometime in 2019 or beyond.

Before the end of the calendar year, without advancing any big-ticket transit projects, USDOT could have more than $3 billion on hand to obligate to transit projects.

If this budget is approved by Congress, it will mark the third straight time that they’ve rejected USDOT’s preference to receive zero dollars to advance new transit projects. Remember, this was their request for the 2019 budget (emphasis ours):

The FY 2019 [budget] proposal limits funding for the CIG Program to projects with existing full funding grant agreements. For the remaining projects in the CIG program, FTA is not requesting or recommending funding. Future investments in new transit projects would be funded by the localities that use and benefit from these localized projects.

To hear FTA tell it, they’re wondering what the big fuss is all about. Last week the FTA’s Acting Administrator Jane Williams spoke to the American Public Transportation Association at their annual conference. During her remarks, she expressed surprise at all the hand-wringing about FTA’s signature transit program:

Unfortunately, the administration’s efforts to support our nation’s infrastructure are many times overlooked by the focus on the Capital Investment Grants (CIG) Program. I know a lot of you in the room have very strong opinions about this administration’s approach toward the CIG program. Even though this program represents less than 20 percent of FTA’s budget, it seems to occupy 80 percent of the attention.

A huge share of FTA’s funds are distributed via formulas—FTA has no discretion to turn off that faucet even if they wanted to. So yes, the public is very interested in the single biggest available federal funding stream to pair with billions raised by local taxpayers to advance new transit projects across the country. Leaders in places like Atlanta might understandably be wondering about the future of their ambitious $2.5 billion transit plan that hinges on receiving funding from a program that USDOT would prefer Congress wind down.

Further on in her remarks, Acting Administrator Williams claims credit for projects that they actually haven’t funded yet:

In fact, in just the last six weeks…

  • Allocated $100 million in funding toward our planned multi-year FFGA for the Seattle Lynnwood Link Extension light rail line, and
  • Allocated $99 million in funding toward our planned FFGA for the Santa Ana, California streetcar project.

USDOT has not yet signed funding agreements nor obligated any funds to the Lynnwood (WA) Link light rail project and the Orange County (CA) Streetcar. Claiming credit for “allocating” funding to them is like telling your kids that they need to write thank-you notes for the presents they might get for Christmas, if they’re good.

Congress isn’t likely to act on the 2019 budget before the November elections—the president signed a continuing resolution to fund the federal government through December 7—but when they do, they’ll be filling up the USDOT purse with yet more funding for transit. Stay tuned.

T4America joins a parade of letters to USDOT urging them to do their job and get transit projects moving

Following a parade of official letters from elected representatives, T4America sent a letter urging USDOT to do the job required of them by law and award funds to expeditiously advance transit projects, communicate more clearly with local communities about the status of their projects, and recognize that a bipartisan majority in Congress has twice rejected their wishes to eliminate the transit capital construction program. (Updated below.)

As chronicled in our Stuck in the Station resource, the Trump administration’s USDOT has stated their clear preference to wind down the federal program that pairs federal grants with state/local dollars to invest in much-needed public transportation projects in cities of nearly all size across the country.

USDOT has (begrudgingly) continued to award dollars mostly to smaller transit projects that receive their funding all at once in one single year—$50 million here, $50 million there—while largely neglecting to advance and sign any funding agreements for multi-year transit projects with higher price tags that require them to provide a larger amount of funding over multiple years. To date, they’ve awarded just $532 million of the $2.3 billion that Congress has given them since May 2017, a fact that’s impossible to reconcile with President Trump and Secretary Chao’s complaints about the long, arduous, red-tape-filled road to getting transportation projects approved and their promises to expedite that process.

(Update: 9/24/2018: Streetsblog LA reported last week that Los Angeles received what’s known as a Letter of No Prejudice from USDOT to proceed on their Purple Line subway extension. While this is indeed a “big deal,” as described by Metro CEO Phil Washington, it does not provide funding from FTA nor does it guarantee that Metro will receive funding in the future. We’ll have more on what this means later this week.)

Last week, we sent a letter to the Federal Transit Administration urging them to get these projects moving and also bring a degree of clarity and transparency that’s been sorely lacking:

To date, the administration has failed to obligate the overwhelming majority of funding appropriated since FY17. This undermines the administration’s stated goal of cutting red tape and building infrastructure. We therefore urge you to expeditiously advance projects, working cooperatively with project sponsors.

We further suggest that you review your method of communicating the status of projects by providing regular, detailed updates to public and project sponsors. This should include specific information about what remains to advance a project, an expected timeline, and what fiscal year funding will be used for a project.

Congress has rejected the administration’s plan to end the CIG program and, instead, provided the FTA with about $2.3 billion to build new and expand existing transit. Based on the limited information publicly available from your agency, there are 16 projects in 13 communities expecting this funding. While some grants have been awarded, USDOT appears to be delaying many projects while not providing project sponsors with the information they need to address the issues USDOT cites as cause for delay. Congress has been clear: USDOT’s mission is to advance projects through the pipeline and award grants.

Read our full letter here (pdf).

We are not the only ones who have been writing letters to USDOT, however.

With several transit projects already in the pipeline (and more on the way thanks to several recent ballot measures), Washington State’s two Senators and scores of representatives sent a letter to Secretary Chao back in February. In this letter, they outlined the recent timeline for three specific transit projects, pointing to months where projects sponsors were left waiting with no communication or action from FTA, noting that this “emerging pattern of missed execution dates, delays, and seemingly deliberate slowdowns in executing CIG grant agreements that have received Congressional appropriations is extremely concerning.”

“In addition, we note it is in direct contradiction to your commitment to distribute the funding Congress provides the Department,” they continued.

A couple months later, in April 2018, Senator Dianne Feinstein (CA) sent a letter to Secretary Chao with a similar thrust. “Congress has now twice rejected proposals from the Trump Administration to terminate the Capital Investment Grant program and instead has strongly reaffirmed its bipartisan commitment to not only continuing, but actually expanding, the program,” the letter states.

For an administration that wants states and localities to pick up a greater share of the funding burden for infrastructure, Senator Feinstein notes that these transit projects should be a pretty attractive deal.

The federal commitment of funding for these [transit] projects averages only 45 percent of the total costs, far less than the federal share of up to 80 percent on comparable highway projects. These projects deserve the fair and timely administration they are owed by a program that has been duly authorized and appropriated.

Jane Williams, the acting administrator of FTA, responded via a letter to all of Congress this summer, in which she seemed to assert that FTA has a lot more latitude to choose projects than the law would suggest (pdf):

The FTA bases its discretionary funding allocation decisions for the CIG program on a variety of factors including the extent of the local financial commitment, project readiness, and geographic diversity. The FTA also considers the extent value capture, private contributions, and other innovative approaches to project development and delivery are used, including public-private partnerships.

Except that the transit capital program isn’t truly “discretionary,” like the TIGER (now BUILD) grant program is, as an example. And “geographic diversity” as a consideration is not actually anywhere in the current law. Rep. Peter DeFazio and Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, two members of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, addressed both of these issues in a reply to the acting administrator (pdf):

As you know, the [transit capital grant] program’s statutory language is not like a typical discretionary grant program like INFRA, bus, or ferry discretionary grants. It is a pipeline program where eligible projects that meet the statutory criteria under section 5309 are funding subject only to continued appropriations. …FTA’s letter also attempts to add a new criterion to the [transit capital] program, referred to as geographic diversity. We are concerned that FTA is adding another layer of bureaucracy to discourage multiple transit projects from entering the pipeline from within the same growing urban area or state.

What they’re saying is that if transit projects are entered into the pipeline and meet the criteria in the law and are scored in a satisfactory manner (FTA does have some latitude here), the law dictates that those projects should be approved and funded. Put another way, FTA doesn’t actually get to “choose” which transit projects they want to fund—it is not a truly competitive program.

Rep. DeFazio and Del. Holmes Norton also note the massive cognitive dissonance between an administration that has publicly and loudly committed itself to cutting red tape, and USDOT’s plan to add a whole lot more red tape to a process that’s already far more complicated than it should be.

When you testified before the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, you spoke of an intent to ‘streamline permitting to speed up project delivery and reduce unnecessary and overly burdensome regulations.’ Given this testimony, we are confused as to why USDOT appears to be intent on creating new regulatory burdens designed to thwart transit infrastructure investment, in overt disregard of clear Congressional intent.

The message that USDOT is receiving is crystal clear. As our letter says, “we intend to continue to draw attention to these delays until these funds are obligated. Local communities have waited long enough.”

USDOT has become the biggest obstacle in the way of delivering transit projects on time and on budget

Our updated Stuck in the Station resource shows how USDOT was already slow-rolling transit funding well before Congress gave them another $1.4 billion 157+ days ago to build or expand transit systems across the country.

Since March 23, 2018, the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) has awarded just $25 million of the $1,400,000,000 that Congress made available to them this year for advancing transit capital projects in more than a dozen cities. 

The full picture for funding is even worse. 

In addition to sitting on $1.4 billion, USDOT has distributed less than half of the $925 million Congress appropriated for new transit projects all the way back in May 2017—more than 480 days ago.

Collectively, that now means that Congress has given USDOT more than $2.3 billion over the last two years to help build or expand transit in scores of local communities. Though they have awarded about $457 million since early 2017, that’s less than 20 percent of all the dollars that Congress has given them for transit capital investments over this two-year period. Put another way, nearly a full year after the close of FY17, USDOT has committed less than half of what Congress gave them for that period.

Congress is concerned about this slowdown: In a report commissioned by Congress, USDOT was warned by the Government Accountability Office back in May that they “run the risk of violating federal law” by failing to administer FTA’s transit capital investment program, as we noted last Friday.


See the full dataset and most current numbers in Stuck in the Station

When USDOT responded to the initial release of Stuck in the Station, they asserted in a response to some reporters that they had in fact advanced ten transit projects since 2017 with funding agreements. But is that the right number? As we wrote in last week’s post:

FTA suggested in their response to reporters that ten projects have received “new” full funding grant agreements (FFGAs) since 2017. But only two of those are actual big ticket New Starts or Core Capacity transit projects [that even require these types of multi-year grant agreements]: The CalTrain electrification project and the Maryland Purple Line project were both holdovers from the Obama administration that moved forward because of intense political pressure or the resolution of a pending legal dispute, respectively. The other eight projects FTA shared with one reporter were all Small Starts projects.

Two of these eight particular projects actually received FY16 dollars (The Link extension in Tacoma, WA and the SMART commuter rail in San Rafael, CA.) That arguably leaves just six transit projects that this administration has truly advanced through the pipeline on their own with 2017 or 2018 dollars.

This also means that, when the administration turned over at USDOT with the inauguration of President Trump, the previous regime had successfully obligated nearly all of the FY16 transit capital funds, save for about $200 million intended for just three projects. $100 million of that funding was for one project held up by a legal dispute (the Purple Line in Maryland). More than two years into the current administration, USDOT has awarded less than a fifth of the $2.3 billion they’ve been directed to obligate by Congress.

Wasn’t this administration supposed to be all about delivering projects more quickly and cutting the red tape?

Trump administration has effectively halted the pipeline of new transit projects

How long will the Trump administration sit on transit funding? Click to view Stuck in the Station, a new resource tracking the unnecessary and costly delays in transit funding.

Last March, Congress provided the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) with about $1.4 billion to help build and expand transit systems across the country. 142 days later and counting, FTA has obligated almost none of these funds to new transit projects. A new Transportation for America resource—Stuck in the Station—will continue tracking exactly how long FTA has been declining to do their job, how much money has been committed, and which communities are paying a hefty price in avoidable delays.

For 142 days and counting, Trump’s FTA has declined to distribute virtually all of the $1.4 billion appropriated by Congress in 2018 for 17 transit projects in 14 communities that were expecting to receive it sometime this year. Other than one small grant to Indianapolis for their Red Line all-electric bus rapid transit project, the pipeline of new transit projects has effectively ground to a halt.

As a result, bulldozers and heavy machinery are sitting idle. Steel and other materials are getting more expensive by the day. Potential construction workers are waiting to hear about a job that should have materialized yesterday. And everyday travelers counting on improved transit service are left wondering when FTA will do their job and get these projects moving.

“When it comes to funding for infrastructure, this administration has repeatedly made it clear they expect states and cities to pick up part of the tab,” said Beth Osborne, Transportation for America senior policy advisor. “Yet these communities are doing exactly what the administration has asked for by committing their own dollars to fund these transit projects—in some cases, going to the ballot box to raise their own taxes—and yet still the administration does nothing.”

Fourteen communities in total are waiting on this funding appropriated by Congress—and approved by the president—earlier in 2018.

Dallas is waiting on more than $74 million to lengthen platforms at 28 DART stations in order to accommodate longer trains and increase the system capacity. In Reno, NV, the transit provider is waiting on $40 million to extend their bus rapid transit system from downtown to the university and provide upgrades to the existing line. Minneapolis/St. Paul is waiting on three different grants totaling an estimated $274 million to help extend two existing light rail lines (including new park & ride stations and additional trains) to reach surrounding towns and build a new bus rapid transit line. Twelve other projects, most of them brand new rail and bus lines, are also waiting for grants ranging from $23 million to $177 million.

President Trump’s stated ambitions to make a big investment in infrastructure have largely been thwarted by his and Congress’ inability to find or approve any new sources of funding. Yet right now, the administration has $1.4 billion for infrastructure sitting idle in the bank for transit, money that could be used to buy materials that are getting more expensive by the day, fire up the heavy equipment, and fill new jobs with construction workers helping to bring new bus or rail service to everyday commuters who are counting on it.

So how much money did Congress put in the Trump administration’s hands, and how much has the FTA actually distributed to these ready-to-go transit projects? Which communities are paying the price in expensive but entirely avoidable delays?

Browse Stuck in the Station, Transportation for America’s new resource for tracking how much money has been obligated to transit projects in the pipeline.

View Stuck in the Station and take action

In this case “obligating” means simply having the FTA (acting) administrator sign a grant contract for a project that’s already been in the federal pipeline for years. To be clear, FTA has already identified the projects that will receive grants, Congress has approved overall funding levels, and local projects have accounted for this federal money in their budgets. Local communities are just waiting on Secretary Elaine Chao and the acting administrator of the FTA to put pen to paper and actually deliver the money they’ve been promised.

It’s time for FTA to fulfill its promises and get these projects moving.

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.

Summary of House Fiscal Year 2019 Transportation, Housing and Urban Development Appropriations Bill

On May 16 the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Transportation and Housing (THUD) passed, by voice vote, its funding bill for fiscal year 2019 (FY19). Under this bill, the U.S. Department of Transportation is funded at $71.8 billion for FY19. This is $1.5 billion above the FY2018 enacted level. The full House appropriations committee is expected to markup the bill on May 23.

The following is a brief summary of key parts of the bill.

Capital Investment Grants (CIG)

The bill provides $ 2.614 billion for CIG, a 0.5 percent increase over the FY18 enacted level. The bill requires the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) to advance projects through the pipeline and to obligate $2.222 billion by the end of 2020. In addition, the bill directs the Trump Administration to reissue the FY19 Report to Congress with allocations for projects. The bill allocates CIG funding as follows:

  • Existing New Starts full-funding grant agreements (FFGA): $836 million
  • Additional New Starts projects (e.g. in project engineering, project development phases): $500 million
  • Core Capacity projects with FFGAs: $200 million
  • Additional Core Capacity projects: $550 million
  • Small Starts projects: $502 million

BUILD

The bill directs $750 million to Better Utilizing Investments to Leverage Development (BUILD) grants (formerly known as the Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER) grant program). This allocation represents a 50 percent reduction in funding compared with the FY18 enacted funding level of $1.5 billion; however, it is a 50 percent increase in funding for the program when compared to historic funding trends for TIGER that have generally been appropriated for $500 million annually.

The funding is allocated as follows:

  • Projects in rural areas (below 200,000 in population): $250 million
  • Projects in urbanized areas (above 200,000 in population): $250 million
  • Projects at seaports or intermodal facilities: $250 million

Historically, funding for the TIGER/BUILD program has not been apportioned by geography or mode by statute, though there has been a mandatory set aside for rural projects and a requirement for geographic diversity. Historically grants have been distributed across all modes and a broad geography of the county.

The bill requires USDOT to conduct a new competition to select projects to fund. USDOT must issue a NOFO within 60 days of enactment of the appropriation, set a deadline for applications within 90 days of enactment, and award grants within 270 days of enactment.

The bill prohibits USDOT from using federal share of project funding as a selection criteria.

The bill also sets the minimum BUILD award at $5 million and the maximum at $25 million.

Highway programs

The bill obligates $45 billion from the Highway Trust Fund for Federal-Aid Highway programs, as authorized by the FAST Act. The bill appropriates an additional $4.25 billion from the general fund to highway programs. This additional funding is allocated to:

  • Construction of highways, bridges, and tunnels: $3.812 billion
  • Highway safety improvement projects: $250 million
  • Puerto Rico Highway Program: $31 million
  • Territorial Highway Program: $8 million
  • Tribal Transportation Program: $50 million
  • Nationally Significant Federal Lands and Tribal Projects Program: $100 million

These amounts are apportioned to the states, tribes, and territories through the same formulas as funds from the Highway Trust Fund.

The supplemental General Fund allotment for highway safety improvement projects is exempted from the high-risk rural road safety rule that requires states to direct additional funds to rural highway safety projects if the fatality rate on rural highways increases.

Transit grants

The bill appropriates $9.9 billion from the Mass Transit Account of the Highway Trust Fund to transit formula programs, as authorized by the FAST Act. The bill provides an additional $800 million from the general fund for transit capital grants, allocated to:

  • Bus and Bus Facilities: $350 million (of which $50 million is for No and Low Emission Buses)
  • State of Good Repair: $200 million
  • Rural formula grants (Section 5311): $50 million
  • Urbanized area formula grants (Section 5307): $150 million
  • Growing States and High Density States formula grants (section 5340): $50 million

Rail

Rail infrastructure and safety programs are funded at $3.2 billion, $63 million over the FY18 enacted level. The bill provides a total of $1.9 billion for Amtrak, of which $650 million is for the Northeast Corridor and $1.3 billion is to support the national network. The bill also provides $221 million to fund FRA’s safety, operations, research and development activities. The Consolidated Rail Infrastructure and Safety Improvement (CRISI) Grants Program is funded at $300 million, of which $150 million is for Positive Train Control. The Federal-State Partnership for State of Good Repair Grants program is funded at $500 million and the Restoration and Enhancement Grants program is not funded.

Looking ahead: Senate

The Senate THUD subcommittee is expected to consider its own FY19 funding bill the week of June 4.

For questions or more information, please contact Scott Goldstein at scott.goldstein@t4america.org or 202-971-3911.

What applicants need to know about TIGER’s replacement program: BUILD

The ever-popular TIGER grant program has returned for a ninth round, but this time with triple the usual amount of funding, a brand new name (and acronym), and new criteria and qualifications that were added to the program by appropriators in the Senate and House. Our resident expert takes a closer look at the changes.

On Friday April 20th, the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) released the FY 2018 Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) for the Better Utilizing Investments to Leverage Development or BUILD program, previously known as the Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER). Having worked on Capitol Hill when this program was passed in 2009 through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) and then at USDOT where I helped run multiple rounds of competitive grantmaking, I want to take a deeper dive, but also add some context about the changes to this program.

First, to say this program has always been popular is a gross understatement. It was not only the most popular program at USDOT but one of the most popular programs across all of government. USDOT routinely received 10 times the requests for funding than was available and overwhelmed grants.gov, the online portal for federal grant programs.

Flexibility has always been the key to its popularity. While most federal transportation dollars go to state DOTs (with a small amount going to transit agencies and metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs)) for specific types of projects written into federal law, TIGER funds could go to any governmental entity, including counties, cities, and rail authorities. This aspect continues in the BUILD program. Likewise, most transportation funds are divided up by “mode”—roadway vs. transit vs. rail vs. waterway. For example, if you have a roadway resurfacing project that includes the replacement of bus stops and the purchase of buses, for conventional federal transportation dollars, you would have to apply separately to different roadway and transit programs, which can involve multiple agencies within your state DOT and also within USDOT.

With BUILD, you can continue to get the necessary funding for your entire project in one application at one time.

As an aside, let me address the name change. I can’t pretend to be happy to see the name TIGER go away. As a proud graduate of Louisiana State University (LSU), I’ve been asked for years if the program was named after my LSU Tigers. The name preceded me but I have always loved the association. Still, as a product of the Recovery Act, TIGER’s focus was on projects that were both ready to go and could provide an economic shot in the arm. In the years since 2009, we have moved beyond the need for the intensive and immediate economic recovery that we sought in 2009, and it is time for a new name too. BUILD is a good one.

What makes BUILD different?

So what makes BUILD different from previous rounds of TIGER? Congress required the administration to keep the 2016 criteria (safety, economic competitiveness, quality of life, environmental sustainability, and state of repair), so the short answer is not a whole lot.

But the changes that were made are still notable.

First, there is a whole lot more money available: $1.5 billion. This is the most that Congress has appropriated to this program since the Recovery Act and triple the $500 million made available in the last round in FY2017. Additionally, up to $15 million of that $1.5 billion may be used for planning, preparation, or design grants for eligible projects (as happened in TIGER’s 2nd and 6th rounds.) USDOT Secretary Elaine Chao has the discretion on whether she wants to award any or all of that $15 million.

Congress also capped individual awards at $25 million. This one is quite a shame. In the first round of TIGER, we were able to fund a piece of the CREATE project in Chicago—a huge multi-billion effort to rationalize rail movement through the region and de-conflict it with transit and roadways—an enormous project with benefits that rippled throughout the country. We were able to fund double-stacking rail projects like the National Gateway Freight Rail Corridor and the replacement of the I-244 bridge in Tulsa. In subsequent rounds, projects tended to top out around $25 million because Congress shrank the overall size of the program but still required geographic equity, modal balance, and a fair rural/urban split. These factors combined to make it incredibly hard to fund any larger projects and still check all of those boxes. With the increase in funding for this round, USDOT had an opportunity to fund more of these larger, transformative projects; but Congress has unfortunately made that option unworkable.

Third, USDOT will now evaluate applicants on how well they secure and commit new, non-federal revenue for projects. This is a major new criterion worth elaborating on. USDOT defines new revenue as “revenue that is not included in current and projected funding levels and results from specific actions taken to increase transportation infrastructure investment.”

It is important to note that USDOT won’t consider any local or state revenue authorized before January 1st, 2015 as new revenue and nor can such revenue be applied as matching funds for BUILD projects. So, for example, if a state increased its gas tax before January 1, 2015, USDOT will not count the resulting revenue raised as new revenue. That includes the 12 states that took the bold step of increasing their state transportation funding between 2012 and 2014. Examples of new revenue according to USDOT are asset recycling, tolling, tax-increment financing, or sales or gas tax increases. Under this definition, bonds do not qualify as a new revenue source.

Fourth, Congress provided a strict timeline for making awards. USDOT must announce the recipients of BUILD grants no later than December 17, 2018. In order to meet that deadline, USDOT released this notice quickly and has set a deadline of 8:00 p.m. EDT on July 19, 2018 for all applications. Five months to make award decisions may seem like a long time to folks on the outside, but given that USDOT received 451 applications in the most recent round (for just one-third of the amount of funding available here), it will take a lot of hard work from the folks at USDOT to hit their deadlines.

Questions for USDOT

The emphasis on non-federal resources is not new from this administration. For the localities that haven’t raised new funding since January 2015, they’ll be hard-pressed to do so in the next few months before applications are due. And it will be difficult to balance the preference for new funding with USDOT’s other priorities. For example, the Trump administration wants to prioritize rural projects, but rural areas have the least ability to toll or raise new funding. Which of these competing priorities will win out? I tend to think the rural priority will.

If your state has raised the gas tax, do localities within that state get to take credit for it? What if a state prohibits its localities from raising funds? I assume that the administration will excuse state DOTs from this exercise, but will they hold these restrictions against states in their applications?

These are the sort of questions I plan to ask USDOT officials on our members-only webinar, scheduled for May 14 at 4 p.m. EDT. T4A members can email their questions in advance to Program Manager Alicia Orosco.

The last point I will make is that transit was basically locked out of the most recent round of TIGER awards. Many people have asked me whether it is worth the effort to apply for funding for transit projects this time. My answer is an unqualified “yes!” With three times the funding as last year and a cap on the size of awards, we can expect USDOT to fund 2-3 times as many projects. It will be harder for the administration to not select transit projects, especially projects that have some value capture or other funding associated with it. Further, many members of Congress from both sides of the aisle have complained mightily about the lack of transit projects in the last round. If they fail to fund transit reasonably this time, Congress will probably slap another requirement on them, and I think USDOT knows that and would like to avoid it.

Not yet a member? Join T4America today! Already a member? Connect with T4America staff

The TIGER program is no more….in name


A rendering of the Multimodal Corridor Enhancement Project (MCORE) in Urbana and Champagne, Illinois is a complex street safety enhancement project that involved two city governments, the local transit agency, the University of Illinois, and the state. It wouldn’t have been possible without a TIGER grant.

Today, the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) released the FY 2018 Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) for the program formerly known as Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER). The NOFO declares that USDOT has rebranded TIGER as the Better Utilizing Investments to Leverage Development or “BUILD” program. The criteria for funding under BUILD and TIGER are essentially the same—with one big caveat. Under BUILD, USDOT is putting a new emphasis on securing and committing new, non-federal revenue for projects requesting funding.

USDOT defines new revenue as “revenue that is not included in current and projected funding levels and results from specific actions taken to increase transportation infrastructure investment.” And any local or state revenue authorized before January 1, 2015 is not considered new revenue and cannot be applied as matching funding for BUILD projects.

Examples of “new revenue” according to USDOT are asset recycling, tolling, tax-increment financing, or sales or gas tax increases. Under this definition, bonds do not qualify as a new revenue source.

If this sounds familiar that is because it is! The criteria for funding consideration under BUILD is a lot like the requirement that the Trump administration included in their proposed infrastructure package earlier this year. As T4America’s analysis of the infrastructure package revealed, this criteria penalizes states and localities who have already raised more local revenue for transportation projects. Why are we penalizing states and cities who acted first?

Since 2012, 31 states have raised new transportation revenues and 12 of those states raised revenue before 2015—mostly by raising or otherwise modifying their gas taxes. Beyond states, many localities like Clayton County, GA and Alameda County, CA raised local funding before 2015 through ballot measures. Even if the taxes or other funding tools are producing new revenue today, if it happened before 2015, the Trump administration doesn’t care. Many of those cities (and the 12 states) would have to raise even more new funding to meet this criteria.

Asking localities to simply kick in more money would do little to guarantee better projects—it’ll just occupy more of the local funding that states or cities could invest elsewhere or spend on long-term maintenance. And the feds shouldn’t be pointing fingers about raising more money. Unlike these states and cities, the federal government hasn’t raised the gas tax (the largest source of federal transportation dollars) since 1993.

Rural communities get shortchanged by BUILD

This is especially problematic for rural communities who already have a difficult time raising new revenue. Many of the sources of new revenue suggested by U.S. DOT—asset recycling, tolling, tax-increment financing—are not feasible in rural areas because there is little to no private demand to finance infrastructure in rural areas because it’s not profitable.

The administration has talked a big game about the need to improve infrastructure in rural areas and this NOFO is on message, saying that’s a priority for this year’s BUILD program. But this new criteria actively makes it harder for rural areas to be competitive for funding because they will struggle to raise new revenue.

With this big change, the BUILD program has already built something: another obstacle to rural communities getting the transportation funding they need.

Background on TIGER

The FY 18 omnibus package enacted into law last month tripled the size of the Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER) program from $500 million to $1.5 billion. The omnibus rejected the president’s proposal to eliminate the TIGER program. This NOFO makes available the $1.5 billion from the omnibus and requires applications to be submitted to USDOT by July 19, 2018.

The TIGER program was one of the only ways that local communities could apply for and directly receive federal dollars for their most needed transportation projects. TIGER enabled the development of complete streets and walkable communities, expanded intermodal access to our nation’s ports, improved our public transit network, made our highway and railway systems more efficient, and helped to strengthen our passenger ferry network. TIGER routinely had requests for three to four times more in funding than was available—making it a very competitive program—and raised $3.6 in additional funding for every dollar appropriated through TIGER. In short, TIGER has been a widely successful and popular program.

T4America members recently got the inside scoop on this next round of TIGER/BUILD via an exclusive webinar with USDOT.

Not yet a member? T4America regularly offers members more in-depth summaries of USDOT actions like this NOFO. In the days ahead, we will be helping members to make their applications more competitive.

Learn more about T4America membership here.

Recent Federal Activity Summary – Week of November 17th

As a valued member, Transportation for America is dedicated to providing you the latest information and developments around federal policy.

Tax Reform

House: On Thursday November 16th, the House of Representatives passed H.R. 1, the “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act,” also known as the Republican’s tax reform package. The bill passed by a vote of 227-205; 227 Republicans voted for the legislation, and 192 Democrats and 13 Republicans voted against the legislation.

What Does this Bill Mean for Transportation?

The bill proposes changes to commuter tax benefits for parking, van pooling, and riding transit and terminates private activity bonds (PAB’s). Employers will no longer be able to deduct or “write off” the subsidy they provide for fringe benefits, including commuting benefits. The bill maintains the ability for employers to provide either a pre-tax benefit or a subsidy. In the case of a subsidy, while the employer can no longer write off this expense, they will not have to pay payroll taxes on the fringe benefit. There is no change to the benefits associated with providing the pre-tax benefit.

Private activity bonds are tax-exempt bonds used to fund a whole range of infrastructure projects that have a “private” use of at least 10%. PAB’s have been used to finance a wide range of infrastructure projects around the country, including roads, highways, housing, hospitals and airports. Recently, PAB’s have been used to fund a lot of transportation projects that are using private public partnerships for financing, including the Purple line in Maryland and the Rapid Bridge Replacement Project in Pennsylvania.

The House’s elimination of PAB’s will greatly harm the ability for state and local governments and private entities to obtain financing and build infrastructure projects that use financing tools, such as toll roads and transit and rail stations. This step is directly at odds with President Donald Trump’s proposal to expand the use of PAB’s to help fulfill his promise to rebuild America’s infrastructure.

Senate: The Senate Finance Committee approved the Senate version of the tax reform package on Thursday November 16th by a party line vote of 14-12. All Republicans voted in favor and all Democrats were opposed. The Senate bill keeps both the commuter benefits and private activity bonds intact, but does eliminate the $20 a month benefit for people who bike to and from work. The House bill also eliminates the bike benefit. T4America is joint signatory of a letter to members of Congress urging them to preserve the bike benefit because it promotes physical activity, reduces traffic congestion and air pollution and promotes walkable communities.

The Senate is scheduled to consider the Senate Republican tax bill when they get back from Thanksgiving recess. Congressional Republicans and the White House hope to have a tax bill on President Trump’s desk by Christmas. It is still unclear whether the Republicans have the votes to pass the tax bill in the Senate. All the Democrats are opposed to the bill so Republicans can only lose two votes and still pass their bill. Right now, Senator Ron Johnson (WI) says he is opposed to the bill in its current form and other senators like Susan Collins (ME), Lisa Murkowski (AK), Bob Corker (TN) and Jeff Flake (AZ) continue to be undecided on if they will support the bill.

One final possible hiccup for the Republican tax reform bill is a congressional budget provision known as the “Pay As You Go” (paygo) rule”. Paygo requires immediate, across-the-board spending reductions to many mandatory programs like Medicare and Medicaid for any bill that reduces taxes and doesn’t fully offset them with revenue increases elsewhere. The GOP tax cut plan would add $1.5 trillion to the debt over the next decade. Under paygo rules, the government would have to make $150 billion in mandatory spending cuts every year for the next 10 years, unless that provision is waived with 60 votes in the Senate, which would require Democratic support. If the Paygo rule is not waived, not only will mandatory spending programs like Medicare take an automatic 4% spending cut, Congress will have to cut a lot of discretionary spending elsewhere to comply with the Paygo rules. Cuts to defense spending are a non political starter right now, so Congress would likely cut from the non-defense discretionary spending accounts. This fact means that funding for popular programs like TIGER, Capital Investment Grants and Amtrak are at risk to be severely cut back or even eliminated entirely if this tax reform bill passes.

The bottom line is that the Republican tax reform bill, especially the House version, will make it harder for state and local governments to make much needed infrastructure investments by stripping away financing tools that governments and private entities rely on. Additionally, the tax bill will potentially lead to devastating discretionary spending cuts that could eliminate programs like TIGER that we fight to fund every year because they are vital to our communities and economies. These two outcomes break the promises made by both the President and Congress to invest more in our infrastructure, not less.

U.S. Department of Transportation (U.S. DOT) Nominations Confirmed

During the week of November 13th, the U.S. Senate confirmed two U.S. DOT nominations. Derek Khan was confirmed to be Undersecretary of Transportation for Policy and Steven Bradbury was confirmed to be General Counsel for U.S. DOT. Mr. Kan’s nomination hearing was held in June and he had bipartisan support, but his nomination was held up by New York and New Jersey Senators concerned over the Trump’s administration’s withdrawal from a non-binding commitment with New York and New Jersey to fund half of the Gateway project. Mr. Kan was confirmed by a vote of 90-7.

Mr. Bradbury was confirmed by vote of 50-47. His nomination was more controversial because of his work at the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice under President George W. Bush. All Democratic Senators and Republican Senators John McCain (AZ) and Rand Paul (KY) opposed Mr. Bradbury’s nomination.

Nomination of Lynn Westmoreland

Additionally, the Senate Commerce and Transportation Committee on November 8th, reported favorably via voice vote the nomination of former Congressman Lynn Westmoreland to the Amtrak Board of Directors. There is no timeline right now for when the full Senate may consider his nomination.

Westmoreland served in Congress for twelve years, including a six-year stint on the Railroads Subcommittee of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. During Westmoreland’s tenure in Congress he voted twice to cut Amtrak’s funding, including a vote for a failed bill in 2009 that would have eliminated all federal funding for the passenger railroad.

At a confirmation hearing in the Senate Commerce Committee on October 31, Westmoreland said he does support Amtrak funding, but that “the Board should look at the long-distance routes” and “should shutter these ‘unprofitable’ routes.” In his response to written questions from Senator Roger Wicker (R-MS), a member of the committee, about his votes to cut funding for Amtrak’s long distance routes, Westmoreland deflected and said his vote for the 2015 FAST Act demonstrates his support for Amtrak because it “reauthorized funding for Amtrak.”

Amtrak will only survive politically if it is a robust national system that serves as many states and communities as possible. Mr. Westmoreland has not adequately justified his prior votes to cut Amtrak funding and considering his Senate Commerce Committee testimony; we remain extremely concerned about Mr. Westmoreland’s commitment to funding long distance train routes. Given the vital importance of long distance Amtrak routes and Mr. Westmoreland’s record in opposition to those routes, we don’t think he is a good fit for the Amtrak board.

Sign-on letter to support transit capital funding

Reps. Earl Blumenauer (D-OR) and Jackie Walorski (R-IN) are leading a sign-on letter calling for funding for the transit Capital Investment Grant program in the FY2018 federal funding bill. These champions are collecting signatures on this important letter, which they will then send the to senior appropriators and leadership. Please let your Representatives know how important transit funding is to your region and encourage them to sign on to this letter. We will keep you updated on the timing of the appropriations process and negotiations.

Recent Federal Activity Summary – Week of November 6th

As a valued member, Transportation for America is dedicated to providing you the latest information and developments around federal policy. This dedication includes in-depth summaries of what is going on in Congress and the U.S. Department of Transportation (U.S. DOT). Check out what you may have missed these past two weeks in Congress and at U.S. DOT.

Amtrak opponent Rep. Lynn Westmoreland nominated to Amtrak board of directors

On October 6 President Trump nominated former congressman Lynn Westmoreland to the Amtrak Board of Directors.

During Westmoreland’s tenure in Congress he voted twice to cut Amtrak’s funding, including a vote for a failed bill in 2009 that would have eliminated all federal funding for the passenger railroad.

At a confirmation hearing in the Senate Commerce Committee on October 31, Westmoreland said he does support Amtrak funding, but that “the Board should look at the long-distance routes” and “should shutter these ‘unprofitable’ routes.”

In response to a question from Sen. Cory Booker (D-New Jersey), Westmoreland said he supported funding the Gateway tunnel project between New Jersey and New York.

In a questionnaire for the committee, Westmoreland said the biggest priorities for Amtrak were “encouraging individuals to choose its service over other competing methods of transportation”; maintaining safety and security; and “building out the high-speed rail plans it currently has.”

Westmoreland served in Congress for twelve years, including a six-year stint on the Railroads Subcommittee of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.

Tax reform package

On November 2 the House Ways and Means Committee released the “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act,” the Republican’s tax reform package.

The bill proposes changes to commuter tax benefits for parking, van pooling, and riding transit. The bill eliminates the ability of employers to deduct or “write off” the subsidy they provide for fringe benefits, including commuting benefits. The bill maintains the ability for employers to provide either a pre-tax benefit or a subsidy. In the case of a subsidy, while the employer can no longer write off this expense, they will not have to pay payroll taxes on the fringe benefit. There is no change to the benefits associated with providing the pre-tax benefit.

Sign-on letter to support transit capital funding

Reps. Earl Blumenauer (D-OR) and Jackie Walorski (R-IN) are leading a sign-on letter calling for funding for the transit Capital Investment Grant program in the FY2018 federal funding bill. These champions are collecting signers until the November 9 deadline and then will send the request to senior appropriators and leadership. Please let your Representatives know how important transit funding is to your region and encourage them to sign on to this letter.

T4America opposing USDOT rollback of greenhouse gas rule

T4America has submitted a comment opposing USDOT’s proposal to rescind a federal requirement for states and MPOs to measure their carbon emissions as part of a larger system of accountability for federal transportation spending.

Our comment in opposition focuses on three issues:

  1. FHWA had legal authority to adopt the Greenhouse Gas (GHG) measure;
  2. The Proposed Rule fails to account for the overwhelming benefits of the GHG measure and is inconsistent with the approach taken in related executive orders and rulemakings and the public welfare; and
  3. Establishing a performance measure for GHG emissions is good governance and smart transportation policy.

The 2012 transportation law MAP-21 required transportation agencies to begin using a new system of performance measures to govern how federal dollars are spent and hold them accountable for making progress on important goals, like congestion, traffic fatalities, reliability, road/bridge condition, mode share and carbon emissions. For two years, USDOT worked to establish this new system, soliciting reams of public feedback, and finalizing the measures in January of this year. T4America worked to ensure that new performance measures would account for all people using the transportation system and supported measuring carbon emissions from the transportation system. Climate impacts aside, tracking carbon emissions is one of the best ways to judge how efficiently the transportation network is moving people and goods. If USDOT drops this measure, we will lose an important metric for determining who is using their funding to most efficiently connect people with destinations and move goods to market.

The Trump administration first attempted to revoke the greenhouse gas performance measure without public input but was sued by environmental groups. USDOT has launched a new rulemaking to propose removing the rule. T4America’s comment opposes revoking the requirement that transportation agencies measure carbon emissions.

 

USDOT is trying to eliminate a new requirement to track carbon emissions from transportation

USDOT is attempting to rescind a federal requirement for states and metro areas to measure their carbon emissions as part of a larger system of accountability for federal transportation spending.

This is from last year’s campaign about the measure for congestion, but the principle holds here: If buses are prioritized because of emissions targets, for example, a road can move more people more efficiently and with fewer emissions.

Update: The comment period has closed and we submitted a large batch of letters to USDOT. Check the blog for updates.

The 2012 transportation law (MAP-21) required transportation agencies to begin using a new system of performance measures to govern how federal dollars are spent and hold them accountable for making progress on important goals, like congestion, traffic fatalities, reliability, road/bridge condition, mode share and carbon emissions. For two years, USDOT worked to establish this new system, soliciting reams of public feedback, and finalizing the measures in January of this year.

Climate impacts aside, tracking carbon emissions is one of the best ways to judge how efficiently we’re moving people and goods. More on that in a minute.

The Trump Administration is attempting to repeal this carbon emissions measure. Take action and provide an official comment to USDOT in support of keeping it intact. (Official notice here)

TAKE ACTION

You may have been one of the thousands of folks who joined our coalition to successfully push USDOT to revise their measure for congestion and put value on providing transit, shared rides and safe walking or biking — rather than just incentivizing the construction of more expensive road capacity in every case in a vain attempt to “solve” congestion. During that process, we also succeeded in pushing USDOT to consider and include a carbon emissions measure to track the percent change in CO2 emissions generated by on-road mobile sources on most of our bigger roadways.

After first attempting to rescind the rule directly by fiat, USDOT was sued by environmental groups, and rightly so — once federal rules are implemented, they can only be undone by Congress or by a new rulemaking process that allows public feedback. So USDOT backed down and is going through the official channels, which means opening up a new comment period where interested groups and citizens can weigh in and urge them to preserve this CO2 rule as part of the new performance measure system.

But we’ll have to act fast — we need to have your letters by Monday, November 6, at noon, so we can deliver them before the deadline.

Measuring carbon emissions is a good yardstick for how efficiently a state or metro area is moving people and goods. Emissions will almost certainly go up if you’re only building new highways and not providing a wide range of transportation options in a congested corridor or region. Agencies should be encouraged — or at least rewarded — for finding ways to invest their transportation dollars so that trips can be taken on transit, on foot or by bike, or coordinated with land use so that trips can be shorter altogether. Measuring carbon emissions doesn’t give you the entire picture, but it is another valuable piece of the puzzle for evaluating the effectiveness of the spending decisions made by states and metro areas.

If USDOT manages to dump this measure, we will lose an important metric for determining who is using their funding to most efficiently connect people with destinations and move goods to market. Shouldn’t states and cities be aiming to move people more efficiently, emitting less carbon per trip? Or, if they decide that less efficiency is the way to go, shouldn’t taxpayers at least have a mechanism for tracking that and holding them accountable?

This administration is attempting to let transportation agencies make decisions while hiding the emission impacts from the public, removing a valuable metric for assessing how they’re spending your dollars. Let them know that we, the people who are paying for the transportation system, deserve to know what we are getting.

Comments are due by the end of the day on November 6. Click here to sign a letter that we’ll produce and deliver on your behalf.

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For those of you who prefer to submit comments on your own, you can do so through the official rulemaking on Regulations.gov here and you can grab the letter text from our page here to paste in.