Streetsblog Capitol Hill

I know I said I wasn’t going to post during my vacation, but I thought you’d be interested in this new report from the FHWA, and, perhaps more notably, the Republican reaction to it. The agency just submitted a report to Congress on the use of highway shoulder lanes as traffic lanes. (It’s not online, or we’d link to it.) Update: here it is. [PDF]

The report, written by the FHWA and the Texas Transportation Institute, recommended setting clearer agency guidance on using shoulders for traffic. Incoming Transportation Committee Chair John Mica (R-FL) heralded the idea as a way to “achieve cost savings by better utilizing existing highway capacity.” He emphasized that he’s not interested in ”paving over America’s landscape.”

Expanding the existing footprint of our nation’s highway system can be costly and time consuming.  Our interstates have become parking lots and this report confirms low cost and effective solutions exist to relieve congestion.  By using existing highway footprints and right-of-way, States will have another effective, low cost means to reduce congestion and enhance mobility.

Encouraging words, to an extent. But the FHWA report, while acknowledging potential benefits for alleviating traffic congestion, says the safety impacts of opening shoulder lanes to traffic are unclear. Europeans have gained safety benefits by utilizing shoulder lanes, the report says, but “the shoulder use is only a part of a much larger investment in ATM [Advanced Traffic Management] technology and resources to manage them.”

In the U.S., where they have been studied, safety impacts have been negative. “There have been longer incident clearance times in areas that don’t have shoulders available to move incidents off the highway. Also, responders don’t have the benefit of traveling the shoulder to reach the incident scene.”

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The trade group representing private-sector transportation contractors is urging the Obama administration to change the way environmental reviews are conducted for infrastructure projects, proposing to favor "categorical exclusions" (CEs) from federal review rules over the lengthier process of measuring the environmental impact of construction work.

In a letter sent Friday to the White House Council on Environmental Quality, which released new guidance on CEs [PDF] earlier this year, the American Road & Transportation Builders Association (ARTBA) lamented that the existing law governing federal environmental reviews -- the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA -- is too vague on the circumstances that would require infrastructure project planners to pursue a quicker CE as opposed to the costlier option of a full-scale review.

As a result, ARTBA President T. Peter Ruane wrote, local planners often "opt for the more time consuming [environmental review] in order to avoid potential litigation at a later time." Legal challenges citing NEPA, filed by green advocates as well as their conservative critics, have delayed work on transportation projects of all stripes in recent years.

Ruane continued in his letter to the White House:

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A new month begins today without rules in place to govern federal transportation programs, thanks to an objection by Sen. Jim Bunning (R-KY) to quick approval of a short-term extension of existing law.

The consequences of the delay could include forced furloughs for nearly 2,000 U.S. DOT employees, according to an agency release this morning, as well as a shutdown of federal funding for road, bridge, bike-ped, and transit projects. The processing of money for stimulus construction work and state-based road safety groups such as Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) are also set for an interruption.

Nevertheless, the situation remains fluid. House transportation committee chairman Jim Oberstar (D-MN) has secured a promise that future Senate legislation will assuage his panel's frustration with a provision in the pending jobs bill that would apply 2009 earmarks to $932 million in 2010 transportation grants.

That agreement helps pave the way for House passage of the Senate jobs bill, perhaps as soon as Tuesday. If both chambers can agree quickly on that jobs bill, which would extend the 2005 federal transport law until 2011, the flow of federal funding for local projects likely would turn back on without senators having to break through Bunning's one-man filibuster.

"We hope Congress can move this legislation as early in the week as possible so reimbursements to the states can resume," John Horsley, executive director of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO), said in a statement late Friday.

In the meantime, Oberstar's committee has released a rundown of how the imperiled extension would affect U.S. infrastructure programs. Check it out after the jump.

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Congressional efforts to set national goals for the American transportation system are stalled for now, but the U.S. DOT said today that it is preparing for an eventual transition to a world where performance targets are the norm for transit, roads, bridges, and ports.

 

"National goals should be set by U.S. DOT in collaboration with states and stakeholders," Federal Highway Administration executive director Jeffrey Paniatti said yesterday during a session of the Transportation Research Board (TRB) conference.

But how will Washington measure progress on transportation metrics such as safety, pollution reduction, and efficiency in states that are, as Paniatti put it gently, "starting from different places"?

Pete Rahn, the chief of Missouri's state DOT and past president of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO), had a simple answer: States should be in charge of the process.

"We believe there should be a state-driven performance management approach," Rahn told TRB attendees, in which "states establish targets which they can deliver given their unique circumstances."

At AASHTO, he added, "we don't envision a process in which the Secretary of the U.S. DOT will dole out a share of a target to each state ... U.S. DOT would establish targets and we'd certainly hope that the total cumulative balance of state targets would equal the national [goal]."

If state-written targets don't meet national performance standards, "that means the national target is not realistic," according to Rahn.

AASHTO's lack of interest in meeting transportation goals that are not written within their ranks could create a major headache for the Obama administration, should it pursue broader infrastructure reform that would hold state DOTs accountable for their spending.

Letting states craft performance measures internally would risk rigging the system to ensure that DOTs always meet their targets -- but if the federal government wanted to effect broader change on a state or regional level, such as lower emissions or fewer pedestrian deaths, where would it get leverage?

Both Paniatti and Rahn ruled out any attempt to threaten a loss of federal transportation funding if goals were not met, a tactic successfully used in the 1980s to set the national speed limit at 55 miles per hour.

In fact, Rahn fondly recalled his past work at a state DOT that successfully gamed the speed-limit system. "We chose to put our speed sensors in really sharp corners," he told the TRB audience, drawing sporadic chuckles. "That's why [the push for national transportation targets] has to be a project we work on together."

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The short answer: Maybe.

As Congress rushed to give itself one more month to break the House-Senate stalemate over federal transportation policy, one matter was left unattended -- the $8.7 billion in un-obligated highway aid that's scheduled to start evaporating on Thursday unless lawmakers act to correct the matter.

Sen. Jim Inhofe (OK), the senior Republican on the environment committee, issued a frustrated press release today warning that his state would lose 1,350 jobs if the $8.7 billion were not reinserted by the Senate before the 2005 transportation law expires tomorrow night.

But time is running out; although environment committee chairman Barbara Boxer (D-CA) promised in July that she would prevent the $8.7 billion from being rescinded, that was before House infrastructure committee chairman Jim Oberstar (D-MN) secured passage of a short-term transportation law extension that did not address the highway money.

Under House rules that require new spending to be offset, Oberstar's short-term measure would have had to find a way to raise the $8.7 billion in road money -- and instead of tackling that tough question, the bill didn't address it.

Governors and highway officials are lobbying fiercely to prevent the money from being revoked, but a resolution may not come before the Senate takes up the House's one-month transportation stopgap. The U.S. DOT would then have to resort to creative measures to prevent states from canceling projects, with about $1 billion per month potentially on the chopping block, according to the road lobby.

We tend to have a few good laughs when Randal O'Toole fires up his Cato computer and weighs in on transportation issues. It's hard to take seriously a man who thinks that having the government tax people to build something which it then gives away for free is the libertarian ideal.

But occasionally O'Toole provides an opportunity to discuss some interesting aspects of the transportation planning process and learn from his errors. And so we turn to his latest policy paper, which was released yesterday. Therein, he writes:

The Interstate Highway System accomplished all of this [construction of the system] without any subsidies. Federal highway user fees paid for 90 percent of the cost of the system, and state highway user fees covered virtually all of the remaining 10 percent.

This brings up an interesting question: What is a user fee? Common sense would suggest that a user fee is a fee paid by a user of something in order to use that something. A common example might be a train fare. When one wants to ride a train, one purchases a ticket. One doesn't purchase a ticket if one doesn't want to ride the train, and one doesn't ride the train without a ticket. A ticket is specifically meant to extract a fee from a potential user, that that user might then be allowed to use the train.

So do gas taxes count as highway user fees? Well, one might pay gas taxes even if one never uses highways. You pay the gas tax on gas used to drive down local roads or private driveways, or to power lawnmowers and tractors that never even see publicly-funded blacktop.

And one can use highways without ever paying gas taxes. Anyone able to obtain a vehicle powered by natural gas or electric batteries or canola oil can ride on the federal highway system for thousands of miles and never pay one cent to do so.

So gas taxes are not user fees. Indeed, the lack of actual user fees is one reason American highways suffer from severe congestion problems; when you give away something valuable for free -- like scarce highway space -- it ends up seriously over-consumed.

As a thought experiment, let's consider a world in which federal gas taxes functioned more like a user fee. That is, let's imagine that when drivers fill up, they pay a federal gas tax only on the gasoline consumed while driving on federal highways. That's still not really a user fee, but it's a little closer.

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Victor Mendez, nominated by the White House to lead the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), spent more than an hour this morning with the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee -- but the most illuminating moment in the hearing came as the clock was running down.

Sen. Thomas Carper (D-DE) asked the nominee a simple question: What does Mendez, a former Arizona state DOT director and ex-president of AASHTO, think of recent legislation codifying "complete streets" principles and expanding the "Safe Routes to School" program on childhood bike and pedestrian safety?

Mendez, whose legacy in Arizona centers on a massive Phoenix freeway project, wavered a bit. Both ideas "fit neatly into what I believe is Secretary LaHood's livability concept," Mendez replied, describing Safe Routes to School as a good thing for his state but not addressing "complete streets" directly.

Though Carper was openly dissatisfied with the answer, he moved on to an even simpler question: Given that previous hikes in auto fuel-efficiency standards have ultimately led to more driving (and increased congestion), does Mendez think that lowering carbon emissions from the transportation sector should be a goal of the upcoming climate change bill?

Theoretically, it should have been easy for Mendez to endorse that concept, especially on the same day that his future boss blogged on the benefits of transit. But if the future highways chief encouraged decreasing transportation emissions, then -- horrors! -- he might be open to the transit sector's plea for a share of the emissions allocations in the climate bill.

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