Streetsblog Capitol Hill

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood announced yesterday that 32,885 people lost their lives on our nation’s roads in 2010. While a staggering toll, this represents the lowest total number of traffic fatalities since 1949. “We’re making historic progress when it comes to improving safety on our nation’s roadways,” said LaHood in a statement, also pointing out that the decrease in deaths came even as Americans are driving more [PDF].

Photo: The North Iowa Journal

The traffic crash and fatality rates in this country are indeed at historic lows, especially given the staggering amount of driving Americans do on a yearly basis. In 2005, the most recent year to have shown an increase in highway fatalities, there were 14.7 traffic deaths for every 100,000 U.S. residents. In 2010, that number had fallen to 10.7 deaths, a difference of approximately 10,000 fewer fatalities annually. (USDOT measures the death rate not by population but by vehicle miles traveled, also showing a dramatic improvement, from 1.5 deaths per million VMT to 1.1 over the same period. Interestingly, while total VMT rose in 2010, per-capita driving declined.)

The news was grimmer for people outside of a car than for drivers and passengers. Improved motor vehicle safety features were likely a factor in the lower fatality rate, according to the Boston Herald, but those same features mean little to non-occupants. After several progressively safer years, 2010 saw a 4.2 percent increase in pedestrian deaths—to 4,280, a difference of 171 human lives—and a whopping increase of about 11,000 nonfatal injuries. Bicycle deaths decreased 1.6 percent, but bike injury rates didn’t change at all. Clearly, safety gains for motorists have not extended to more vulnerable road users.

Furthermore, while it is certainly good news that traffic is claiming thousands fewer lives each year, 32,885 is a staggering number. It is roughly equivalent to 70 full jumbo jets crashing and leaving no survivors, or equal to the population of Juneau, AK or Dover, DE. There is enormous room for improvement: The fatality rate in the U.S. still pales beside leading countries like Japan (3.85 traffic deaths per 100,000) and Germany (4.5), which also happen to have much lower rates of driving than the U.S.

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Transit providers in Detroit, Miami, Seattle and Bloomington, Indiana were a few of the many winners in the latest round of Federal Transit Administration capital grants.

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood was in Detroit Monday to announce almost $1 billion in transit grants to local agencies across the country. Photo: USDOT

On Monday, FTA awarded almost $1 billion to local transit agencies to purchase buses, construct shelters and plan for the future [PDF].

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood announced the grants in Detroit Monday alongside Mayor Dave Bing and Michigan Governor Rick Snyder.

Transit agencies throughout the state of Michigan were awarded $46 million, including $2 million for Detroit to study expanding its planned Woodward Avenue light rail line into the suburbs past Eight Mile Road.

The city of Detroit’s Department of Transportation was also awarded $6 million to purchase new buses. Meanwhile, Detroit’s suburban bus system, SMART, received $5 million to update its fleet.

“This is a significant investment in Michigan’s future,” said Snyder. “A modern transportation system is key to a stronger economy and enhanced quality of life in our state.”

Elsewhere around the country, Sound Transit in Seattle will receive $5.4 million to buy hybrid buses, and the South Florida Regional Transit Agency will receive $4.5 million to replace its shuttle buses with vehicles that run on alternative fuel. These vehicles link public transportation centers with the airport, hospitals and universities in the Miami-Dade area, according to Environmental News Service.

In one of the smaller grants, Bloomington, Indiana received almost $30,000 to purchase lockers for cyclists at a new downtown transfer station.

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In about an hour, Congressional appropriators will vote on how much money to allocate for transportation in the next fiscal year. It won’t be pretty.

This smiling man (THUD Chair Tom Latham) is getting ready to take the axe to prized livability programs. Photo: Iowa Independent

The House Appropriations Subcommittee on Transportation, Housing and Urban Development (THUD) is planning deep cuts to many programs, some reminiscent of House Budget Committee Chair Paul Ryan’s notorious budget proposal, which wanted to slash transportation spending by about a third.

The subcommittee is led by Iowa Republican Tom Latham, whom we profiled when he took the gavel. At the time, we were worried he would end up cutting important livability programs, and here he is, doing exactly that.

At least transit and highway spending share the pain, both getting cut the same 34 percent. Highway funding goes from about $41 billion to $27 billion; transit funding (excluding New Starts) goes from $8.3 billion to $5.3 billion.

Bizarrely, the bill regresses to a pre-cooperation era and returns to the age of agency silos. One great accomplishment of the Obama administration has been the Sustainable Communities Partnership which joined USDOT, HUD and the EPA to work together on common development programs, planning inexorably linked programs of housing and transportation in conjunction with each other, and in consultation with the environmental regulator. But the appropriations bill prohibits HUD from using any funding for anything related to the Partnership.

In his excellent analysis of the dismal news, Transportation for America’s Stephen Lee Davis also delivers this blow: the innovative TIGER grants, TIGGER grants and high-speed rail programs are cut entirely. And more, Davis writes:
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Senators in Appropriations have to ask, Who rides the train cross-country anymore? Photo: Pignouf

The idyllic cross-country train trips that many Americans still take could get derailed by today’s “slash and burn” federal budget policies. Meanwhile, fears for the safety of rail passengers in the post-bin Laden era are drumming up political support for costly security measures and raising, once again, questions about why the federal government funds rail routes without any promise of profitability.

At this morning’s Senate Appropriations hearing on budget requests for the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) and Amtrak, the three senators in attendance were unified in their support for funding rail transportation. They’re working on the funding request for the FRA for 2012, not the rail piece of the overall transportation reauthorization. Still, with huge disagreements over spending levels in Congress still raging and a showdown looming over cuts as a quid-pro-quo for raising the debt ceiling, next year’s funding is a significant question.

So the three senators present wanted to know how they could be expected to defend rail funding without more transparency in the budget allocation process. They also asked pointed questions about what the administrators of the FRA and Amtrak were doing to keep riders safe from the terrorist attacks threatened by Al-Qaeda.

The FRA has taken on a greater role in the allocation of funding for rail projects over the last several years and senators appeared frustrated over a lack of clear information as to where the funding would come from. Indeed, some security projects appear in the FY2012 budget request but the FRA is also requesting a USDOT loan to for the same thing.

Transportation Appropriations Subcommittee Chair Patty Murray (D-WA) was quick to commend FRA Administrator Joseph Szabo for his efforts, but called him out for not improving transparency about how, when, where and why projects are funded.  “I support investments,” she made clear. “Now is the time to address critics head on. We must communicate with the people.”

Murray and Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) presented a grim future for surface transportation if funding does not keep up pace with booming population growth. The only other senator to speak, ranking Republican Susan Collins of Maine, agreed and reminded her colleagues that the ambitious national rail plan proposed by the FRA, including high-speed rail, has yet to be followed up with any cost estimates, for construction or operations.

Szabo, for his part, could only promise that studies to be released within “the next couple of months” would present the “broader business case” for funding both high-speed rail and individual projects across the country. Szabo, the first union railman to hold his position, was proud of what his agency was doing to keep hazardous freight secure – but admitted that there are still unimplemented security measures that date back to 9/11.  He pointed out that for every $50 spent on aviation security, only $1 went to surface transportation.

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With multiple versions of two years’ worth of federal budgets flying around, some details are still emerging about what’s in and what’s out. At the end of last week we heard that the FY2011 budget, which has been sent to the president for his signature, includes $100 million for the Partnership for Sustainable Communities. According to HUD Sustainable Communities Director Shelley Poticha, the partnership was allocated $70 million for regional planning grants ($17.5 million is slated for regions with populations of less than 500,000) and $30 million for Community Challenge planning grants.

Chicago's GO TO 2040 plan to link transportation, land use, and economic development was awarded a $4.25 million Regional Planning grant from HUD last October. Image: CMAP

That’s still a significant reduction from the $150 million the partnership had last year, but in this time of shrinking budgets, it’s a lot more than some livability advocates feared. If the Sustainable Communities program had been killed in this budget, it would have been all the more difficult to revive it for inclusion in the upcoming reauthorization of the transportation bill.

The president wants to keep the partnership going, and indeed, within the administration and among reformers, the funding for the partnership is seen as a money-saver, consolidating duplicative agency programs, cutting through red tape, and using outcome-based metrics to identify and fund effective projects. Still, it’s an administration program labeled “livability” and was, therefore, extremely vulnerable to the GOP ax.

The Partnership for Sustainable Communities is the name for the coordination among DOT, EPA, and HUD to promote planning and infrastructure investment according to their six tenets of livability: transportation choices, affordable housing, economic competitiveness, support for existing communities, coordination of federal policies and investing in healthy communities. The two planning grant programs, which are funded and managed out of HUD, are a centerpiece of the entire partnership. The other main part of it, TIGER, is run through the DOT and also saw the bulk of its funding — the lion’s share of TIGER, if you will – preserved (perhaps somewhat surprisingly, in the current budget bill), suffering only a 12 percent cut.

Meanwhile, transit capital funding (the FTA’s New Starts program) was reduced by about a quarter, high-speed rail was zeroed out completely, Amtrak took about a 10 percent hit, and TIGGER (a greenhouse gas reduction program for transit) got cut from $75 million to $50 million.

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Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood likes to remind critics that there have been no reports of “boondoggles” or “sweetheart deals” related to transportation stimulus funds. He’s proud that the money has been put to the uses it was intended for.

Are House Republicans confusing TIGER's equitable geographic distribution with a lack of accountability? Map by Transportation for America.

Two GAO reports being released today largely bolster LaHood’s claims that the funding was allocated based on merit and according to published criteria. But the GAO points out a few places where DOT transparency could have been better, and House Transportation Committee Republicans have pounced.

“President Obama promised the American people that his administration would be the picture of transparency and openness, but reality betrays his rhetoric,” said Railroads Subcommittee Chair Bill Shuster (R-PA).

Full Committee Chair John Mica (R-FL) added, “The rationale for the Administration’s awards of billions of dollars under a failed high-speed rail program remains shrouded in mystery.”

But a closer examination of the GAO reports – one on the high-speed rail grants [PDF] and one on TIGER [PDF] – reveals a much softer nudge toward better documentation, not an all-out condemnation of administration record-keeping. Indeed, the title of the TIGER study, “Competitive Grant Programs Could Benefit from Increased Performance Focus and Better Documentation of Key Decisions,” highlights the advantages of programs like TIGER in allocating funds based on merit – a method the GAO has long advocated.

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A powwow between Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, President Obama, and House Speaker John Boehner last night failed to yield a compromise that would put a budget in place before the government shuts down at midnight tonight. The failure of yet another attempt to negotiate makes a government shutdown all but inevitable.

A government shutdown could empty out the D.C. metro system. Photo: Examiner

Just a month ago, AASHTO sounded the warning that the transportation sector could lose up to $100 million a day in case of a shutdown. However, Congress’s extension of SAFETEA-LU through the end of the fiscal year (September 30) has put their minds at ease. Now, AASHTO spokesperson Tony Dorsey says spending for federal highway programs will continue unabated, despite a shutdown. “At this point,” Dorsey said, “we’re not anticipating any issues.” Still, he said, they’re hoping that “should there be a shutdown, it will be a very, very short one.”

But that’s not the whole story. According to a detailed DOT shutdown plan, the vast majority of the Federal Transit Administration would shut down, keeping only 54 out of 575 positions working. Already-awarded stimulus grants would continue to receive oversight and the Lower Manhattan Recovery Office would continue to function. The $270 million that the FTA normally remits to transit agencies every week would cease.

Jeff Rosenberg, government affairs director for the Amalgamated Transit Union, says the SAFETEA-LU extension only continues government’s authority to pay for transportation programs. But “if the FTA isn’t authorized to open the door,” he says, those payments will cease. That could be especially damaging for smaller metros that receive operating assistance, not just capital funds, from the feds. However, he’s hopeful that a potential shutdown would only last a couple of days and would just be “a blip on the screen.”

What else can you expect to happen if the government does shut down as of midnight tonight?

• At least 800,000 federal employees would be furloughed immediately. That would cause a massive drop in transit ridership, especially here in D.C., where Metro is predicting a five to 20 percent drop in case of a shutdown. Michael Perkins of Greater Greater Washington estimates that this would result in a loss for Metro of a quarter million dollars a day.
• Amtrak’s federal subsidies – up in the air for months now anyway as Congress debates whether to eliminate them, reduce them, or maintain them – will stop. However, Amtrak CEO Joe Boardman recently assured employees that the rail operator can keep going on ticket revenue alone in the short term.
• The Federal Highway Administration will stay open, with no positions furloughed, according to the DOT shutdown plan. The FHWA is funded with contract authority and has enough funds available to operate in that way for about a month.

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Florida Governor Rick Scott announced today he would forfeit $2 billion in federal grants to build a high-speed rail line between Orlando and Tampa.

Florida Governor Rick Scott: hot on road spending, cool on rail. Photo: Joe My God

The announcement ended months of speculation about whether Scott would join fellow Republican Governors John Kasich (Ohio) and Scott Walker (Wisconsin) in turning down federal funds for expanding passenger rail in the U.S. — an important initiative of the Obama administration.

In his announcement, Scott included a lengthy indictment of President Obama’s policies and recently-released 2012 budget.

“We cannot expect individuals to build businesses in America if our taxes are higher than other countries,” he said. “Let us never forget, whether it is Washington or Tallahassee, government has no resources of its own. Government can only give to us what it has previously taken from us.”

But, like his counterparts in the Midwest, Scott does not seem to favor an equally austere approach for the state’s highways.

“Rather than investing in a high-risk rail project, we should be focusing on improving our ports, rail and highway infrastructure to be in a position to attract the increased shipping that will result when the Panama Canal is expanded,” he said.

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From bus rapid transit in Michigan to light rail in Arizona, ten new local transit projects are in line to receive federal capital funding under the President’s 2012 Budget proposal.

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood today released a list of 10 new projects in nine cities that would receive a total of $569 million in funding under the president’s $556 billion, six-year transportation package. Also slated for federal support are 11 other projects that had been selected for federal funding in previous years but had not received commitments, including light rail in San Francisco and a busway in Connecticut. The president’s total proposal of $3.2 billion in capital funding for transit would also support seven projects, from New York to Dallas, that have been receiving ongoing federal funding.

Bus-Rapid-Transit, pictured here in Curitiba, Brazil, will get a big boost nationally under President Obama's 2012 budget proposal. Image: Before It's News

“As President Obama made clear in his State of the Union Address, we must win the future by investing in a modern transportation network that will enable us to out-compete the rest of the world,” LaHood said. “The projects we are proposing to Congress are an important down payment on the President’s promise to strengthen our transportation networks for the 21st century.”

New projects that would be green-lighted under the President’s proposal include:

• San Jose, California: Silicon Valley Berryessa Extension Project, a 10.2-mile heavy rail project would extend BART adding two stations.
• Portland, Oregon: Portland-Milwaukie Light Rail Project, a 7.3 mile light rail extension of TriMet’s Yellow Line.
• Salt Lake County, Utah: Draper Transit Corridor, a 2.8-mile extension of TRAX light rail with three stations, which would operate on an abandoned railroad.

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Before President Obama made his call for infrastructure investment in the State of the Union address last night, an impressive panel of about a dozen DOT officials addressed the Transportation Research Board’s annual meeting to divulge what they could about the reauthorization of the long-term national transportation law.

U.S. DOT Undersecretary for Policy Roy Kienitz. Photo: Southern Governors Association/Flickr

Secretary Ray LaHood has said he’s confident we’ll have a transportation bill by August, and Rep. John Mica (R-FL), chair of the House Transportation Committee responsible for moving the bill, seems to agree with that timeline.

The current extension expires March 4, so expect yet another extension. Mica has said that he’s prioritizing the Federal Aviation Administration reauthorization above the surface transportation bill (the FAA has been stuck in an even more interminable cycle of extensions than SAFETEA-LU – 17 and counting). But Mica is hoping to get it moving before the August recess because, as one trucking industry lobbyist told the Journal of Commerce, “once we get past August, we start getting into a presidential cycle.”

Roy Kienitz, undersecretary for policy at U.S. DOT, outlined six themes for the TRB audience that the development of a new transportation bill will center around (all category names are straight from Kienitz):

1. Modal silos vs. multimodalism. “One of our original TIGER Grants was the Moynihan station reconstruction project in New York,” Kienitz said. “In looking into it, we found they had FRA money, they had FTA money, they had a Federal Highway Administration earmark, and we were about to give them a TIGER grant. And, of course, they had separate cooperative agreements with each one of our agencies to administer each one of the grants and we were about to write a fourth one. So, one of the principles of multimodalism is, you shouldn’t have to have four cooperative agreements with the United States Department of Transportation in order to implement one project.”
2. Fewer vs. more methods of assistance. Federal transportation funding used to be simpler: There was formula money distributed to states and other public entities, and there were earmarks secured by individual lawmakers. Now there’s a whole alphabet soup of grants and loans and credit assistance programs. U.S. DOT wants to broaden some of the new programs like TIGER and somewhat older ones like TIFIA, and they want to create new ones, like that National Infrastructure Bank, which, more and more, everyone talks about like it’s a done deal.

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