Streetsblog Capitol Hill

These numbers, from the Office of Management and Budget, indicate that the Highway Account of the Highway Trust fund is in better fiscal shape than previously thought. So why are senators still chasing after $12 billion? Source: OMB

Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) and his Finance Committee have been looking high and low for a $12 billion patch to fund the transportation reauthorization bill that passed the Senate EPW Committee a few weeks ago. According to Politico’s transportation reporters, the top Republican on the Finance Committee, Sen. Orrin Hatch, has already rejected several of Baucus’s ideas.

But the question is not only, “How will we get the money?” It’s also, “How much money do we need?” The dollar amount the Senate is seeking could lavish more money than necessary on roads while leaving transit out in the cold.

The EPW Committee wants to hold transportation spending at current levels (plus inflation), which they estimate at $109 billion over two years. Receipts into the Highway Trust Fund (from gas taxes and other vehicle fees) aren’t expected to be sufficient to pay that bill. The Congressional Budget Office told the committee that the HTF is $12 billion short of the amount needed to fully fund the bill. That amount is destined just for highways, based on projections that the Mass Transit Account will be solvent through the end of 2013 – in fact, ending that year with a $1.5 billion balance.

But last month, the two top members of the Senate Banking Committee, which has jurisdiction over transit, asked FTA Administrator Peter Rogoff for confirmation of those numbers [PDF]. Rogoff replied that he, in fact, found another set of numbers to be more accurate [PDF].

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Two weeks ago, every option for reconstructing the Tappan Zee Bridge posted on the state's project website showed both a bus line and a rail line. Now, all the documents showing transit across the bridge have disappeared. Image: Tappan Zee Bridge website, captured by Streetsblog

Call it the mystery of the missing transit. One of New York state’s biggest transit projects, in the works for nearly a decade, was canceled overnight and no one will explain why, or even claim responsibility for the decision.

Two weeks ago, each of the four alternatives for replacing the Tappan Zee Bridge, which spans the Hudson River north of New York City, connecting the suburban counties of Rockland and Westchester, included a new Metro-North commuter rail line and some form of bus rapid transit. The project called for widening the highway but also included a major expansion of transit in both counties. It was the product of nine years of study and a whopping 280 public meetings. The whole process was thoroughly documented, with information about each alternative — along with hundreds of pages generated by the environmental review process and public commentary — easily found on the state’s Tappan Zee Bridge website.

On October 11, the Federal Highway Administration and Governor Andrew Cuomo’s office announced that the bridge project had been selected for expedited federal review. The project they promised to speed up, however, was vastly different from the one vetted over the course of nearly a decade. The new plan for the bridge promised to add space for car traffic but left the transit component to be completed at an unspecified future date. Transit advocates are skeptical that the commuter rail and BRT lines will ever see the light of day.

At the same time that transit was removed from the plan, the state expunged from the public record all information about the nine-year public process and the four design alternatives that included rail and bus lines. The Tappan Zee website no longer displays the documents it did two weeks ago, as blogger Cap’n Transit first noted. The endorsement of transit, the extensive environmental analysis, the history of public input — all of it gone, replaced by three short documents chronicling the brief history of the transit-free project.

So much for transparency. Kate Slevin, executive director of the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, said she couldn’t recall a single example of this kind of wholesale document scrubbing.

In addition to hiding the history of the Tappan Zee project, the state and federal agencies in charge won’t disclose how they reached the decision to build the bridge without transit.

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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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Whether it’s just a short walk down the street or a five-mile bike ride, the journey between home and station is a major factor in people’s decision to take public transit.

Bike-share can bridge the last mile for public transit. Photo: Flickr/Arlington Country

For the transit officials and livability advocates gathered at the Rail~Volution conference this week, that key piece of the journey is known as the Last Mile. Frequent service and affordable fares, on their own, won’t entice people to make that trip. The route to the station also has to appeal to pedestrians and bicyclists.

Every transit trip is a multi-modal journey, pointed out Alan Lehto, director of project planning for TriMet in Portland, at the start of a panel yesterday. “Everybody who rides transit is a pedestrian or cyclist on at least one end of their trip,” Lehto said. “Getting people to and from the station is fundamentally important.”

But that aspect of transit is often overlooked. In fact, look no further than Portland itself, Lehto said. In a recent study, TriMet evaluated all 7,000 bus and transit stations within the region and found major gaps in bike-ped accessibility. “We realized that 1,500 of those don’t even have a sidewalk,” Lehto said.

Ensuring that transit stations are served by adequate pedestrian infrastructure is the bare minimum required to connect people to transit. Making the Last Mile truly appealing takes more than laying down sidewalks and adding a few bike racks.

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If SAFETEA-LU isn't extended on time, over 5,000 transit grants could be at risk. Source: FTA

The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee is meeting tomorrow to discuss a four-month extension to the current transportation bill, SAFETEA-LU. The map above is from a short but powerful document the Federal Transit Administration put out this week explaining “The Impacts of Failing to Extend Surface Transportation Funding” [PDF]. How much transit work would grind to a halt in your state without an extension?

In addition to the 5,600 transit grants, covering both capital projects and operations, a failure to extend SAFETEA-LU on time would jeopardize 134,936 active highway projects and 847,294 jobs, according to the FTA.

FTA Chief Peter Rogoff leads a panel of transit experts in Detroit. Photo courtesy of USDOT.

For the last two days, transit experts from around the country have been hunkered down in Detroit to devote their collective expertise to making the Motor City a better city for transit.

The Federal Transit Administration convened the panel, which included current and former transit agency leaders from Salt lake City, Denver, Portland, Atlanta and Dallas. The meeting was to focus on the planned Woodward Avenue light rail project, which received a $25 million TIGER grant, to envision a “bright future” for Detroit transit. Bickering between private donors and public officials over the design of the rail line (curb-running versus center-running trains) and conflict between the primary transit providers in Detroit have created problems for the project, and were likely a reason the feds decided to step in with some assistance from above.

Of course, the leaders that came together to advise Detroit come from very different cities with their own sets of issues, but none with the complex set of challenges besetting Detroit: an unemployment rate triple the national average, the highest foreclosure rate in the country, more than a quarter of its property vacant, a 25 percent drop in population over the past decade, and most of the region’s jobs well outside the city limits, with no public transportation to get there. Can a city like Portland really be of any help?

“Given the current technical capacity, as well as the lack of experience, as well as the extraordinary needs in Detroit, we wanted to treat this project differently, and sort of attack the problems collectively, rather than just wait to see if the city can attack them themselves,” FTA Administrator Peter Rogoff told Streetsblog.

Dan Lijana, a spokesperson for Detroit Mayor Dave Bing, said that although Detroit’s transit system will undoubtedly look very different from the other cities’ systems, there were some concrete things they wanted to learn from others’ experience: how to space transit stops, how to design the routes, and, especially, how to foster economic development along the corridor.

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Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood yesterday announced $1.58 billion in New Starts grants that will fund 27 transit projects around the country. The only major difference between this list and the list of proposed projects that came out in February 2010 is the glaring absence of the ARC tunnel project that New Jersey Governor Chris Christie unceremoniously axed last year.

The century-old transit tunnel NJ Gov. Christie decided not to modernize. Photo: TSTC

Christie’s decision to kill the project to expand capacity in a train tunnel under the Hudson River had one positive result: it must have made things easier for ­FTA officials to make the cuts required by the 25 percent haircut the New Starts program received earlier this year at the hands of Congressional budget-cutters.

The $200 million federal grant for ARC was one of the biggest on the list of proposed New Starts projects last year. The only other significant change is that the $45 million for “Other New Starts/Small Starts Projects” became $20 million for Alaska’s Denali Commission and for ferries in Alaska and Hawaii.

In its press release, USDOT highlights some of the transit projects that are moving forward:

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In a press conference today sponsored by the American Public Transportation Association, Obama administration officials affirmed their commitment to transit, especially good maintenance of transit systems. As FTA Administrator Peter Rogoff told reporters:

Decay in the ceiling of Philadelphia's 110-year-old Wayne Junction transit station, which got a $4 million federal grant for repairs after the roof fell in. Photo: SEPTA

We have a challenge in that we want to provide the American public, in a maximum number of communities, with real transit choices, and give them the opportunity to keep more of their paycheck in their wallet, rather than hand it over at the gas pump. But in order to do that, the transit service has to be available; it has to be safe and clean; it has to be reliable and desirable. The only way you get that is by continuing to invest, not just in the expansion of systems, but in the necessary maintenance and major capital reinvestment in systems.

Rogoff said that the largest area of growth in the president’s transportation budget for 2012 is a new formula assistance program for the state of good repair for transit systems. (Indeed, the “Bus and Rail State of Good Repair” budget item is slated for $10.7 billion in 2012 but its allocation shrinks to $3.8 billion in 2013, rising year by year from then.)

Rogoff said it was “spooky” to see how many commuters depend on aging and deteriorating transit systems. He recently facilitated a $4 million federal grant to rehabilitate the 110-year-old SEPTA station at Wayne Junction in North Philadelphia (incidentally, about three miles from where I grew up) where the roof collapsed last year.

Transit agencies and advocates have been saying that high gas prices have led to a spike in transit ridership. In the first quarter of this year, ridership was only up 1.6 percent over the first quarter of last year, but gas prices didn’t really spike until March, so the second quarter results may be more telling. Still, APTA President Bill Millar says it represents the largest quarterly ridership increase in more than two years.

Millar also touted the track record of transportation-related ballot initiatives so far this year. Seven out of eight local initiatives have passed, despite the fact that each one raised taxes or maintained a tax increase.

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Waiting for the bus in Chicago. The Obama Administration is getting behind a policy to help keep service running in cities struggling to cope with tight budgets and higher demand for transit. Photo: ifmuth/Flickr

Today’s Senate Banking Committee hearing held some good news for transit riders. Unintuitive though it may be, Banking has jurisdiction over public transportation in the Senate. While in the House, the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee handles every aspect of the reauthorization, in the Senate the bill gets carved up. Environment and Public Works is taking the lead, with the specifics on transit left to Banking. Luckily, there are some transit champions on Banking: Jack Reed (D-RI), Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Robert Menendez (D-NJ) and Jeff Merkley (D-OR) to name a few.

In an uncertain time for national transportation policy, there were several reassuring signs at today’s hearing, if you knew where to look. Here are five pieces of good news:

#1: Administration Pushes to Expand Transit Operating Assistance and State of Good Repair

Significantly, FTA Administrator Rogoff echoed Secretary Ray LaHood’s recent announcement of a push to expand operating assistance for transit agencies.

“There’s no point in using federal dollars to buy brand spanking new buses for transit systems if they cant afford to pay the drivers to put those buses into service,” Rogoff said. “We are proposing assistance that would be targeted and temporary, aimed at economically distressed, urbanized areas with 200,000 or more in population and phased out over three years.” (Smaller metros can already use federal funds for operating costs.)

Larry Hanley of the Amalgamated Transit Union mentioned that with population growth, more and more metro areas are hitting that 200,000 mark, disqualifying them (under normal circumstances) for federal operating aid, making initiatives like the one Rogoff mentioned all the more important.

The plan would be to offer up to 25 percent of an agency’s funding for operating costs the first year, narrowing that to 15 percent the second year and 10 percent the third and final year, with a sole focus on preserving service, especially while Americans are seeking out transit as an alternative to high gas prices.

Rogoff also said the agency has a new program to invest in the state of good repair of transit systems, citing the backlog of $50 billion in maintenance costs in just the country’s seven largest urban rail systems. He said it couldn’t just be a federal burden though – he wanted to see all levels of government step up to address the shortfall.

Ranking Republican Richard Shelby (R-AL) echoed the need for maintenance funds, but framed it as a mandate on local systems, asking that transit agencies that receive billions in federal funding for new capital projects be required to keep a state of good repair.

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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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