Streetsblog Capitol Hill

LaHood is spending his birthday defending the administration's high-speed rail plan. Photo: Christian Science Monitor

It’s Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood’s birthday, and he’s spending it testifying before the House Transportation Committee. The hearing is on “Mistakes & Lessons Learned” from the high-speed rail program, but — no surprise here — LaHood and House Republicans have differing ideas about what “mistakes” have been made.

Here are some highlights.

Chair John Mica said he’s a “strong, committed advocate to high-speed rail service in the United States” but he’s been “very disappointed” in the progress so far. “We have hit an impasse,” he said.

Mica pointed to the ballooning cost estimates for HSR in California and reiterated his long-held position that it’s the wrong place to build high-speed rail. LaHood agreed that “this is an expensive project, but all of the money is going to American workers to build American infrastructure.” Mica stood firm that the Northeast Corridor, not California, is the place to build.

“We’re taking our cues from you,” LaHood said. “We’re investing in the Northeast Corridor.” Mica said they’re still waiting for the money to be awarded.

Rep. Bill Shuster, who chairs the rail subcommittee, said the president’s vision to bring high-speed rail access to 80 percent of the American people isn’t realistic. He said there’s no money for it — and no need. “I don’t hear people all around the country clamoring for high-speed rail,” he said.

When LaHood said that the HSR vision isn’t “Ray LaHood’s vision” — it comes from the states themselves — Shuster said yes, but his daughter wants a luxury SUV and he don’t have the money for it, so she’s not getting it. “I’m glad you didn’t think that about the Keystone Line,” LaHood shot back. He said Shuster asked for the money for that line and the DOT gave it. “Right,” Shuster said, I believe in rail investment “where it makes sense.” But, Shuster noted, he didn’t ask for help funding rail improvements between Harrisburg and Pittsburgh – and that line goes right through his district. But it’s not a strategic investment priority for the country.

Shuster suggested actually taking money from the California project and putting it toward the NEC — not likely to be a popular suggestion, when federal funding is already just $3.6 billion of California’s $98.5 billion total bill.

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How can you convince Americans that transportation is important enough to invest in?

That’s the question that brought together five former U.S. Transportation Secretaries this week at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center.

Former DOT Chief James Burnley took a swipe at Transportation Enhancements and the stimulus.

James Burnley was deputy secretary and then secretary under President Reagan. He took the position that “75 percent” of the public “gives the thumbs down to paying more for transportation” because we’re giving them the wrong argument about why it matters. He took a jab at President Obama’s stimulus program:

We have to stop treating transportation infrastructure as a short-term jobs program. It didn’t work by any conventional definition of what “working” means. We all knew –those of us who have expertise in the field – it would not work in terms of short-term stimulus.

Because it takes time – it takes years for that money to actually be spent and people to be hired. We need to convince the American people that we need to invest in transportation infrastructure because we need to invest in transportation infrastructure. If we sell that idea – not as a jobs program, but because it affects the ability of our economy to grow over time, our international competitiveness and all the other things that we believe it affects, then we’ve got a fighting shot at convincing the American people that the resources that we believe ought to be devoted to transportation should be devoted to it.

That’s a legitimate point, and Streetsblog has made the same argument – that selling transportation as a jobs program undersells the true value of transportation. But there are a few problems with what Burnley is saying. First, when asked to tax themselves at the local or state level for transportation improvements, 75 percent of voters say yes. So maybe the case isn’t so hard to make after all.

And second, most Republicans – and many Democrats – fault the stimulus for not investing enough in infrastructure. Not quite seven percent of the package was devoted to infrastructure, and many critics say that’s why the stimulus didn’t do more to create jobs. Certainly, the president’s desire for “shovel-ready” projects may have been naïve, which Obama himself has publicly admitted. But Burnley may have been over-simplifying things with his statement.

Meanwhile, Sam Skinner, who served under President George H.W. Bush, argued that too many bridges to nowhere have eroded public confidence. And it’s not just transportation, he said – government mishandling of Medicare and pensions and everything else leads to overall distrust that the government can handle anything at all, despite the fact that the transportation department has proven that it “actually can complete projects under budget and on time.”

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At the current rate of federal investment, it would take 30 years to fund the American transit projects currently in the construction or final engineering stages. Map of transit projects in the pipeline: Reconnecting America

UPDATE: Corrects the post to say that the map reflects all ongoing projects, not just those in the final engineering and construction stages.

How much is New York’s Second Avenue Subway estimated to cost? What transit lines really make up LA’s ambitious 30/10 initiative? Besides the silver line to Dulles Airport, which may or may not ever be completed, what other changes are projected for DC’s metro system? And what’s all this construction in Fort Worth?

The answers to all those questions — and in fact, just about any question you might have about ongoing transit projects — can now be answered in one handy map, brought to you by the chief cartographer of the livable streets movement, Jeff Wood of Reconnecting America.

Jeff is still inviting updates and corrections, so some crowdsourced factchecking is in order before we can officially declare this the authoritative encyclopedia of all U.S. transit projects. Still, it’s a useful compendium of all transit-related progress afoot in the country — and the limitations of the federal programs for putting transit plans into action.

Reconnecting America found strong demand for transit projects around the country but a dearth of federal support for such projects. “There is a huge backlog of federal funding through the New Starts program,” the organization says. If all of the transit projects in this map were funded through the federal New Starts Program at the current spending rate, it would take 73 years to fund them all.

The map shows all planned transit expansions. If we were to limit the list to just those projects in the construction or final engineering stages, the wait for federal funding is still 30 long years.

Reconnecting America notes that the projects in the late stages of engineering and construction alone would “connect 3.5 million more jobs to transit, an increase of 25 percent, and nearly 4 million households would gain enhanced transit access, with almost half of those being lower-income households.”

The takeaway, they say, is that the New Starts Program isn’t sufficient to meet demand and is not well suited to support the rapid build-out many regions are calling for.

In its third incarnation, USDOT’s TIGER program continues to be overwhelmingly popular.

The deadline to apply for TIGER III grants passed late last month, but not before 828 applications were received from all 50 states, the District of Columbia and US territories. Applications for this $527 million program totaled $14.1 billion, guaranteeing the selection process will be fiercely competitive.

The Atlanta streetcar was funded in an earlier round of TIGER. This photo shows an artist's rendering of the project.

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said the response demonstrates just how urgent the need is for investment in the nation’s transportation systems.

“The tremendous demand for these grants clearly shows that communities across the country can’t wait any longer for crucial upgrades to the roads, bridges, rail lines, and bus routes they rely on every day,” he said in his blog, The Fast Lane.

USDOT plans to award the grants before the end of the year, thanks to a directive from the President to expedite the process, according to LaHood. (That move prompted the Washington Post to call LaHood a grinch for keeping his staff in the office over the winter holidays.)

TIGER, which stands for Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery, represents an important innovation for US DOT, in that grants are awarded based on project merit rather than political and geographic considerations. Extra consideration is given to applications that have the potential to have a significant impact on the nation or the region where the grant is awarded. This third round of grants, however, relaxed this theme a little to include a geographic diversity component in the awards process.

USDOT has awarded a total of $2.1 billion in grants under TIGER I and II. TIGER funding is helping build a streetcar in downtown Atlanta. TIGER also provided $23 million to help realize the Philadelphia Area’s Bike and Pedestrian Network, which calls for 128 miles of facilities across an six-county region. Program funds have also advanced Los Angeles’ innovative 30/10 program, which will speed construction of the Crenshaw/LAX light rail line.

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First Ray LaHood tells us he’s not sticking around as Transportation Secretary much longer. Now his number two, Roy Kienitz, has announced he’s gonna bounce too — and he’s not even going to wait around as long as LaHood. Kienitz will be out by next month.

USDOT Undersecretary for Policy Roy Kienitz, left, and FTA Administrator Peter Rogoff, right, at Bike to Work Day this year. Photo: Washingtonian

Politico’s Morning Transportation reporters got the dish in Kienitz’s own words from an email he sent. Kienitz said he’ll be joining a consulting firm: “Specifically, I will be taking a position with the highly respected firm of Roy Kienitz LLC, which doesn’t technically exist yet but will soon! As you may have guessed, I will be this firm’s first employee, but I think the odds are strong I will win Employee of the Month as soon as December. I plan to do consulting (but not lobbying!) on any and all topics transportation.”

Kienitz has been a down-to-earth presence at USDOT, explaining policy decisions clearly and without pretense. He’s been a big proponent of the administration’s livability initiatives, and he has championed multimodalism by encouraging government agencies to leave silos behind and work together on big visions for sustainable communities that can’t be compartmentalized into just transit or just housing or just roads. And he’s always shown up for Bike to Work Day.

He came to USDOT after advising Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell on transportation and doing planning for the state of Maryland. He filled out his résumé serving as director of the Surface Transportation Policy Project, working for infrastructure champion Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan and for the Senate EPW Committee.

Federal safety officials missed their own deadline Friday for making new rules about dangerous trucks.

A 76-year-old man in LA county was hit by a truck while riding his bike in 2008. Republicans want to keep current trucking laws in place that Democrats and others say lead to driver fatigue, causing accidents like this one. Photo: Aitken Aitken Cohn

October 28 was the original deadline by which the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration was supposed to announce new hours-of-service regulations for trucking, but in the end, they gave themselves another month to do it.

The pending change is the result of a lawsuit brought by Public Citizen, the Teamsters Union, Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, and the Truck Safety Coalition against the FMCSA to tighten the standards. The suit resulted in an agreement that the FMCSA would change the current 11-hour driving day and the 34-hour rest period before starting a long workweek to a 10-hour driving day, keeping the 34-hour “restart” but with new restrictions.

The Bush-era rule has been struck down twice before by the courts, but the FMCSA kept reinstating it — first in late 2007 and then about a year later. This time, the agency appears ready to make a change.

The 11-hour rule was a “midnight regulation” made during President George W. Bush’s final days in office, according to the Teamsters. The Bush administration increased the workweek from 60 to 77 hours of driving and reduced the restart period from 50 hours to 34.

The Teamsters say truck crashes cost the nation $20 billion in 2009, and that truck driver fatigue is a major factor in truck crashes. Some statistics indicate fatigue is a factor in 30 to 40 percent of truck crashes, though the FMCSA itself puts the number at 5.5 percent.

“We will continue to push for a rule that protects truck drivers, instead of the greed of the trucking industry,” said Teamsters President Jim Hoffa when the court case was decided two years ago. “Longer hours behind the wheel are dangerous for our members and the driving public.”

The problem isn’t limited to highways. Six percent of pedestrian fatalities and nine percent of bicyclist fatalities in 2009 were caused by crashes with large trucks, according to the NHTSA. Between 1996 and 2005, crashes with large trucks accounted for almost a third of all cyclist fatalities in New York City, according to a joint report by NYC agencies [PDF].

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There’s been a lot of adulation heaped upon the TIFIA loan program lately. Both houses of Congress are ready to increase funding for the program nine times over, from $100 million to $1 billion a year – despite warnings from outside groups that there may not be enough eligible projects to use up all that money.

The Staten Island Ferry has gotten some TIFIA funding. Some say an expanded TIFIA would do everything an infrastructure bank would do, but others say it wouldn't allow for large-scale community planning. Photo: SI Ferry

The TIFIA program has been around since 1998 but money pressures have led to a steep uptick in applications over the past few years. Some have criticized it for its lack of transparency in decision-making and suggested that it might be more effective housed outside of USDOT and functioning independently.

“Is TIFIA the first perfect federal program?”

Nevertheless, Congressional Republicans have thrown their full support behind the program, mainly as a counterweight to the president’s proposed infrastructure bank. Consistent with their desire to limit the growth of the federal bureaucracy, they resist the idea of creating an entirely new entity, even though the bank would be independent from the government, a la the Export-Import Bank.

There are two competing infrastructure bank bills in the Senate and a new one introduced earlier this week in the House. The Senate is planning to vote next week on a bill to spend $50 billion on infrastructure with another $10 billion in seed money for a bank – pieces of President Obama’s jobs bill, which has been dismembered for separate votes. Next week’s bill isn’t expected to pass. Indeed, many members think TIFIA is the way to go.

At a House Transportation Committee hearing earlier this month, nearly every Republican present spoke out in favor of expanding TIFIA instead of creating a new bank. Chair John Mica asked why a bank was needed when “we have a successful example” in TIFIA.

One of the things that the infrastructure bank can do is enter into long-term relationships with people who have decade-plus-long plans. They’re trying to finance a plan. What Washington knows how to do is finance a segment of a project. The current TIFIA process does not allow us to do that.

- Roy Kienitz

Highways and Transit Subcommittee Chair John Duncan (R-TN) went as far as to ask, “Is TIFIA the first perfect federal program?” He noted, “Everyone has had glowing comments about TIFIA, and it’s a program that I support as well.”

Geoffrey Yarema of Nossaman LLP (a law firm specializing in public-private partnerships for infrastructure projects) told Duncan TIFIA wasn’t perfect but that it did have 12 years of solid experience. He suggested it be “right-sized” by adding staff and he wants to “change it from a discretionary decision-making process that has the potential for being politicized – and some would say the reality of being politicized – to a first-come-first-served program.”

That change, however, would eliminate the part of TIFIA reformers like most: The fact that it has the power to encourage innovation and goal-oriented, performance-based strategic transportation planning.

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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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House Transportation Committee Chair John Mica (R-FL) said this morning that getting permission from Republican leadership to find more revenues to fund the transportation bill was a “major breakthrough” but still won’t say where the money will come from.

Rep. John Mica won't be specific about where additional transportation funding could come from. Photo: 13 News

Mica told an audience at a Washington Post-sponsored forum on transportation that passing yet another extension of the surface transportation reauthorization persuaded leadership that there would not be consensus on a long-term bill until the spending levels were raised. “There wont be a gas tax increase,” Mica said, “but our leadership has asked us to look for other sources of revenue, and we’re on that mission now.”

“Speaker Boehner has really opened the door to us to look for any responsible means” to fund the bill, Mica said, adding that a gas tax increase is still off the table. “There’s also the possibility of doing away with it; adopting something else.” He wouldn’t specify what the replacement fee could be.

Nor would he say what he thinks of a Republican proposal to fund the bill with revenues from new oil drilling except to say, “We’re looking at it. We have some scoring issues. And then we have to make sure we have the votes.”

Mica said he was confident that a long-term bill would pass in March. “Don’t let anybody talk about a two-year transportation bill; that’s criminal,” he said. His counterpart in the Senate, Barbara Boxer, has proposed a two-year bill, but could be willing to go along with a longer-term bill if funding levels were raised.

Mica also reiterated his support for state infrastructure banks, saying he prefers them to a national bank. He said the way Washington works is: “the biggest gorillas get the most bananas.” Instead of having big guys compete for big loans from a big national bank, he said, “the best way to prioritize projects is to have them evolve from local level, get local and state participation, and then assist them.”

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood also addressed the Washington Post gathering. He said he was confident that, despite current gridlock, there was enough pressure on Congress to create jobs that they’ll pass some form of transportation bill this year.

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Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood became a darling of the bicycling advocacy community last year when he jumped up on a table at the National Bike Summit and affirmed his support for biking, later declaring “the end of favoring motorized transportation at the expense of non-motorized.”

LaHood's tabletop speech to cyclists, March 2010. Photo: J. Maus / Bike Portland

Now LaHood says that biking and walking is not only good transportation policy; it’s good health care policy.

Speaking at the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy’s 25th anniversary reception last weekend, LaHood said the rail-trail program “has done more for health care than anything we’ve ever done in America. Rail-trails have contributed so much to people’s good health over the last 25 years — also preventing heart disease, and providing the kinds of opportunities people have looked for, for a long, long time.”

City health departments are getting on board with active transportation, with many health officials promoting biking and walking as a path to good health. Perhaps the innovative partnership between USDOT, EPA, and HUD should make room for Health and Human Services too?

We’ll bring you more of the LaHood-bicycle-lovefest tomorrow, when the secretary publicly endorses the NACTO bike guide, the most bicycle-friendly street-planning guide out there for engineers.