Streetsblog Capitol Hill

“In 2014, federal investment in surface transportation — which is currently about $50 billion per year — will drop to $6 billion or $7 billion. In one year.”

Rep. Peter DeFazio says underinvestment in transit is killing people, and it's about to get way worse.

Those were the dire words spoken by Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR) at the start of this morning’s Transportation & Infrastructure Committee hearing on MAP-21. What he meant was this: At the end of MAP-21, the Highway Trust Fund is expected to have a balance of almost zero and a $7.1 billion shortfall in 2015. Congress would have to radically reduce FY 2015 highway and transit investment levels to ensure that the trust fund remains solvent. According to AASHTO, federal highway investments would have to be cut from approximately $41 billion to $6 billion and transit investment from $11 billion to $3 billion.

“That is pathetic,” DeFazio said. “And we have to do something about it.”

Funding Cuts Force FTA to Break Agreements

T&I Chair Bill Shuster agreed. “That’s our biggest challenge moving forward,” he said. And Ranking Democrat Nick Rahall added that the sequester cuts and Congress’s inability to pass a real budget has compounded the funding crisis.

FTA Administrator Peter Rogoff warned that the cuts will have a profound impact on transit projects around the country:

Overall, the sequester struck $656 million from FTA’s budget. It reduced program funding for our [New Starts] capital investment grants program by almost $100 million. This will means that few, if any, New Starts construction projects will be fundable in the near term.

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This is the third and final installment of our exit interview with departing U.S. Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood. In the first, he talked about his proudest accomplishments, why he decided to leave, and why it’s important to fund bike/ped improvements with federal dollars – and he made it clear he’s still not giving us any answers about where to find more money for transportation. In the second, he talked about Republicans who get it, why TIGER was a game-changer – and he let slip some good news about the Chicago Riverwalk. Part three is more of a grab-bag — I hadn’t expected to get almost 40 minutes one-on-one with the secretary!

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood will be leaving his post soon. Photo: Fast Lane

Tanya Snyder: You mentioned high-speed rail. In California, the line is going to cost upwards of $68 billion. The federal government has put in about three and the funding is still a big question mark there. Do you think that, in the future, going forward with the high-speed rail program, it would make sense to pick sites where the federal government could put in a more substantial proportion of the final funding?

Ray LaHood: High-speed rail is not going to be accomplished by the federal government putting an enormous amount of money in. The money is just not here. And so what we have done is we jump-started passenger rail in America and asked private businesses to come in and make a commitment, to make an investment.

I traveled to 16 or 18 countries in the first two years in this job, looking at high-speed rail. And every place that I went, I asked people come to America, make an investment, hire American workers, and build these trains in America. And now there are a lot of companies in California, in Illinois, along the Northeast Corridor, in Nevada, thinking about making investments.

We’re not going to accomplish our passenger rail, our high-speed rail dreams and aspirations with funding coming from Washington. Some of it can. But the lion’s share will have to be private investment and the states’ commitment to this.

In California, the assembly there passed last year the selling of bonds, between $6 billion and $10 billion worth of bonds. That’s a huge investment. In Illinois, the governor there has made huge investments in high-speed rail. We’ve made some, but he’s made some, and private companies have made some. This is going to have to be a true public-private partnership in order to get this accomplished, and frankly, that’s what happened in Europe and Asia, too.

TS: There was an Anderson Cooper segment a couple weeks ago that underlined for me the fact that maybe the message really hasn’t gotten out about higher-speed rail — that that was part of this package too. It’s not just about getting trains over 110 mph but it’s also about getting trains that have been going 30 mph up to 70 mph. Do you feel like that’s a message that hasn’t really come across? That people see “high-speed rail” and think it should be going 220?

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Next month, outgoing Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood will speak at the National Bike Summit — he never misses one — and I’ll bet the standing ovation lasts 10 minutes. His support for biking and walking has been unprecedented at U.S. DOT. Now cyclists are worrying about who could replace him, and whether that person will bring the same zeal for livability and sustainable transportation.

These are some big shoes to fill. Photo: Life via Jim's Bike Blog

The field of rumored front-runners is narrowing. Reformers will be sorry to hear that there’s not much buzz about Janette Sadik-Khan outside of a select circle. Antonio Villaraigosa has apparently taken himself out of the running. Jennifer Granholm and Ed Rendell don’t think they’re viable candidates. The name that keeps popping up is NTSB Chair Deborah Hersman, who has a lot of experience with plane and train crashes but not as much with biking and walking. Then again, neither did LaHood when he took the job.

To nudge President Obama toward a pick with a love of two-wheeled transport, 10 bicycling leaders sent the following letter Friday:

Dear President Obama:

Four years ago, you surprised many people by appointing Ray LaHood to be your Secretary of Transportation. On behalf of the entire bicycling community, we want to thank you for the surprise: Secretary LaHood’s support for sustainable and livable communities has been refreshing, wholehearted, and has made a real difference in the lives of people and communities across the nation.

We sincerely hope his tenure – and his legacy – is just the start of a new era of transportation policy that embraces all modes of transportation equally and ensures that transportation is more than just an end in itself. We hope your next appointment to this critical position:

• continues the extraordinary collaboration between DOT, EPA, and HUD, and even extends this multi-disciplinary approach to include health and energy agencies
• builds on the remarkable success of the TIGER program in getting more funds directly into the hands of local government entities, where smarter, more equitable and inclusive community development projects emerge, and
• responds to the clear need for real transportation choices and options to be available to all in our communities.

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A favorite for transportation secretary has stepped out of the race. Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa released a statement late Friday saying he is “flattered and humbled” by the buzz around his candidacy but is “firmly committed to remaining in LA and finishing [his] term.”

Mayor Villaraigosa brushes aside talk of heading up U.S. DOT. Photo: LA Weekly

“I have said many times I will be focused on my job as mayor of Los Angeles until 11:59 and 59 seconds on June 30, 2013,” he said.

If LaHood were willing to stick around a few months longer, Villaraigosa could still be in the running, seeing as his term as mayor ends July 1. LaHood was already planning to stay on as department head until a new one could be named, a process that’s expected to take two months, meaning that LaHood would throw his goodbye party in late March or early April. Would he wait another three months for Mayor V?

At the moment, no one’s asking him to, and the federal government doesn’t make a practice of waiting for city officials to clear their schedules. But it’s worth noting that if that’s truly the only deterrent against a Secretary V, it’s not that high a hurdle.

If this ends up being the end of the story, though, it’ll be a shame. Sustainable transportation advocates were enthusiastic about the prospect of Villaraigosa heading up the department.

I talked to our own Damien Newton, editor of Streetsblog LA, this morning. He said the mayor’s vision in pushing Measure R, the 2008 sales tax measure funding the city’s major transit expansion, shows he’s got the stuff to be a great secretary.

“Once [Measure R] passed, we started to see a shift — not just in the city of Los Angeles but in other places around the county — towards more sustainable transportation,” Damien said. “Because it’s one thing for advocates and Streetsblog to say, ‘No, voters really want more options,’ but when you’re in an area that’s been so car-dominated, you need to prove it. And measure R proved it.”

Damien said it would be a shame if bad timing nixed Villaraigosa’s candidacy. “Having a DOT secretary from Los Angeles would be good for Los Angeles,” he said, “and I think having one that’s familiar with cities would be really good for cities.”

Villaraigosa was at the top of most lists of contenders, so if he is out, who’s in? Former Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell has been mentioned, but he recently told a reporter, ”The president would not be interested.” That’s not exactly the same as saying he wouldn’t take the job, but he’s probably right. Not only is Rendell “too critical of the lack of transportation funding,” as he said, he also wouldn’t do anything for cabinet diversity.

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We’ve had a busy two weeks since the Transportation Research Board conference, and one thing that’s slipped through the cracks is passing on a few tidbits that came at the end of the TRB panel of U.S. DOT officials on January 16.

That's FTA Chief Peter Rogoff in the middle and Under Secretary for Policy Polly Trottenberg on the right. Photo: Fast Lane

First, in response to my question about whether the dip in vehicle-miles-traveled had affected how DOT performs travel forecasting and, therefore, transportation planning: “Certainly, we have been observing that trend,” said Polly Trottenberg, DOT’s under secretary for policy. “One of the reasons that’s been posited is, there’s a generational change going on; younger generations are driving less, for a variety of reasons.”

Those reasons include graduated drivers’ licenses and new technologies like Uber and bike-share, she said. “It fits in to what we think the American transportation system needs to be, which is multimodal.”

So does it affect their planning? Trottenberg says yes:

We don’t know yet what the long term VMT trend will be, but we know that since 2005, per capita VMT is essentially flat and declining. And, yeah, that certainly figures into our planning.

That’s different in different parts of the country and may or may not figure into a particular local plan, but certainly it’s something we look at as we’re looking at, departmentally, what we want to do.

The flip side of the dip in driving is an uptick in transit ridership. It’s hard to believe that in this context, some people still think transit isn’t a high priority and shouldn’t receive dedicated federal funding. At TRB, FTA Administrator Peter Rogoff said he thinks that the Republican effort to whack transit last year was a last gasp of sorts:

[One] thing I find exciting: the House debate this past year notwithstanding, I think we are really moving past these sort of knuckle-dragging debates in the past about highways versus transit. We recognize that with 100 million more citizens coming to the United States by 2050, we need more of both.

We’re seeing transit leaders in places like Gov. Rick Snyder of Michigan, and it’s no longer a partisan issue. The vision for transit and, for that matter, rail investment, is coming from people of all political stripes. We’re breaking down the political side of all this preferring one modal approach to another. We just need more of all of it and people are coming around.

Last Friday, CNN’s Anderson Cooper ran a segment about high-speed rail as part of his “Keeping Them Honest” series. Reporter Drew Griffin did an “exposé” of a Vermont rail project that spent .00006 percent of the federal stimulus money on needed track improvements and came in on time and under budget. Scandal!

It amounts to a high-profile smear campaign on the high-speed rail program from a mainstream media source trying to expose government corruption and waste where none exists. Cooper makes it clear they’re going to stay on the story; they already did a similar takedown of the California rail program.

I’ve counted ten ways this story was misreported. Let me know in the comments if I’ve missed any…

1. Higher-speed rail is not a failure. Perhaps the Obama administration could have done a better job making clear that their rail program was split into two halves: one for high-speed rail and one for incremental upgrades to inter-city passenger rail. Not all of the projects were intended to bring speeds up to 110 mph.

“We’ve never been very public about this but, yes, we’ve felt for a long time that the administration has done a poor job around messaging,” said Dan Schned of the Regional Plan Association. “The bulk of the money went to regional projects, but they still had the secretary going around the country and calling this the ‘high-speed program.’”

The crux of the CNN story is that while the Vermont project did everything it set out to do and was a responsible steward of taxpayer money, it’s not “the high-speed rail that you or I think of.” Well, no. There’s a reason for that.

2. It takes more than three years to build high-speed rail. Cooper embarrassed himself when he ominously intoned that three whole years after the passage of the stimulus (actually, it’s been four years), “we can’t find any high-speed rail that’s actually been built.” They show images of almond trees and dairy farms in California along the planned route. “Not a single piece of track on that line has been built.”

True – they plan to break ground this summer in California. But, as House Republicans constantly complain, highway projects can take up to 15 years to complete. There are lots of reasons for that, which I won’t delve into here. But to expect something as massive and complex as high-speed rail to instantly appear like magic the minute the deal is inked is, well, a little naïve. Federal Railroad Administration Chief Joe Szabo calls high-speed rail “a multi-generational effort,” noting that it took “10 administrations, 28 sessions of Congress” to complete the interstate highway system.

3. There is high-speed rail. Cooper says they couldn’t find any high-speed rail. I guess he wasn’t looking in the Midwest, where officials just cut the ribbon on new service between Chicago and Kalamazoo. It’s the second fastest line in the country, nearing Acela speeds of 150 mph. Other trains in the Midwest can reach 110 mph in places.

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Photo from the White House, via Daily Kos

He strung it out long enough, but Ray LaHood has finally announced that he’s resigning as Transportation Secretary. Speculation has been rampant for months about who could replace him, and now it kicks into high gear.

Matt Yglesias captured the sentiments of many transportation advocates when he tweeted yesterday, “Ray LaHood was a surprisingly good DOT secretary, but it’d be great to see Obama give the job to a real expert next.”

What qualities will the next Transportation Secretary have?

There are political considerations that could win out over technical know-how. Given that this appointment will be made at the tail end of a Cabinet nomination process where President Obama has been criticized for nominating too many white men, he may look to U.S. DOT as a place to correct that error.

“Transportation is often viewed as place to check a box,” said Joshua Schank, president of the Eno Center on Transportation. “If you look at the last five transportation secretaries – [Federico] Peña, [Rodney] Slater, [Norman] Mineta, [Mary] Peters, LaHood – all of them checked the box.”

“Not that they didn’t have other qualifications,” Schank is quick to add. “They did. But they all checked a box of some sort.”

But another insider, speaking on background, said that it was “self-serving” for people in the industry to demand an expert “because they want it to be one of us.” He said that not being an expert worked to LaHood’s favor because he didn’t already have strong opinions about everything. In that way, the source said, LaHood was able to avoid getting bogged down.

Don’t expect the next secretary to share LaHood’s zeal for bicycling and transit. Given all the qualities and qualifications the administration will be looking for, they probably won’t institute a litmus test for whether a person looks comfortable in a bike helmet.

But perhaps all isn’t lost. “I don’t think Ray LaHood was a pedestrian and bicycle advocate when he came to the job,” said Schank. “I think he was influenced by the people at DOT and the people in the White House.” Maybe those same people will work their magic on his successor.

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Should I stay or should I go? LaHood decides to go. Photo: FoxNews

After a few false alarms, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood has finally come out and said it: He’s leaving the administration.

In a letter sent to U.S. DOT staff and contractors this morning, he listed the accomplishments of the last four years:

We have put safety front and center with the Distracted Driving Initiative and a rule to combat pilot fatigue that was decades in the making.  We have made great progress in improving the safety of our transit systems, pipelines, and highways, and in reducing roadway fatalities to historic lows.  We have strengthened consumer protections with new regulations on buses, trucks, and airlines.

We helped jumpstart the economy and put our fellow Americans back to work with $48 billion in transportation funding from the American Recovery and Investment Act of 2009, and awarded over $2.7 billion in TIGER grants to 130 transportation projects across the Nation.  We have made unprecedented investments in our nation’s ports.  And we have put aviation on a sounder footing with the FAA reauthorization, and secured funding in the Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act to help States build and repair their roads, bridges and transit systems.

Transportation reformers would add to that list LaHood’s support for intercity rail and active transportation. Throughout his tenure he has made the case for investing in bicycling (sometimes while standing on a table), high-speed rail, and livability initiatives through the TIGER grant program.

LaHood had said in the fall of 2011 that he didn’t intend to stay for a second term, but he’d since backpedaled. Insiders said he may not have meant to make any definitive statements and was still deciding what to do. He’s told the AP that he liked working for President Obama and considered it the “best job I’ve ever had in public service” — a sentiment he repeated in his letter this morning.

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Darren Flusche is the policy director of the League of American Bicyclists.

Should the performance of this road…

…be measured like this one?

Under the new federal transportation bill, known as MAP-21, the performance of these two roads could be measured the same way — even though one is a bustling business district, and the other is an interstate highway. (Example provided by Transportation for America.)

MAP-21 expands the scope of the National Highway System by 60,000 lane-miles; now it will include many streets, called “primary arterials,” that don’t feel like highways at all. At the same time, the law directs U.S. DOT to set up performance measures for the $22 billion National Highway Performance Program – the largest transportation program under the new law – that will ultimately reward and penalize states for reaching or failing to meet these targets.

So, unless the performance measures are set appropriately, state DOTs will treat many streets that cut through neighborhoods essentially the same way they treat interstate highways: prioritizing speed over other factors. (Jonathan Maus at BikePortland has investigated what this could mean for his city, where he says local transportation leaders will have “much less leeway and independence to do innovative designs and to make changes to the streetscape without a potentially onerous process of seeking federal approval.”)

Which streets will that affect in your state? You can find the primary arterial routes that will be added to the NHS on the Federal Highway Administration’s website.

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Note to President Obama: This lady would make a great DOT Secretary. Photo: Momentum Magazine/Ryan Dixon

On Friday, we put this question to our readers: Who should be the next Transportation Secretary? And lucky for us, 323 of you had nothing better to do with your weekend than answer our poll.

The runaway winner, starting as soon as the polls opened, was Janette Sadik-Khan of New York City DOT. Under her leadership, safety and mobility features for bicyclists have increased exponentially, Select Bus Service has made aboveground transit a more viable option, 23 plazas have been installed, Times Square has gone from car-plagued nightmare to pedestrian public space, and Summer Streets car-free days have shown neighborhoods what it’s like to replace automobile traffic with ziplines. If there ever was a beautiful experiment in livability, JSK’s NYC is it.

No one wants to see Sadik-Khan leave New York, but Mayor Michael Bloomberg is leaving office at the end of next year (no fourth term for this guy) and word is she’ll be looking for a new job. Plus, as commenter Joe R. said, “If she makes what we’ve done here in NYC federal policy there’s far less chance of a future mayor undoing the progress we’ve made.”

Sadik-Khan got 108 of the 499 votes cast (voters were allowed to check up to three boxes) — one-third of the total — despite the fact that she was up against nine other candidates, plus “other.”

That’s a pretty solid margin. President Obama, if you were wracking your brain for another DOT secretary that would make Streetsblog readers as happy as Ray LaHood has, now you know.

Runners-up were Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and Chicago DOT Director Gabe Klein, with 73 and 72 votes, respectively. They’ve both shown how some smart and strategic changes can result in a seismic culture shift in how people move around the city. Villaraigosa has also shown a special genius for creative financing of infrastructure mega-projects — a rare and exceedingly practical gift in today’s cash-poor transportation world.

And in fourth place was a plea to Ray LaHood to stay put. He’s done so much to make the U.S. DOT a bastion of livability efforts, and our readers know he could do so much more.