Streetsblog Capitol Hill

Bike and pedestrian funding got slashed. Federal assistance for transit operations was rejected. Even the performance measures – arguably the high point of the recently passed federal transportation bill – are too weak to be very meaningful. For Americans who want federal policy to support safe streets, sustainable transportation, and livable neighborhoods, there were few bright spots in the transportation bill Congress passed last month.

AASHTO Director John Horsley is thrilled with the new transportation bill, which gave state DOTs just about everything they wanted. Photo: International Transport Forum

But state transportation departments are celebrating. They scored victory after victory, getting a bigger share of federal funding with fewer rules and regulations attached.

In the Senate, advocates were able to work some reforms into the bill and mobilize grassroots support for amendments like the Cardin-Cochran provision, which put funds for street safety projects in the hands of local governments, not state DOTs. But the House never managed to pass a bill of its own, and the opaque conference committee process was an exercise in horse-trading that advocates found difficult to penetrate.

The final product, which included measures like raising the federal contribution for certain highway expansions, seemed finely tailored to benefit DOTs in several ways. “This is a bill written by and for the benefit of state DOTs at the expense of both federal oversight and regional and community outcomes,” wrote David Burwell, director of the climate change program of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, in an email shortly after the bill passed. He said the policy changes “are too elegantly crafted and specific in their effect to have been written, or even conceived, by members of Congress or their staff.”

For state DOTs, access to lawmakers is a given. “We worked very closely with the House and Senate to craft those measures,” AASHTO Director John Horsley confirmed to Streetsblog in an interview yesterday. He said that while AASHTO offered recommendations, no text written by AASHTO made it into the bill verbatim, as far as he knows.

According to Horsley’s account, AASHTO followed a pretty standard script when it came to advocating for their interests on the Hill. Every stakeholder and special interest under the sun had its lobbyists knocking on lawmakers’ doors, offering their two cents – everyone from gravel producers to equipment manufacturers to environmentalists to free market fundamentalists. It’s just that the state DOTs seemed to get everything on their wish list.

Horsley said AASHTO had been laying the groundwork for many, many months before conference started, working with Republican House Transportation Committee staffers as well as aides of both parties in the Senate. (He didn’t mention working with House Democrats, who were shut out of the process from day one.)

The House is where the magic happened for AASHTO. “We’ve been very pleased with where the Senate bill started,” Horsley said. “And we were even more pleased when the House and the Senate in conference agreed to incorporate a lot of the House provisions that were even better for states.”

What were those House provisions? Horsley went through the list:

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In the immediate, panicked moments after the MAP-21 conference report was released, I missed some of the nuances of just how bad a deal this bill is for bike policy.

Under the new transpo bill, the fight to get states to invest in infrastructure for biking and walking will get a lot tougher. Photo: Jim Hash / Ped Bike Images

Three things stand out:

• States can use their Transportation Alternatives (TA) money on anything they want.
• Bike/ped programs are facing anywhere from a 33 percent cut in funding to a 66 percent cut, depending how each state reacts.
• The mandatory sidepath law was included.

Let’s start with Number Three. The law states that if there’s a paved bike path within 100 yards of a federally owned road, cyclists have to use it — given the speed limit on the road is at least 30 miles per hour. When this was first included in the Senate bill last fall, bike advocates called it “paternalistic” and said it ignores cyclists’ fundamental right to the road.

“If the path is any good, you shouldn’t have to force anyone to use it; they will use it voluntarily because it works,” wrote Andy Clarke, president of the League of American Bicyclists. Unfortunately, he said, many paths are “dangerous, slow, and out of the way” – and cyclists would still be forced to use them under this law.

The concerns were partially addressed between this provision’s appearance in the Senate bill and the final conference report. It now states explicitly that cyclists are prohibited from using the road unless “the bicycle level of service on that roadway is rated B or higher.” So, if the road is more bikeable than the sidepath, in some instances, the cyclist can choose the road.

However, there’s no uniform way of measuring how bike-friendly a roadway is. The FHWA has developed a measurement for “bicycle level of service” but it’s not universally utilized. Besides, I wouldn’t count on every cyclist knowing the rating of every roadway they ride on.

Advocates’ concern about being forced off of streets and onto shoddy paths remains.

Three Ways States Can Filch Bike/Ped Money

On to the funding “transferability” in the Transportation Alternatives section, which now includes bike and pedestrian funding. If you’ll recall, half of TA money gets distributed, proportionally to population, to metropolitan planning agencies or local governments. The other half is supposed to capitalize a grant program in each state, to be overseen by their DOTs, allowing municipalities to apply for the funds.

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In the highly polarized and antagonistic transportation bill negotiations, dragged out over the course of almost a year, there was one thing that Democrats and Republicans could agree on: vastly expanding the TIFIA loan program. The Transportation Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act (TIFIA) program has, since 1998, provided federal credit assistance at favorable interest rates to surface transportation projects of national and regional significance.

San Francisco's Transbay Transit Center got a $171 million TIFIA loan in 2010. Will new rules make it harder for visionary projects like this to compete? Image: Archithings

Under the new bill, however, it appears any old highway plan will do.

MAP-21, the transportation bill that is now on its way to the president for his signature, turned TIFIA from a $122 million program to a $1 billion program – and at the same time, made it completely useless as an instrument to reward and enable innovation.

The bill eliminated all project selection criteria from the TIFIA program. It’s now first-come-first-served.

“By removing those selection criteria, they’ve basically turned the federal government into a bank,” said Sarah Kline, director of policy for Reconnecting America, “instead of an entity with national policy in mind.”

TIFIA used to employ the following criteria to evaluate potential loan recipients:

• national or regional significance (including livability, economic competitiveness, and safety) — 20 percent
• private participation — 20 percent
• environmental sustainability and state of good repair — 20 percent
• whether the loan would help accelerate project delivery — 12.5 percent
• creditworthiness — 12.5 percent
• use of technology — 5 percent
• consumption of budget authority — 5 percent
• whether the loan would reduce the need for federal grants — 5 percent

Under the new bill, creditworthiness now accounts for pretty much the full 100 percent.

Projects will still need to be approved by the U.S. DOT credit council. “They’re not rubberstamping things that come through,” said Kerry O’Hare, vice president of Building America’s Future and a former FHWA administrator.  “There’s a real financial analysis that’s done. People don’t just willy-nilly say, ‘We’re going to sign off on this.’”

But the credit council is looking only at the ability to repay loans. Not sustainability, not significance, not economic competitiveness.

“The federal government essentially has no control over what kind of projects get built,” Kline said. “As long as you come in with an application that is technically eligible and meets the credit-worthiness, it’s not clear to me that the federal government can say, ‘No, this is not the kind of project we want to fund; we’re looking for things that are innovative; this is not innovative.’”

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The House of Representatives approved the transportation bill conference report this afternoon by a vote of 373 to 52. [UPDATE 4:00 PM: The Senate has also approved the bill, 74-19.] This is a bill that’s been called “a death blow to mass transit” by the Amalgamated Transit Union, “a step backwards for America’s transportation system” by the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy, “a retreat from the goals of sustainability and economic resiliency” by Reconnecting America, “a substantial capitulation” by Transportation for America, and “bad news for biking and walking” by America Bikes.

Remember the empty highways that symbolized the House Republicans' vision of America's transportation system? The final transpo bill might as well have the same unfortunate cover.

After more than 1,000 days of waiting since the last transportation bill expired, the nation’s new transportation policy is a grave disappointment to people seeking to reform the current highway-centric system.

The fact that the House GOP tried and, for the most part, failed to reverse the progress made under presidents Reagan and Bush the elder offers a small degree of consolation. “Some of the worst ideas pushed initially by House Republicans went nowhere – funding the highway system with new oil drilling revenues, taking transit out of the highway trust fund, de-federalizing transportation funding – to mention some of the most radical proposals that were seriously being put forward,” wrote Deron Lovaas of NRDC this morning. “But… that pretty much exhausts the good news.”

So what does the bill actually do? Overall, it doesn’t change a whole lot, and the most significant changes tend not to benefit livable streets or sustainable transportation. Here’s a breakdown.

Length and funding. The bill lasts a year longer than the Senate bill would have, expiring at the end of September 2014. That gives states, cities, and the construction industry substantially more stability and allows them to move forward on projects that have been delayed for years because of the uncertainty surrounding federal funding. It maintains funding levels at around $54 billion a year, as did the Senate bill, which is roughly current levels plus inflation.

While some have criticized the complex funding mechanisms that prop it up and its departure from a user-pays model, the Congressional Budget Office reported this morning that the bill actually reduces the deficit by $16.3 billion.

Everyone seems to understand that Congress won’t be able to pull this kind of magic for long and will soon have to deal with the long-term insufficiency of current Highway Trust Fund revenues to cover the nation’s transportation needs. However, the gas tax was not raised, and at the same time the House passed this bill, it also approved an appropriations bill that prohibits even studying the possibility of moving toward a VMT fee.

Non-transportation-related items. The Keystone XL pipeline and the EPA’s ability to regulate coal ash as a hazardous substance, introduced into the transportation negotiations by the House Republicans, were stripped out of the bill. The RESTORE Act to spend BP oil spill fines on Gulf Coast restoration is included.

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UPDATE: The final bill contained a $2.4 billion transfer from Leaking Underground Storage Tank Trust Fund to the Highway Trust Fund in June 2012 and three transfers from the General Fund to the Highway Trust Fund, totaling $18.8 billion. They were: $6.2 billion to the Highway Account of HTF in October 2012; $10.4 billion transfer to Highway Account of HTF in October 2013; and $2.2 billion transfer to Mass Transit Account of HTF in October 2013. They dropped the car tariffs change and the gas guzzler transfer. They replaced those smaller transfers and offsets with the pension provisions and a tiny bit from the roll-your-own-cigarettes change.

Congressional leaders announced opaquely last week that they’d “moved forward” on a deal on the highway section of the transportation bill. That means transit, rail, and safety programs are still being negotiated. And it means the financing of the bill hasn’t yet gotten the seal of approval from the House.

What do roll-your-own cigarette machines have to do with surface transportation? Photo: News Herald

Still, both houses of Congress have agreed to spend more on the transportation bill than the Highway Trust Fund itself can bear. (The House gave its green light a couple weeks ago when it nixed the Broun motion to keep transportation spending to HTF receipt levels.) To overspend the HTF but still plausibly deny that they’re deficit-spending, the Senate Finance Committee has done some pretty fancy footwork to offset the expenditures with other savings.

Chair Max Baucus (D-MT) squeezed blood from the stone of the U.S. budget, and many of his colleagues have lauded him as a miracle worker. But Taxpayers for Common Sense – and lots of other people with common sense – say the numbers don’t really add up. The information below comes from TCS’s report, released last week, on the Senate pay-fors.

Stick with me here – this is all a little convoluted, but understanding the funding is a key part of the process. While the Senate transportation bill may be a good stop-gap compared to the option of even shorter extensions, a look at the funding shows why it provides no long-term answers to the question of how to pay for transportation.

The sources of new Highway Trust Fund revenue Baucus et al came up with are:

A transfer from the general fund: $4.97 billion. This is the most obvious example of deficit spending – just taking money from the Treasury to pay for transportation. That’s on top of $34.5 billion the Treasury has already coughed up in the last four years to bail out the Highway Trust Fund – something no one wanted to repeat.

Dedication of imported car tariffs to the Highway Trust Fund: $4.52 billion. This revenue would no longer go to the general fund.

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Sen. Barbara Boxer and Rep. John Mica just released this statement:

The conferees have moved forward toward a bipartisan, bicameral agreement on a highway reauthorization bill.  Both House and Senate conferees will continue to work with a goal of completing a package by next week.

From what we’re hearing, whatever deal they’ve reached only applies to the EPW portion on highways. That means transit and rail are still pending an agreement, as are the hot-button issues like Keystone, coal ash, and environmental reviews. But bike-ped funding is part of the highways section, so with any luck, we’ll have word soon on whether the Cardin-Cochran amendment has survived. The amendment provides for some limited local control over funding for small-scale transportation projects.

We’re hearing reports that a deal on the surface transportation bill is imminent. We’ll let you know when we hear more. Could it be that the Walz Motion to Instruct lit a fire under the conferees?

Photo: People Against Distracted Driving

Three more motions are about to be voted on, assuming peace doesn’t break out first. One, sponsored by Rep. Diane Black of Tennessee, would have spiked a section of the Senate bill that provides grant money to states that enact distracted driving bans. The Senate provision would reward states that enact bans on texting for all drivers and bans on all cell phone use for drivers under the age of 18. Speaking out against these bans is like coming out in favor of drunk driving. It just makes no sense. The motion calls for a study to be conducted instead.

Another MTI in the works, sponsored by Rep. Tim McKinley of West Virginia, would have instructed the conference committee to include in its final report the House provision devolving coal ash regulation to the states, so that the EPA can’t treat a hazardous substance as hazardous substance. The House will be voting on this one momentarily.

And the final motion, sponsored by House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer, calls on the House to take up the Senate bill.

We’ll keep you posted on news of these motions — and this supposed deal — as it breaks.

For the past six months, I have had the enviable task (seriously) of tracing the path of federal transportation legislation through Congress. And look how far we’ve come! When I first took the editor’s chair in January, transportation funds were drying up, the deadline for a new bill was fast approaching, and none of the news made Congress look good. Today, essentially, nothing has changed, except everything is somehow even worse.

With the 47-member conference committee at a standstill, Senator Barbara Boxer will meet with her House counterpart and their respective bosses today to work out a deal. Don't hold your breath.

The latest update is that with only 11 calendar days and six legislative days in which to get a bill to the President, the 47 House and Senate negotiators seem as far as ever from reaching a deal. If they can’t, then transportation policy will expire, the gas tax will stop being collected, the Highway Trust Fund will run out of money… Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

In the past, deadlocked conferees could simply get their bosses to work out a deal, as they will try to do today, but even that seems unlikely according to The Hill:

“I think the bill’s dead,” a transportation industry source said to The Hill on Friday.  “I don’t think they can fix what they have in front of them. Kicking it up to the leadership probably gives it a chance…but every time they get to the five-yard line, they move the goal posts back.”

In fact, some reports have already emerged that this afternoon’s negotiations aren’t about producing a bill but about determining the length of the next extension. As Todd Zwillich at Transportation Nation reports:

“Zero,” said Rep. Steve LaTourette (R-OH), when asked about the chances of last-ditch conference negotiations yielding an agreement before next week. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.)  is set to meet with House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) at 4 PM today. Chief negotiators Sen Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and Rep. John Mica (R-Fla.) are also scheduled to be in on the meeting. “The purpose is to come up with a clean extension” of six months, LaTourette said in an interview.

Other members of Congress seem to be putting on slightly braver faces. Ranking House T&I Committee Democrat Nick Rahall still believes there’s a 51 percent chance of a bill passing, according to Zwillich, and Minnesota Democrat Tim Walz has introduced a non-binding motion to instruct the conferees to agree on a bill by the end of the week [PDF]. Though the way things are going, he might as well be moving to tell the House to stop hitting itself.

If negotiations have indeed failed, the House has already passed an extension through September 30 which could be taken up by the Senate. However, it contains a number of things the Senate would be loath to pass, like aggressive environmental “streamlining,” and at least one thing — the Keystone XL Pipeline — that has drawn a presidential veto threat. And remember that Congress is gone for the whole month of August, so a three-month extension is basically just a one-month extension likely to end in another extension.

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The transportation bill conference committee negotiations have been difficult and contentious, by all accounts — all except Senator Barbara Boxer’s account. The EPW chair has been optimistic when others have been bitter, consistently focusing on how much the two sides agree rather than the places where they’re still far apart.

Barbara Boxer sharpened her rhetoric yesterday about the House Republicans' foot-dragging on a transportation bill. Photo: Tanya Snyder.

But that seemed to change with her fighting words at a press event yesterday.

“I’ll be candid,” she said. “There is only one group standing in the way of a bill, standing in the way of three million jobs, standing in the way of thousands and thousands of businesses struggling right now — and those are the House Republicans.”

The seven other senators who joined her at the podium used even stronger words. New York Democrat Chuck Schumer decried the “militants, radicals, and extremists” among the House Republicans — not all Republicans, he was careful to note — who don’t believe the federal government should even be involved in building transportation infrastructure.

Do the math, said Sen. John Kerry. Every billion dollars invested in infrastructure yields an estimated 27,000 to 35,000 jobs. This is a $109 billion bill — “that’s several million jobs.” He echoed a point Schumer had made, that the economy is recovering but is being held back by lingering high unemployment in the construction sector. “Those folks would go to work tomorrow if this bill were passed,” Kerry said, adding that it was “an utter disgrace that people would say they’re with the American people and then refuse a bill that would put them back to work.”

“Where’s the speed bump? Where’s the road block?” asked Delaware’s Chris Coons. “It’s right there,” he said, pointing to the southern wing of the Capitol building, “in the House of Representatives.”

The senators were joined by a convoy of five large construction trucks behind them (breaking DC’s three-minute idling law), symbolizing the idling construction sector, one assumes.

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As if the drama surrounding the reauthorization weren’t enough, there is another transportation battle brewing between the House and Senate. Last month, the House voted to eliminate funding for the American Community Survey, which is the Census Bureau’s way of getting a yearly pulse-check of how the country is doing and where investment is needed. The Senate’s version of the Commerce, Justice and Science appropriations bill [PDF], approved at the committee level, does not include this ill-advised amendment to defund the survey.

Rep. Daniel Webster thinks this form is an unconstitutional threat to privacy. (It's also the best assurance that the government is spending its money wisely.) Photo: Planetizen

The difference in the bills will have to be resolved in conference or in a year-end agreement on the FY2013 budget. A Senate floor vote has not yet been scheduled to take up the bill.

It is hard to overstate the importance of the American Community Survey. In addition to state- and local-level demographic information such as income, employment and housing, the survey includes data on where Americans work, how we get to work, and how long we take to get there. It’s the primary source of information on rates of bicycle commuting, for example, and advocates and planners carefully analyze its results to determine when more bike infrastructure is needed.

No other survey done by the government – or anyone else – provides such a rich source of information about the economy and American society.

In the unlikely event that the House bill becomes law, transportation planners could be left without a reliable guide for making decisions. The survey results guide the distribution of more than $400 billion, including funds for transportation projects.

The U.S. Department of Transportation, states and local governments use the findings to develop transportation plans and identify the need to fund public transportation, roads and transit options for the elderly and disabled.

Businesses also rely on the data to decide where to establish operations, recruit workers and gain information on consumer behavior. Eliminating funding for the ACS would leave the business community without a reliable data source to make intelligent decisions and avoid wasteful spending.

In introducing the amendment to eliminate funding, Representative Daniel Webster (R-FL) cited constitutional and privacy concerns. He compared the Census Bureau to the Environmental Protection Agency and bank regulators, saying that these agencies intrude on people’s lives.

These comments expose this freshman’s lack of understanding of what the American Community Survey is and does.

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