Streetsblog Capitol Hill

Something to keep in mind while the House GOP leadership toys with the idea of sending national transportation policy back to the 1950s…

Funding to make biking and walking safer has taken something of a beating in both the House and Senate transportation bills. The fate of the most significant federal bike-ped programs — Safe Routes to School, Transportation Enhancements, and Recreational Trails – is still very much in doubt. Under the Senate bill, passed Wednesday, local agencies would at least have greater access to the funds that remain for these programs. At last glance, the House bill completely obliterated dedicated bike-ped funding.

A House GOP staffer said bike-ped programs, which make it safer to, for instance, cross the street, are the new "Bridge to Nowhere." Photo: Texas DOT

The uncertainty over bike-ped funding will continue as long as the House struggles to finalize its bill. At a panel discussion earlier this week, one GOP aide turned some heads when he characterized bike-ped issues as this year’s “Bridge to Nowhere” — that is, the poster child, in the eyes of his party, for wasteful spending. (The actual Bridge to Nowhere — funded by an earmark in the 2005 transpo bill — inspired the proposed ban on earmarks, which failed but was nonetheless observed in the current reauthorization efforts.)

As a comparison, it’s absurd – bike-ped infrastructure delivers tremendous value, dollar-for-dollar, compared to regular highways, let alone enormous boondoggles. Meanwhile, state DOTs continue to waste billions building highways that really do go nowhere.

Bike-ped spending is also minuscule compared to earmarks. “Earmarks made up something like 8 to 10 percent of the cost of an already substantial transportation bill,” Darren Flusche, policy analyst at the League of American Bicyclists, told Streetsblog. “By contrast, bicycling and walking receive only 1.5 percent of federal transportation spending.”

“For roughly the cost of the Bridge to Nowhere alone, communities across all fifty states built over one thousand Transportation Enhancements projects last year,” Flusche added.

Members of Congress attacking the legitimacy of cycling infrastructure is nothing new. But the perception of street safety programs as unnecessary frills used to be something of a fringe position. Now it’s the dominant view of the Republican majority.

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Add Federal Transit Administrator Peter Rogoff to the list of people saying that it’s premature to declare victory over the House’s attempts to cast transit into the abyss. Rogoff knows a thing or two about transportation bills: He was an aide on the Senate Transportation Appropriations Subcommittee for 20 years, during which time the federal government passed three long-term transportation laws.

FTA Administrator Peter Rogoff says 30 years of not having to defend federal funding has led to complacency. Photo: Minnesota Public Radio

Until they show us something different, said Rogoff, the same old House bill — the one that cuts off all dedicated revenue streams for transit programs — is still the one before us. And since the House has yet to bring forward any concrete alternatives, it presents “an incredibly fluid and dangerous situation, especially since our highway trust fund programs are scheduled to expire in three weeks.”

The House bill “deliberately puts public transportation on a starvation diet, forcing it to survive on the most controversial of funding proposals,” like oil drilling, according to Rogoff. “And I’m talking about what the House bill does, not what the House bill did.”

“We spend a great deal of time talking to each other, but we’re in a fundamental fight now for our own survival,” Rogoff said. “I don’t think we’ve won the fight on the trust fund. We haven’t won anything. The only thing that’s happened is that the expiration of our program has grown weeks closer.”

Support for mass transit has been enshrined in federal law since Ronald Reagan signed the Surface Transportation Assistance Act of 1982, which raised the federal gas tax for the first time since 1959 and directed a portion of the proceeds to fund transit. Since then, Rogoff surmises, the transit industry has gotten complacent.

“We’ve never had to have the discussion about why we are there in the name of a balanced transportation system,” Rogoff said. “I’d be willing to bet that of the 535 members of House and Senate, less than a dozen were in office when Reagan signed transit into the trust fund. That gives us 520-plus people to educate.” (The real number is well over a dozen, in fact closer to 40, but it doesn’t change his point.)

The result is a Congress that never truly internalized the rationale for supporting transit, and therefore sees it as as a superfluous nice-to-have rather than a hard-fought and well-deserved component of federal policy. ”We need to talk to each and every one of them. We need to stop just speaking to our friends.”

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In its annual “Views and Estimates” document [PDF], the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee indicates that when it comes to transportation policy, despite a few nods to transit, House Republicans still want to cut spending and let highway-centric state DOTs sort out the details. While the House transportation bill could be on its last legs, the document shows that the House GOP hasn’t given up on its quest to eliminate street safety programs for walking and biking while giving a free hand to states to build more sprawl projects.

The House GOP wants states to have more say over how transportation funds are spent -- so they can spend more of it opening new stretches of highway. Photo: Sumter County, FL

The T&I Committee submits this document each year to help shape the Budget Committee’s spending priorities. On the positive side of the ledger this time around, the committee prominently mentions strategic planning and intermodalism (in addition to familiar favorites like consolidation and cost-cutting) as primary goals. Committee Republicans also assert that the government’s pledge to spend Highway Trust Fund receipts on their intended use has been upheld. That affirmation flies in the face of the argument, often made by conservatives and road-gangers — including members of the T&I Committee — that funding transit out of that fund constitutes a violation of that contract.

And the committee states its opposition to the underfunding of transportation programs “under the guise of ‘budget reform’” – something they threw their full weight behind last summer, when they introduced a bill that would have hacked deeply into all facets of the program, cutting 30 percent across the board.

Elsewhere in the document are countless signs that House Republicans are sticking to their more ill-conceived policy ideas, as laid out in their multi-year transportation bill, H.R. 7. That bill differs dramatically from President Obama’s FY 2013 budget proposal, and the Views and Estimates document carefully notes each of those differences. Of course, H.R. 7 is on life support right now, so the Views and Estimates are best seen as the GOP fantasy of how to shape transportation policy.

T&I members, for their part, say that the president is living in a fantasy world too, when he asserts that his budget proposal is paid for with war savings. “The reduction in overseas military operations is the result of policy decisions that have already been made,” they say in the document. “The administration’s surface transportation reauthorization proposal would not achieve any additional savings.”

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Last May, Streetsblog ran an article with the headline “Experts Agree: Six-Year Transportation Bill Won’t Pass This Year.” A lot has happened since then, but we’re still right where we started, butting up against a deadline with more than enough gridlock to give even optimistic experts pause.

The clock is ticking for Congress to approve a new transportation bill, or extend the old one. Smart money says "extension." Image: Ananse Productions

Here’s where we stand: The current extension of the law authorizing federal transportation funding expires on March 31, which means the worst case scenario is a shutdown of federal transportation programs on April 1. The Senate is close, or closer, anyway, to passing a completely new two-year, $109 billion bill. The House is currently without a proposal of its own, and House Republicans haven’t been keen on the Senate bill — though that might be changing.

If Washington has to stop writing checks to states, then construction projects all over the country would grind to a halt in a matter of weeks, or even days. Senator Barbara Boxer has often pointed out — including at a press conference this morning — that 1.8 million jobs are at stake if that happens.

It’s likely that a shutdown will be avoided. A similar reauthorization fight over aviation resulted in a partial shutdown last year, and memories of the fallout should be fresh enough that Congress would do everything necessary to avoid a repeat.

However, the consensus among the transportation experts, activists, and lobbyists I’ve spoken to over the last few days is that no new transportation bill will be signed into law before March 31, and probably not even before the November election. Opinions seem to differ only on whether there will be just one big stopgap extension, or two smaller ones.

Here’s one likely course of events according to my anonymous conversational partners:

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Majority Leader Harry Reid has incorporated much of the Ben Cardin/Thad Cochran amendment into the so-called “manager’s mark” of the Senate transportation bill. The move means that the amendment’s provisions letting local governments directly access funding from popular bicycle and pedestrian programs will be included in the bill without having to come up for a separate vote.

Without the Cardin-Cochran amendment, cities and towns looking to invest in safer streets for walking and biking would have been left at the mercy of their state DOTs, which could have prevented any bike/ped funding from being spent. The adopted provisions would put funding directly in the hands of local agencies, making it harder for state highway departments to funnel resources away from walking, biking, and complete streets.

The full Senate bill, including the Cardin/Cochran provisions, could face a cloture vote as early as Tuesday. Streetsblog will have more in-depth analysis later in the day of what this means for the Senate’s efforts to pass a transportation bill.

Image: C-SPAN2

The U.S. Senate voted 51-48 today to reject an amendment to their transportation bill that would overturn measures in President Obama’s signature health care law dealing with contraception coverage. The vote clears the way for the Senate to finally begin considering actual transportation issues rather than dealing with delay tactics.

The so-called “conscience” amendment, proposed by Missouri Senator Roy Blunt, was one of two that recently drew the ire of Democrats Barbara Boxer and Harry Reid for delaying the approval of the underlying bill.

The other amendment, proposed by Rand Paul of Kentucky, would withhold aid to Egypt until the American NGO employees there were allowed to leave the country — and today, they were.

Attention can now turn to the meat of the Senate’s transportation proposal. Without missing a beat, 17 environmental organizations, including the Sierra Club and Republicans for Environmental Protection, have just sent a letter to the Senate outlining the best — and worst — of the remaining amendments:

Facing the expiration of the current transportation authorization on March 31, some have tried to attach unrelated, environmentally damaging provisions, such as permitting the dirty and dangerous Keystone XL pipeline (Hoeven SA 1537) and rolling back existing clean air standards to reduce toxic pollution from industrial boilers and cement plants (Collins SA 1660, Barrasso SA 1618)…

As this legislation moves forward, we encourage you to support amendments that will further reduce oil consumption in the transportation sector and provide Americans with access to clean, affordable transportation choices such as transit, biking and walking.

The letter contained an outright endorsement of several amendments, including the Cardin-Cochran proposal to give metro areas greater control over bike-ped funding.

Other supported amendments include making congestion mitigation and air quality improvement (CMAQ) a required part of state transportation planning, and offering financing for local governments to build public infrastructure around transit nodes.

The letter also called out two amendments, both proposed by Utah Republican Orrin Hatch, for being particularly damaging. “These amendments would deepen our addiction to oil by linking infrastructure funding to increased oil drilling in our nation’s wildest places, such as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and rescinding funds from the Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing loan program, which helps automakers retool to manufacture cleaner, more efficient vehicles,” the letter reads.

T4America is also maintaining its amendment tracker page, which after today’s action will finally have changes to track.

Read the full text of the environmental groups’ letter after the jump.

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UPDATE (3:45 p.m.): Citing a lack of support from his colleagues, Speaker John Boehner has dropped his 18-month transportation proposal and has not yet offered an alternative, according to Politico. “A five-year bill is the best way to do this,” he said.

We’ve known for a few days now that the House, in the wake of Republican party infighting, was not likely to pursue a long-term transportation bill after all. It turns out, they’re not even pursuing a bill any longer than the Senate’s. But the House bill remains a drastic attack on programs for safer walking and biking while favoring highway construction and oil drilling.

Chairman John Mica has watched his bill get dismantled and delayed by House leadership, yet gets blamed for its failures. Photo: Jonathan Maus/BikePortland

Todd Zwillich at Transportation Nation broke the story last night that the House’s revamped transportation proposal will only authorize federal transportation programs for 18 months, running out in mid-2013. The Senate, meanwhile, has been working on a two-year bill.

The House leadership had to go back to the drawing board after factions within the Republican party came out against Chairman John Mica’s initial five-year, $260 billion bill, though for different reasons.

Moderates in transit-heavy districts opposed the elimination of dedicated funding streams for transit, and super-conservatives opposed what they saw as irresponsible deficit spending — even more so when one of their supposed funding sources, federal pension reform, wound up funding a tax cut extension instead, leaving an even bigger gap.

In its place, the House is proposing an 18-month bill that raises no additional revenue and continues to fund transit from the Highway Trust Fund. (There is no word yet on how much funding an 18-month bill would authorize.)

However, it still consolidates bike-ped funding out of existence, still gives states more authority to direct their transportation dollars towards highways, still rolls back environmental safeguards, and still ties infrastructure funding to expanded oil drilling. So while the changes may win over some undecided Republicans, they certainly haven’t made a decent piece of legislation.

Steve LaTourette, the moderate Republican and friend of Speaker John Boehner who has been a voice for multi-modalism, told Zwillich that the GOP leadership is still intent on taking the bill in an extreme direction. “They’re going to try to jam it,” he said. “They went backward because that’s what the conservatives said they wanted.”

House leadership has tried to pin the blame on Mica for the bill’s failures, prompting colleagues to rush to his defense. As Politico reported this morning:

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On January 6, 1983, the icon of the modern conservative movement, Ronald Reagan, signed legislation to raise the gas tax for the first time in more than two decades, devoting a portion of the revenue to transit.

We’ve been reading about this moment a lot, as the current GOP leadership in the House tries to undo Reagan’s legacy by eviscerating dedicated transit funding.

In this ABC News clip, you can see that Reagan touted the measure, a five cent gas tax increase, as an economic catalyst. It would raise $5.5 billion for transportation investment and result in 320,000 new jobs, the administration said. The measure even reserved one cent per gallon for transit, all for the cost of about $30 a year for the average driver.

Sounds like a win-win, right? After some initial resistance to the idea, Reagan eventually came around to that perspective, even if some special interest groups (truckers) didn’t.

What a difference 29 years makes.

When Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama balked at the increase in transportation spending recommended by President Obama’s 2013 budget, Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood did not mince words: “America is one big pothole,” he said.

Secretary LaHood defended the president's proposal to pay for transportation using war savings. Photo: Senate Budget Committee

LaHood was testifying before the Senate Budget Committee yesterday to explain and defend the President’s proposed transportation budget, as he has done for each of the past three years. And just as in previous years, LaHood was forced onto the defensive. The budget recommends a six-year surface transportation program worth $476 billion, including $47 billion for one of Obama’s signature transportation initiatives, high-speed rail.

Obama’s budget even includes a pay-for, albeit a controversial one: The President proposes to take half of the expected savings from removing troops from Iraq and Afghanistan and spend it on transportation, while using the other half to pay down the national debt.

Using war savings to pay for transportation elicited doubts from committee leaders from both parties yesterday. Sessions, a Republican, pointed out that “we borrowed money to pay for the war,” rather than raise taxes to fight it, “so when the war ends we just don’t have to borrow as much.” Sessions also pointed out that the war savings figure endorsed by the Congressional Budget Office uses a model that assumes ten years of spending at current levels, and nobody expects America to maintain anything resembling its current troop presence in Afghanistan for ten years.

Chairman Kent Conrad was more measured in his concern: “War funding is very unpredictable… I’ve always been reluctant to use war savings to pay for something, that’s a bonus in terms of bringing down deficits and debt.”

LaHood said he liked Obama’s pay-for plan, and was especially excited that Congress could no longer accuse the president of proposing investment without a revenue source. As to the reliability of war savings: “War is not in my portfolio,” LaHood said.

When LaHood was grilled by Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) about why the federal government would ever want to be in the business of subsidizing high-speed rail, Mark Begich (D-AK) came to his defense: “We subsidize roads, big time… I understand the senator’s concern about HSR but the point is, we subsidize all of it: You name it, we subsidize it, because it’s good for business if we do it right.”

However, the committee was largely silent on suggesting any alternative funding sources. Ron Johnson (R-WI) hit upon the unspoken theme of the past three years of reauthorization efforts when he said, “It’s politically poisonous to raise the gas tax, so why not look at utilizing energy resources?” The question was reminiscent of an exchange between senators Michael Enzi and Max Baucus during last week’s Finance Committee hearing, when Enzi proposed — and immediately withdrew — an amendment indexing the federal gas tax to inflation, just to prove a point about the supposed necessity of using oil and gas drilling as a revenue source. Increasing, or at least indexing, the gas tax would appear be the simplest way to stabilize the highway trust fund while staying true(ish) to a “user pays/user benefits” principle, but it faces a mountain of political inertia. The last time the gas tax was raised was in 1993.