Streetsblog Capitol Hill

This is the second of two posts examining Rep. Bill Shuster’s candidacy for the chairmanship of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. Yesterday, we took a look at Shuster’s positions on rail and his leadership style. Here we delve into his record on active transportation and the always-thorny topic of funding.

Legendary wheeler-dealer Bud Shuster got emotional when his son, Bill, took his seat in Congress. The younger Shuster now stands to take his father's old place at the helm of the House Transportation Committee. Photo: Gary Baranec/Altoona Mirror

While you might not agree with him that privatization is the best medicine for a struggling passenger rail program, by most accounts Rep. Bill Shuster (R-PA) has a genuine interest in the future of rail in America. It’s hard to make the case that he cares nearly as much about making streets safe for walking and biking.

Bike Paths Kill!

Indeed, perhaps the most alarming aspect of a Bill Shuster chairmanship is what it would mean for progress on street safety. Shuster is no friend of the movement to make American cities and towns more bikeable and walkable.

He fell in line with the Republican army against Transportation Enhancements, a program that mostly funded bike/ped projects under the previous transportation law. “Not everybody uses a bike path,” Shuster said at the time. He chafed at what others in his party called “set-asides,” saying, “That’s for [the] community to decide, not for our federal government to sit up here in Washington and decide.” He claimed that eliminating TE was “fundamental to the reforms that we are trying to include in this bill.”

Indeed, Shuster’s conviction that transportation is a federal responsibility ends at the interstate. “When you start getting into the inner city, the federal government has less of a role to play,” he told an audience at the Transportation Research Board’s annual conference in January, ignoring the fact that much interstate spending is used to provide capacity for local car trips on highways. “It’s up to the local community and state to decide [their transportation priorities].”

His position that federal transportation dollars should be “focused like a laser [yes, one of his favorite phrases] on the national highway system” alarmed the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy, which issued an action alert to Pennsylvania voters when Shuster was appointed to the conference committee negotiating the final surface transportation bill. RTC noted that during his official conference statement, Shuster “regrettably… call[ed] out ‘bike paths’ as wasteful, even dangerous.”

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With the election just days away, it’s a good time to reflect on what the Obama administration has done with transportation policy – and what a Romney administration might have in store. Streetsblog does not endorse candidates. This is an overview of their respective records and a look back at what we know of these two men. We’ll start with President Obama in this post and move on to Mitt Romney in the next one.

High-speed rail could have been President Obama's signature achievement. Photo courtesy of Obama for America.

Perhaps the best thing President Obama did for transportation policy was to nominate Ray LaHood as U.S. DOT secretary. Sure, LaHood reportedly wanted to be Secretary of Agriculture, not transportation. And yes, Obama’s main motive for nominating the moderate Republican congressman was to make friends across the aisle, a goal that for the most part went woefully unmet. Nonetheless, LaHood has proven to be a genuine reformer.

We knew LaHood was a keeper when he stood on a tabletop and declared that bicycles were on an “equal footing” with cars, announcing “the end of favoring motorized transportation at the expense of non-motorized.”

The administration’s creation of the Partnership for Sustainable Communities has created valuable new links between federal transportation, housing, and environmental policies, demonstrating how government can eliminate barriers between agencies. It’s a model that some state transportation agencies have begun to take note of, as they approach local governments to craft land use and transportation decisions that make sense in tandem.

Even the Republican House of Representatives’ ire toward the Partnership can’t destroy the essential piece of it: that agencies are breaking down siloes and communicating more effectively with each other. The smart growth ethic that infuses the Partnership has permeated the three agencies involved – and many more.

Another signature achievement of this administration has been the TIGER program. TIGER has awarded more than $3 billion to more than 200 transportation projects based on their ability to meet strategic objectives, bucking longstanding policies (which continue in the current transportation bill) that fund transportation based on formulas and a singular focus on making sure every state gets their piece of the pie. While TIGER has some geographic criteria and a set-aside for rural areas, it has rewarded cities, regions, and towns that are innovating, and the program has prioritized bike/ped infrastructure, streetcars, freight rail, maintenance of existing roads, and other measures that advance sustainable transportation and smart growth. And by the way, that rural set-aside isn’t a bad thing: It’s helped jump-start transit access in a lot of small towns and tribal areas.

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Out of thin air, House Speaker John Boehner sent an email yesterday with the subject line, “Labor Day Pain: Gas Prices Have Doubled on President Obama’s Watch.” As evidence of the “doubling” charge, Boehner links to his own website, where he claims, “The average price for a gallon of gasoline was $1.85 when President Obama took office.”

Technically, he’s right. There was a sudden and temporary drop in gas prices just at the end of President Bush’s term — probably because there was a massive global recession at the end of President Bush’s term.

Gas prices are actually just about where they were Labor Day 2008, when George W. Bush was president. Source: Gas Buddy

You know who really gets this? Mitt Romney, that’s who. Don’t expect any reality-based commentary like this out of him these days, but back when he was governor of Massachusetts, Romney “responded to price spikes by describing them as the natural result of global market pressures and by calling for increases in fuel efficiency,” according to Alec MacGillis, writing in The New Republic this spring. Under pressure to call for a gas tax holiday when prices were high in 2006, Romney thought better of it. MacGillis quotes Romney:

“I don’t think that now is the time, and I’m not sure there will be the right time, for us to encourage the use of more gasoline,” Romney said, according to the Quincy Patriot Ledger’s report at the time. “I’m very much in favor of people recognizing that these high gasoline prices are probably here to stay.”

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Rep. Earl Blumenauer likes to say that Oregon was the first state to adopt a gas tax and it will be the first state to get rid of it. In 2006-2007, the state conducted a pilot study of alternative revenue collection methods, with an eye toward moving to a better system. This fall, they’ll do another pilot, fine-tuning their process for replacing the gas tax with a vehicle-miles-traveled fee.

Oregon's VMT fee can be collected through odometer readings, but the system works best if people use more high-tech means of tracking miles driven. Photo: Fun with Num3ers

A legislature-appointed task force looked into two dozen methods of funding transportation and settled on VMT as the best one. With electric cars and hybrids growing in popularity, especially in eco-minded Oregon, tax collections at the pump don’t bring in enough to maintain the state’s transportation infrastructure.

During the first pilot, people raised some familiar concerns about privacy. They didn’t like having a government-installed GPS receiver in their car, tracking their movements. As it turns out, a lot of the resistance can be overcome if people can choose their own technology from the marketplace. They can just use their own smart phone, GPS unit, or OnStar device. After all, we’re already wired to the teeth with technology that tracks our every move. We just need to let those devices calculate the miles we drive.

“The government will not be a provider of devices,” said James Whitty, who manages Oregon DOT’s Office of Innovative Partnerships and Alternative Funding. “We just won’t be. We can’t be. It stops the discussion of this. People don’t want the government to have anything to do with providing their technologies.”

Oregon DOT found that people were also more comfortable letting the private sector collect the data and process the payments.

While some would prefer a VMT fee based solely on odometer readings, that wouldn’t allow for dynamic pricing based on congestion and other conditions. But more importantly, especially when we’re talking about state tax collection, it doesn’t differentiate between miles driven in the state of Oregon, for which the driver owes taxes to Oregon, versus miles driven in Washington or California or Idaho.

Ironically, the people most vehement in their opposition to government tracking will have to deal with the government the most. For those who reject the technological approach — even with devices of their own choosing, and even with no transmitter of information out of the device – the state has been forced to come up with other options. But since they don’t involve private-sector technology, they won’t involve private-sector accounting, either.

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Liisa Ecola is a senior project associate at the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research institution.

It’s time to explore mileage-based user fees. For nearly a century, Americans have largely paid for roads through gas taxes – taxes which governments can’t or won’t raise. Even if they could, more and more cars no longer run on gas. Transportation experts have talked for decades about changing the basis for transportation funding to miles driven, rather than gallons consumed. But this sensible switch is proceeding slowly for several reasons, including concerns over privacy. Fortunately, there are ways to address this issue.

Worried about devices that track your every move? Here's one. Photo: Coolspotters

Decades ago, the only way to count miles driven was odometer readings. Odometers are still considered a potential source of data to implement mileage-based user fees (MBUF). But using odometers means losing the chance to experiment with charging different fees on different roads at different times of day—that is, congestion pricing, probably one of the best tools to unclog many metro areas’ gridlock. It means, for instance, that the number of miles Virginians drive in DC—and vice versa—remains unknown, with the possibility of jurisdictions losing revenues that could help support their road programs. It also means the hassle of annual odometer inspection.

Beyond odometers, more sophisticated technologies can determine travel time and location along with total mileage, but they inevitably raise privacy concerns. Of all the complexities involved with a potential move to MBUF—administrative, jurisdictional, collection costs—privacy issues tend to raise the most concern among the public.

And it’s not surprising. The United States has a long tradition of wanting government to leave its citizens alone. But unlike many European countries, where privacy is protected by stringent laws at the national level, the United States has no such overarching federal legislation.

With technologies changing so quickly, legal issues around privacy are still evolving, and Americans may not have as much privacy with regard to transportation as they think. Depending on the state, records of electronic toll tags (such as E-ZPass) can be used not just in criminal cases, but in divorces. In January, the Supreme Court ruled [PDF] that secretly installing a GPS device in a car to track a criminal defendant for 28 days was an unlawful search – but did not address the legality of monitoring an on-board unit already in the car.

There is no need for privacy concerns to halt all discussion of new technologies to help address America’s mounting transportation funding crisis. Privacy concerns can be dealt with in several ways. Here are five:

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Last week, I published a list of seven questions I had as the Transportation Conference Committee started meeting. I was examining the politics, not the policy. Turns out some readers wanted to hear more about the policy.

I asked the Cap’n what his questions would be. The reply:

Meanwhile, reader Ryan Richter sent in his revised list of questions too. They’re a little more specific, so I’ll start with Ryan’s. With any luck, the answers to Cap’n Transit’s questions will be woven into the answers below.

Thanks to both of you for keeping me focused on what really matters in this whole political hullabaloo.

Ryan’s first question:

1. How will public transportation fare after being practically decapitated in the last round?

Public transit came out a winner when members of the House GOP mounted their full-frontal assault against it. “The uprising was so immediate and so bipartisan [the Republicans] backed off,” said Deron Lovaas of NRDC. Democrats and some urban and suburban Republicans blew up at the idea that transit would no longer be eligible for its 20 percent of Highway Trust Fund dollars, which it’s gotten since the Fund’s Mass Transit Account was created under Ronald Reagan in 1983. Surviving an attempt against it makes transit that much stronger now – its opponents know that defunding transit is a losing issue for them.

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Source: CBO

Would stricter fuel economy rules bankrupt transportation funding in America? The Congressional Budget Office seems to think so, but environmentalists are quick to say that the system was hurtling toward bankruptcy anyway.

Under a new rule proposed by the NHTSA and the EPA, CAFE standards are expected to raise the average fuel economy of the new-vehicle fleet from 34.1 miles per gallon — the average anticipated for 2016 and beyond under current standards — to 49.6 mpg. That’s fantastic news for the environment, but for those counting on gas consumption to pay for essential infrastructure, a recent CBO study suggests it would be a disaster.

Just how big a disaster is a matter of some dispute. The CBO says that between now and 2022, revenues — already insufficient to meet transportation needs, already causing endless gridlock in Congress — would shrink by $57 billion. By the time most cars on the road are in compliance with the new standards, about 2040, the CBO says that would mean a 21 percent drop in funds available for infrastructure spending.

Deron Lovaas of NRDC says the CBO is “sniffing fumes” with its analysis:

To set the record straight, the correct estimate is a loss of $2.5 billion over those 10 years—a reduction of just one percent of the current revenues. The CBO actually noted this themselves in small print in a footnote on page six of the report: “The new CAFE standards would not take effect until 2017, so they would reduce gasoline tax revenues between 2012 and 2022 by less than 1 percent, CBO estimates.”[1]

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There’s more than one way to approach transportation reform. One is to believe that an ideal transportation policy promotes the use of modes that are environmentally sustainable and which foster livable cities, while those that perpetuate overdependence on automobiles do neither.

Moderator Anne Korin (center) and participants at Thursday's Mobility Choice Roundtable. (Photo: Johanna Moss/IAGS)

Then there is another camp, which approaches transportation from a micro, rather than macro, perspective. In this camp, America’s transportation choices are seen as a market where providers compete across the various modes for the privilege of meeting each individual’s transportation needs. A good transportation policy, in this view, is one that makes such a market function as efficiently as possible, keeping costs low for travelers and profits high enough for providers to ensure continued service without excessive government subsidy or regulation.

Here, the user-pays-user-benefits principle is sacrosanct, and fiscal self-sufficiency is paramount. It’s transportation reform for the libertarian set, who are just as likely as many liberals to categorize current transportation policy as deeply flawed — though they are just as likely to disagree about how.

That’s why the Mobility Choice Coalition — convened by the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security — hosts roundtable discussions about the issue of transportation reform as seen from the second camp. The most recent one was last Thursday. Previous roundtables, which Streetsblog has covered in the past, have covered the viability of private transit, the comparative advantages of bus vs. rail transit, and the idea of incorporating the cost of foreign oil wars into the price of highway travel.

“One of the key issues for us is pricing, really, across the board,” Anne Korin, the roundtable’s moderator, told Streetsblog. “Get the pricing right, and a lot of stuff will follow.” When one mode is priced unnaturally low, the market isn’t operating as efficiently as it could.

But pricing isn’t the whole story. Congress, you may have heard, is working on a new surface transportation bill, and there’s plenty of federal spending that has to happen before changes to pricing can be instituted. Korin can already see her message at work there.

“You definitely saw, in response to transportation language in both chambers, a huge emphasis on the user-pays principle,” Korin said. “First the response to H.R. 7 [which used energy royalties to pay for transportation spending], and the Senate bill which dips into general funds [for everything]. Either way, we think it’s very, very important to maintain the user-pays principle, and that message has gotten a good hearing.”

Last Thursday’s discussion began with a list of priorities for transportation policy reform, but it was clear from the outset that there are still deep divisions among cost-minded transportation thinkers. Those divisions often occur around whether gas tax revenue — or vehicle-miles-traveled fees once they’re implemented — and tolls should be used exclusively for roads or whether they can be used to fund infrastructure for other modes as well, which some see as undermining the user-pays principle.

Former Virginia Secretary of Transportation Shirley Ybarra, now of the Reason Foundation, said, “America needs a large increase in highway investment,” but opined that too much existing roadway revenue is being spent on what she called “other stuff.” Rather than breaking down the funding silos for each mode, Ybarra advocated the complete separation of those silos, and the insistence that each mode be entirely user funded. “Mica was on the right track” when he tried to separate transit from the Highway Trust Fund, she said — that is, until “transit went off the deep end.”

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Democratic Governor Martin O’Malley of Maryland was dealt a setback last week when the legislature failed to approve a revenue package that would have shored up funding for transportation projects.

Gov. Martin O'Malley (D-MD) must convene a special session of his state's legislature in the next 10 weeks. Image: Baltimore Fishbowl

Maryland has been at the forefront of a number of progressive planning issues in recent years, including a trailblazing statewide land-use plan. The difficulty in raising the gas tax is notable not only in relation to Maryland’s smart growth trajectory, but also as a harbinger for other states struggling to maintain and invest in transportation infrastructure absent a long-term federal bill.

Maryland pays for transportation projects through its Transportation Trust Fund, which works pretty much like the federal Highway Trust Fund — it gets money from gas taxes, excise taxes on SUVs, vehicle registration fees, and the feds, then dedicates it to transportation projects. Also like the HTF, the TTF routinely falls short of what it’s supposed to cover.

One reason for the shortfall is that the state’s gas tax has been frozen at 23.5 cents per gallon for the last 19 years. It has never been tied to the rate of inflation or fluctuations in the price of gas. Furthermore, gas is exempt from the state’s 6 percent sales tax.

O’Malley proposed phasing out the exemption over several years, directing the proceeds to the TTF. He claimed that the state could raise some $600 million annually for transportation that way, nearly doubling the amount currently brought in by gas taxes. The state gas tax currently only covers about 20 percent of the state’s transportation budget, according to an MDOT spokesperson — under O’Malley’s plan, it could cover 31 percent.

But even though O’Malley’s party holds a majority in both houses of Maryland’s legislature, his plan never made it out of committee in either chamber. So what happened?

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Yesterday, before taking off for a two-week recess, Congress passed a three-month extension of SAFETEA-LU, the ninth since it first expired on September 30, 2009. It now only needs the president’s signature sometime before midnight on Saturday to become law.

That means that on June 26, 2012, current transportation policy will have been operating under temporary extensions for 1,000 days. Four days later, it will be due to expire yet again.

One thousand days. Think about how much more could have been accomplished if in September of 2009, Congress had simply approved a 3-year, $150 billion extension rather than piecing one together three or six months at a time. Cities and transit agencies, for instance, would have had the funding guarantees to support investment in infrastructure while they ride out the recession.

The political dynamics at work are complex. But at the most basic level, no one in Washington has mustered the will to tell Americans the truth: “Transportation isn’t free.”

Take the Senate’s two-year bill. Its loudest critics complain that it doesn’t offer the funding guarantees of a five-year bill. And that’s true — even the bill’s supporters would agree. But the whole rationale behind the decision to cap the bill at two years was that the gas tax could just barely get them to the end of 2013.

At some point, Congress and the president will have to clear this hurdle. Whether by raising the gas tax and indexing it to inflation, implementing a mileage tax, or simply letting existing highways be tolled, the money has to come from somewhere.

You won’t hear anyone in Washington say that these days. Instead, the more conservative representatives will talk about how the federal government is exceeding its authority in paying for transit and bike lanes because they don’t cross state lines. Or the believers in private financing will say they need more time to develop “innovative” (read: magic) funding schemes that’ll saddle later generations — my generation — with the cost of the transportation fantasy they’ve sold to their constituents.

“The money just isn’t there!” cried House Majority Leader Eric Cantor this week, apparently forgetting the option of raising the gas tax. To which his (Republican!) colleague in the House Walter Jones responded, “Then why are we spending $10 billion a month in Afghanistan?” Because freedom isn’t free, as they say.