Streetsblog Capitol Hill

From the beginning of today’s hearing, Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee made it clear they weren’t going to let Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood’s last appearance before them be an easy one. While the hearing’s purpose was to examine the department’s budget request, the tough questions LaHood fielded on the budget were nothing compared to the fight one lawmaker picked about the Columbia River Crossing.

Transportation Appropriations Subcommittee Chair Tom Latham derided the administration request for $50 billion for “immediate transportation investments” as “a proposal we’ve seen three times before” which, like the 2009 stimulus package, is “not paid for or offset by reductions elsewhere.” He dismissed the plan to pay for transportation with war savings as “dubious,” saying, “Many members hope that the drawdown of our forces in Iraq and Afghanistan will provide an opportunity to reduce spending and the deficit, and not serve as excuse for even more spending.”

LaHood told Latham he “can’t have it both ways.”

“The first two years I was in this job you all criticized us for not coming up with a way to fund transportation,” LaHood said. “For the last two years, after receiving criticism for the first two years, for no funding, we’ve come up with a funding mechanism.”

Even worse than defending a gimmicky pay-for, LaHood tied himself in knots promising the U.S. DOT “has never promoted building anything to get anywhere faster.” He defended this position when it came to the Columbia River Crossing in the Portland area, which Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler raked him over the coals for, and even for high-speed rail, which he pledged was not actually about increasing speeds. A weird position, indeed.

Latham noted that the administration budget proposal included $40 billion for rail and wondered when the administration might send over a draft proposal of the rail reauthorization those numbers are based on. He reminded LaHood that the administration never actually sent a draft surface transportation reauthorization.

LaHood tried to turn the tables on Latham, saying the president was busy with guns, immigration and the sequester, and when Congress does its work on those three issues, Obama will bring out his bold plans for transportation. LaHood has made this argument before, and it’s one I find perplexing. Isn’t that why there are Cabinet secretaries, with thousands of people working under them? No one at DOT is working on guns and immigration, but I bet someone there has a pretty good handle on their plans for the next rail bill.

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The Obama Administration has put forward an opening bid in what are sure to be contentious 2014 budget negotiations, issuing a solidly progressive transportation budget that calls for increased overall spending and continued investment in passenger rail.

The $76 billion transportation budget would represent a 5.5 percent, or $4 billion, spending increase over 2012 levels.

In addition, the president repeated his call for $50 billion in stimulus-style funding in 2014. Of this one-time funding infusion, $40 billion would be reserved for “fix-it-first” projects aimed at bringing the nation’s roads, bridges, and transit systems into a state of good repair. The other $10 billion would be offered on a competitive basis to “innovative” projects, through programs like TIGER.

The $50 billion infrastructure-spending stimulus is a proposal we’ve seen Obama float several times in the last few years. In the 2014 budget proposal it is again packaged as a jobs program.

“These investments would create hundreds of thousands of jobs in the first few years and in industries suffering from protracted unemployment,” the document says.

The administration’s budget also demonstrates that the president has not abandoned his high-speed rail ambitions. The budget proposes $40 billion for passenger rail programs over five years, aimed at making rail more widely accessible and convenient. It’s essentially his outline for a passenger rail (PRIIA) reauthorization. He even stuck to his goal of providing 80 percent of Americans with rail access, though years of funding setbacks have tempered his ambitions some — he now pledges that 80 percent of the population will have “convenient access to a passenger rail system, featuring high-speed service” — not that they’ll all have high-speed rail service.

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A report released this week by the Federal Railroad Administration outlines 15 possible ways forward for the Northeast Corridor, ranging from building fully separate tracks to accommodate 220 mph bullet trains to simply maintaining the existing infrastructure in a state of good repair.

The “preliminary alternatives” were laid out in a report called “NEC Future,” which FRA is using to prompt discussions on the future of rail service along the corridor. Each alternative will be evaluated on its environmental and transportation impacts. FRA will then choose a “preferred alternative” to pursue.

The first several proposals laid out by FRA — the “resource-constrained” options — show trains maxing out at about 160 mph, like they do now. A state of good repair would be maintained. Investment would be limited to accommodating projected ridership increases through 2040. No new routes would be constructed.

Meanwhile, in the middle-range investment scenarios, “Alternative 4″ calls for increasing capacity at all choke points, including the construction or acquisition of “express bypass tracks,” to allow overtaking of slower trains. This alternative would also tackle “cost effective” trip-time improvement on projects “that also increase capacity,” according to the report.

Among the less “resource constrained” proposals is where we see a call for transformative new investment. “Alternative 15″ calls for a new right-of-way along the 457 miles from Boston to Washington, which would allow for a “major increase in capacity.” This proposal would include new routes off the main spine of the corridor, serving outlying areas like Long Island. This proposal also calls for a “super express” line running all the way from Portland, Maine to Washington, DC, along with two additional local routes along the length of the corridor, for shorter regional and inter-city trips.

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Not one to back away from a terrible argument, CNN’s Anderson Cooper is sticking with his series exposing the “boondoggle” of federal high-speed rail funding. In a segment aired Monday night, he and reporter Drew Griffin hammered away yet again at their argument that high-speed rail has been a waste of money. Under the tagline “Keeping Them Honest,” Cooper and Griffin hope to raise public ire about the taxpayer money “dumped” into a program sold as high-speed rail but is really just moving slow trains “a little faster.”

After four years and $12 billion poured into high-speed rail, Griffin says it’s nothing but a pipe dream held by those who “stand to make money” from it. After all, “not a single piece of rail has been laid.”

Griffin and Cooper made essentially the same arguments as their last segment, which cast hellfire and brimstone on a successful little project in Vermont that came in on time and under budget, cutting trip times and improving performance. And Streetsblog’s response is essentially the same.

Still, I can’t help calling out a few notable points that surfaced in this week’s story.

This time, they’re focused on improvements between Portland and Seattle, which, Griffin said, cut 10 minutes off a three hour, 40 minute trip. He doesn’t say how much the improvements cost, but he does mention that Washington state got $800 million of stimulus high-speed rail money, “mostly” for these rail improvements. (A small portion of those funds were actually appropriated in 2010, separate from the stimulus.)

If it makes him feel any better, the rest of Washington’s stimulus money for transportation was spent like this:

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Rep. John Mica (R-FL) no longer chairs the House Transportation Committee, but that doesn’t mean he’s eased up on his crusade against Amtrak. Calling the company a “Soviet style monopoly,” Mica used his afternoon address to the U.S. High Speed Rail Association to announce his plan to revive his despised and defeated measure to privatize parts of Amtrak.

Mica plans to introduce legislation to end Amtrak’s “monopoly” by allowing “open competition to provide intercity passenger and high-speed rail service.”

Of course, high-speed rail in California is open for bids from private, mostly foreign, firms, and many have expressed interest. Fully private entities are moving forward with rail projects in Florida and Texas. Amtrak simply doesn’t have the stranglehold on rail in America that Mica tries to convey. And in the sense that Amtrak does have a broad network of lines, it’s in large part because it was created by Congress and is partially funded by taxpayers with a mandate to provide mobility services to the country.

To illustrate the land of milk and honey that awaits rail privatization, Mica cited the European Union’s decision to end state rail monopolies. Perhaps he isn’t up to speed on the latest news: The European Commission planned last month to break up the monopolies and open the rail system to free market competition but took a step back from that two weeks later due to opposition, favoring instead a proposal that will allow Germany and France to keep their state-dominated systems. Meanwhile, rail privatization in the UK has let to a tripling of fare prices and plummeting investor confidence.

Earlier in the day, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood also had an anecdote from Europe and Asia. He’s toured 18 countries’ high-speed rail systems during his tenure as secretary. “The common thread in every country was the idea that unless the national government makes the investment in high-speed rail, it will not happen,” he said.

Mica hopes to include his privatization proposal in the Passenger Rail Investment and Improvement Act reauthorization this year. The last time he tried to include a similar idea in the surface transportation reauthorization, the proposal was so widely panned he had to retract it. Mica now has no leadership post within the committee. He is the senior member of the Rail Subcommittee but not the chair or the vice chair.

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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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California Republicans from Fresno and Bakersfield put their foot down in a House hearing yesterday, rejecting the high-speed rail project whose initial segment would run between those two cities.

Rep. Jeff Denham, whose district includes Fresno, is the author of an amendment, passed in June, to ensure that no more federal money gets spent on the project. And Bakersfield Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the Majority Whip in the House, suggested it may be time to “cut our losses” and stop spending money on the project.

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, testifying before Congress on his 67th birthday, rushed to the defense of the proposed rail line. “Investing in rail is a priority for President Obama and this administration,” he said, “and most importantly, it’s a priority for the American people.”

The cost estimate has fluctuated between $33 billion and $98 billion, and is now set in the middle, at $68 billion.

The high-speed rail authority is seeking $38 billion in additional federal funds to fill in some of the gaping difference between the full cost and the $11.5 billion in state and federal funds already pledged.

As McCarthy pointed out, now is a difficult time to make the case for more federal spending on rail, when fiscal cliff negotiations will result in spending cuts and tax increases. Congress hasn’t appropriated a dime toward high-speed rail since the GOP gained control of the House in 2010. So far, the federal government has allocated just $3.5 billion to the project.

The state is trying to raise capital from pensions and sovereign wealth funds, but LaHood said Denham’s provision barring federal funding makes it harder to court investors. “As long as there’s language in bills that prohibit us from funding, we’re going nowhere,” LaHood asserted.

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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.

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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In a pivotal vote Friday, the California Senate approved $4.5 billion in bonds to begin construction of CA High-Speed Rail (CAHSR) connecting San Francisco and Los Angeles. The funds will help fund construction of the line’s initial segment in the Central Valley and upgrades for the Caltrain and Metrolink commuter rail lines in the Bay Area and Los Angeles, respectively.

The vote, which reached a majority by just one senator, came as a major relief to high-speed rail advocates. The project, which has been increasingly scrutinized since voters approved over $9 billion in bonds for it in 2008, could have been scrapped without the approval. Had the vote failed, California could have lost another $3.2 billion in matching federal funds.

“Building high-speed rail in California could reinforce cities as the hubs of our economies, significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions, get commuters off congested roads, and cost much less than highway and airport expansion,” said Stuart Cohen, executive director of TransForm, which lobbies for smart growth and sustainable transportation in California.

“It will provide Californians with an improved transportation option that has for decades been available in other nations,” added Cohen, who noted that the vote comes exactly 150 years after the Transcontinental Railroad was authorized. Although high-speed rail is popular — and expanding — in other countries in Asia and Western Europe, CAHSR would be the first such system in the United States.

The previous plan from the CAHSR Authority lacked support even from TransForm, but the group praised the revised plan released in April, which reduced the project’s cost from about $100 billion to $68 billion, reduced the impacts on communities which it would run through, and provided funding to upgrade Caltrain and Metrolink tracks, which would be shared with CAHSR. “This new plan is simply much better,” said Cohen after it was released.

In San Francisco, funds approved in the Senate bill would help electrify the Caltrain tracks by 2019 and extend them to the Transbay Transit Center currently under construction. Friday’s vote was widely praised by SF officials.

The approved Senate bill “provides not only the beginning of the nation’s first high-speed rail line that will connect its diverse and growing communities, but also the local connections that will deliver the economic growth from high-speed rail into our towns and cities in the form of travelers be they commuters, tourists or students,” said a joint statement from SF Municipal Transportation Agency Director Ed Reiskin and Chairman Tom Nolan.

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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.

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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