Stephen Harrod, Assistant Professor at the University of Dayton, quoted in a recent APTA report. Image: APTA

“Most Americans don’t use railroads, they use cars.”

“There’s no better example of excessive government spending than the $53 billion President Obama allocated for high-speed rail in his 2012 budget.”

“Would you pay $1,000 so that someone — probably not you — can ride high-speed trains 58 miles a year?”

“High-speed rail may be feasible in parts of Europe or Japan, where the population density is much higher, but without enough people packed into a given space, there will never be enough riders to repay the cost of building and maintaining a high-speed rail system.”

Critics of federal initiatives to promote high-speed rail have launched these attacks with great frequency over the past few years. Their targets have been projects in Florida, Wisconsin, California, or even federal regulators and Secretary Ray LaHood. But their primary intended audience was the American people, and, according to the American Public Transportation Association, there has been a “well-oiled campaign” (pun probably intended) to make sure their message was repeated, and loudly.

APTA is trying to unplug that propaganda machine with its new “Inventory of the Criticisms of High-Speed Rail With Suggested Responses and Counterpoints” [PDF]. It methodically lists no fewer than 37 specific objections to pursuing high-speed rail (grouped thematically into eight chapters) and exposes them for “lack of veracity and vision.” The four critiques quoted above (the first two from Diana Furchtgott-Roth in the Washington Examiner, the third from CATO’s Randall O’Toole and the last from Thomas Sowell in The Albany Herald), barely scratch the surface of the anti-HSR literature addressed by the report.

The aim of the report is to give HSR supporters a way to return fire when detractors say things like:

• High-speed rail is too expensive and will never be profitable. APTA says the question of profit is “dangerously misleading and irrelevant” since “the economic value generated by passenger transportation historically is captured by the businesses served by the transportation network, not by the carriers.”
• It doesn’t have broad enough support. On the contrary, says APTA: Even the Congressional leaders who have been the most critical of the Obama administration’s allocation of rail funds “have set about finding creative ways of financing the initiative in the hope of encouraging greater private-sector support and leadership.”
• HSR might work elsewhere, but it won’t work in the U.S. Oh really? Sure, intercity passenger rail currently serves “the smallest share of riders among all modes of passenger transportation,” says APTA. But that’s changing. “In the Northeast Corridor, intercity trains enjoy a market share almost equal to the airlines, and nationally, ridership on Amtrak is at an all-time high.”

Many of the debunked criticisms point to some combination of unrecoverable cost and only marginal benefits, with the assumption that taxpayers will be on the hook for costs and that benefits will be confined to a select few. Not so: APTA cites ample evidence that high-speed passenger rail could be capable of operating profits and wide-ranging benefits.

Beyond reiterating HSR’s many merits, the report exposes the double standard so frequently invoked in the HSR debate: that of government subsidization. What is it that makes HSR off-limits for government spending, while the construction and maintenance of the interstate highway system was undertaken at such great federal expense? The truth, as the report points out, is that one would be hard pressed to find a mode of transportation that isn’t subsidized in some way.

And it makes sense, because railroads, highways, airports, and even sidewalks are all parts of a much larger transportation system that enables society to function and grow. “What proponents are arguing is that the nation needs a more balanced use of all three modes,” the report reads, “Particularly… where airports and highways have become so congested that long delays and lost productivity are routine.”

A 2011 Univ. of Penn. report points out lopsided federal spending among transport modes. Image: PennDesign

Population growth and the anticipated growth of urban areas is one primary argument for the urgency of high-speed rail. Last year, a team of Master’s students from the University of Pennsylvania (full disclosure: I was one of them) concluded that it wasn’t enough to simply debunk the critics. It may be better to craft a new high-speed rail message that can stand on its own.

That message centered on this question of the changing economic geographies of the 21st century. Economic activity is coalescing into megaregions (or megapolises), and if economic and population growth is to continue at anticipated rates, those megaregions face very specific capacity constraints on core infrastructure systems, particularly transportation. In a debate filled with claims of skyrocketing costs, the Penn report concludes, “the highest cost would be the cost of doing nothing.”

Or, as Building America’s Future co-founder Ed Rendell said recently to an audience in Jacksonville, when it comes to infrastructure, “You can pay now, or you can pay later.”

President and CEO Joseph Boardman announced this morning that Amtrak would pursue an “aggressive” agenda for 2012, including a large-scale equipment upgrade and some much-needed capital improvements to the busy Northeast Corridor [PDF]. Boardman said that fiscal uncertainty would not spell delayed capital investments — as it has in the past — because “customers expect us to get better.” He cited the company’s record ridership – 30.2 million passengers in 2011, the eighth time in the last nine years that Amtrak has set a new ridership record.

Artist's rendering of Siemens' "Amtrak City Sprinter" electric locomotive, the first of which will be built in 2012. Image: Metro Magazine

“I think the culture and organization of this company is changing to where we’re able to make investments,” Boardman said, offering as an example the purchase of 70 new electric locomotives. The purchase illustrates a surprising confidence in the future as the trains were “financed by debt because we were able to show folks we can pay that debt with increases in improved reliability and service.”

The locomotives will replace the entire fleet of electric locomotives currently in use on the Northeast Regional and Keystone Corridor routes, and will be capable of slightly higher speeds with greater reliability.

Long-distance trains will also be getting equipment upgrades in the form of 130 new sleeper, diner, and baggage cars. These will be used on long-distance routes which connect the Northeast Corridor to Montreal, Chicago, and Miami. Boardman pointed out that some of the cars they are replacing, inherited from predecessor railroads, are older than he is.

Concerning the rails themselves, Boardman said Amtrak would continue to pursue incremental upgrades to Northeast Corridor service. Upgrades to a 24-mile segment between Trenton, NJ, and New Brunswick will permit top speeds of 160 mph where speeds of only 135 mph are currently possible. This would be only the second segment of the NEC capable of speeds exceeding 150 mph (the other is in Rhode Island).

As for larger projects, such as the Gateway project that includes new tunnels under the Hudson River to New York, Amtrak intends to commit some funds to planning, design, and preliminary environmental review in 2012. Boardman admits, however, that there is no capital funding commitment to the Gateway project at this time.

The ultimate goal remains the implementation of a “next-gen” high-speed rail system on the NEC, capable of 220 mile-per-hour top speeds. When asked whether debating high-speed rail projects outside the NEC has made it more difficult to make HSR a reality in the northeast, Boardman answered that, if anything, “it’s given a great boost in the arm to Amtrak and to those who support rail in this nation to have HSR talked about outside the [Northeast] corridor.”

Thanks to FHWA, Missouri (and 29 other states) is finally getting some relief from the devastating floods of last year. No thanks to Republicans in Congress, that relief is not coming at the expense of transportation programs that, one day, could prevent such climate events from happening. Photo: Paul Davis / AP

The House voted in July to transfer over a billion dollars of high-speed rail funds over to flood relief, but according to sources at U.S. DOT, “there has been no effort” to tie today’s emergency appropriation to a rescission of high-speed rail funding. Indeed, these dollars came from the omnibus funding bill that passed last month.

U.S. DOT had the chance to spend the money on rail projects quickly enough that by the time they could start on the emergency relief appropriation, the money would have already been spent out. That’s just what happened. So, instead of the $1.028 billion going to the Army Corps of Engineers for relief work, it went to rail projects as intended.

It’s good to see that these essential emergency relief funds were spent without cutting into HSR. Cloaking a partisan attack on a Democratic program in disaster relief was a cynical move by House Republicans.

These communities, from Maine to Montana, never should have had their recovery from 2011′s devastating storms made into a political football. Besides, increasingly extreme weather events are likely tied to the larger trend of climate change. It’s a little short-sighted to apply a band-aid to disaster relief while hobbling development of a transportation mode that could, potentially, reduce climate change and the disasters it causes.

It’s also worth noting that some Republican senators have proposed eliminating Transportation Enhancements to cover bridge repair. But even if Congress had zeroed out the Enhancements program to cover the disaster relief bill, it would have come up far short. The entire TE program – for bike/ped, historic preservation, billboard removal and a host of other programs – cost $928 million last year. Using that whole amount, we’d still come up far short of what the DOT was able to do today to promote recovery from natural disasters.

And even that is far below most expert estimates of what’s really needed. Whether you believe in the ASCE prognosis of a $2.2 trillion shortfall for infrastructure maintenance and repair, or your own wish list is a little more humble, it’s clear that pinching cash off other worthwhile programs is not the way to restore disaster-affected areas.

Plans for intercity rail that will travel as fast as 110 miles per hour are well underway between Chicago and St. Louis. Photo: Illinois Department of Transportation

Yesterday, U.S. DOT announced a $186 million grant to Illinois DOT to upgrade the line between Chicago and Joilet — about 40 miles southwest of Chicago — one of the final segments to be built in the 284-mile Chicago to St. Louis line.

The project will allow trains to travel up to 110 miles per hour and, when completed, will save travelers about an hour, U.S. DOT reports. That’s good news for the about 35 million people travel the corridor annually. According to the Illinois Department of Transportation, about 90 percent of those trips end at either terminal: St. Louis or Chicago.

Michigan, Minnesota and Indiana are all in the midst of upgrading intercity rail lines as well, although it might not be accurate to describe many of these projects as true high-speed rail. (True HSR runs at an average speed of 110 miles per hour, as opposed to a maximum of 110.)

Michigan has funds for line upgrades between Kalamazoo and Dearborn — just outside Detroit. Meanwhile, Amtrak will be completing the remainder of the Detroit-Chicago link west of Kalamazoo to Chicago. The line will top out at 110 mph, said Richard Harnish, Executive Director of Midwest High Speed Rail Alliance.

In addition, Minnesota has begun an environmental review process to upgrade and modernize rail connections between St. Paul and Chicago. The state is also beginning the environmental review process on a true HSR link between the Twin Cities and Rochester, Minnesota, where the Mayo Clinic is located.

Indiana, meanwhile, is taking responsibility for the portion of the St. Louis–Chicago line that lies between its borders.

Harnish said the country has slowly been moving toward modern rail transportation for decades — in fits and starts. Despite vested interests that seek to maintain the status quo, he is optimistic.

“I truly believe that there is a strong desire at the ground level to have better ways to travel and that there is a desire to have high-quality passenger trains,” he said. “If we can organize that base, we will get policies changed in DC.”

Can you guess who? Image: YouTube

Match the quotation to its Speaker (hint, hint!):

“Let’s go ahead and be really bold, and go head-to-head with the Chinese in developing and implementing maglev trains that move at 280 to 300, 320 miles an hour. [...] You cannot talk about American national security in the long run without a fundamental redevelopment of this country economically… And you cannot talk about a competitive American economy without a dramatically more robust and more modern infrastructure.”

Is it Obama, stumping for reelection? Not this time. What about Mitt Romney, who recently said he’s okay with borrowing money if it’s for infrastructure that provides a revenue stream? Getting closer.

No, these words belong to one Newton Leroy Gingrich, and they were delivered at a June 2009 event co-hosted by Building America’s Future and the National Governors Association. That’s right: Mr. Balanced Budget Amendment, the Deficit Hawk’s Deficit Hawk, wants to build maglev trains, per-mile one of the most expensive modes ever devised.

His speech outlined “8 Principles for a 21st Century Infrastructure System,” and featured: rewriting the budget act to allow for multi-year capital investing (number one), involving and incentivizing the private sector (number four), and an “energy infrastructure investment comparable to transportation investment” (number eight).

This last point, no doubt, refers to the six-word mantra that served as the title of Gingrich’s 2007 book, Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less. He also wrote a book – that same year! – called A Contract with the Earth about environmental stewardship. If nothing else, you have to admire his chutzpah. (That, and his skill at delivering focus group-tested talking points that advance the agenda of his patrons in the fossil fuel industry.)

The Republican presidential field’s resident idea man and self-styled “organizer of the pro-civilization activists” has a rather extensive public record when it comes to his stance on transportation investment, one that dates back to his years as Speaker of the House in the 1990s. Not that he’s ever had much to say about urban transit or other transportation issues that touch the daily lives of city dwellers.

• In 1995, Newt was already a champion of Intelligent Transportation Systems, and had high hopes for the technology behind EZ-Pass and similar programs. However, he had higher hopes for a system that could be handed over almost entirely to credit card companies instead of tolling authorities.
• In 1998, in his book, Lessons Learned the Hard Way, Newt said that he opposed a proposal by George Bush (41) to increase the gas tax after just two phone calls: one to his mother-in-law, and one to his eldest daughter. (That smells like “sample bias” to this urban planner.) Interestingly, principle number five was that transportation infrastructure should be financed by user fees rather than tax increases, so which does he consider the gas tax to be?
• In 2007, in his book, Real Change, Newt wrote: “The US has three corridors that are very conducive to … high-speed train investment,” meaning Boston-Washington, Miami-Tampa/Jacksonville via Orlando, and San Diego-San Francisco. Of course, the system must be “privately built, run efficiently, and capable of earning its own way… a railroad system that works for us, and not for the Amtrak bureaucracy and their unions.” (In his 2009 speech, he counted high-speed rail among “very large megaprojects that rouse the nation.”)

For all his published prose, Newt’s voting record is rather unenlightening, as it seems he missed more than half of all transportation-related votes during his last six years in office.

The initial operating segment of California HSR has critics worrying about the entire system. Full Image: CHSRA

First to take center stage were the members of the California congressional delegation, whom ranking member Nick Rahall (D-WV) likened to the cast of a reality TV show for “always fighting.” And fight they did: about alignments, the proper location for an initial operating segment, and whether HSR is needed at all.

The committee seemed primarily concerned with three things:

• the choice of the Central Valley as the project’s initial operating segment
• a recent poll showing dwindling public support for the project in its present form, and
• the uncertain availability of funds, given such a dramatic increase in project cost estimates

Regarding the choice of the Bakersfield-to-Fresno initial segment, FRA Administrator Joseph Szabo was unequivocal. “We have a legal and binding obligation to move forward,” he told the committee. “We don’t have the authority to shift these dollars now [to a different segment] and meet the requirements of the law.” He’s right: The FRA, in awarding federal money to CA HSR, is executing its duties set forth in laws like the stimulus act, PRIIA [PDF], and others, passed to permit expansion of passenger rail while SAFETEA-LU stuck around.

Assessing the other two fears – dwindling public support and uncertainty of funds – is less straightforward.

Petra Todorovich, director of the rail advocacy group America 2050, told Streetsblog that she sees the uncertainty of funds as the greater threat. “It adds delay to the project, which is one of the reasons that the recent cost estimates were revised upwards,” she said. “If California can accelerate the project, it will cost less money.” And it’s a vicious cycle: The more the project costs, the less inclined private investors will be to sign on to the project, and the slower the project will be able to proceed.

Both sides agree that the success of the project depends on finding private capital to fill the growing gap in the up-front costs. The business plan (conservatively) predicts an $11 billion investment from the private sector, but even if all $11 billion were to turn up, Rep. Andy Miller (R-MD) expressed his extreme reluctance to ask his constituents in Maryland to help come up with the remaining balance. If that attitude prevails in the belt-tightening House, private sources have even less incentive to invest, and so the cycle continues. In this way, the entire House hearing could be seen as self-fulfilling.

After all, the hearing was titled “California’s High-Speed Rail Plan: Skyrocketing Costs & Project Concerns,” leaving no doubt about whether the convening Republicans wanted to paint the project in a negative light. But some said that plan backfired. Thomas Umberg, California High-Speed Rail Authority Chair, told Streetsblog he was gratified that, “While the hearing was called as a critique of the plan, in fact… federal officials, members of Congress, and the Mayor of Fresno strongly defended the plan.”

Still, it has plenty of detractors. And with Congress unwilling to commit to CA HSR and the State of California essentially unable to, it’s no wonder popular support has faded. Ray LaHood frequently reiterated in his testimony last week that HSR is “what America wants” (which he said again to a media conference call yesterday) but many skeptics yesterday cited a poll that would indicate otherwise: 59 percent of respondents in California said they would vote against the nearly $10 billion bond issue in Proposition 1A if it were to come up for election today.

Of course, Prop 1A passed by a 5 percent margin in 2008, so what can be done about an “unpopular” use of funds which happened to pass by popular a vote with 80 percent voter turnout? “The voters chose wisely when they voted [to provide] an alternative to the road congestion that is a drag on the state’s competitiveness,” said Todorovich. “For the sake of the state’s economy and quality of life, I hope they can keep the faith.”

LaHood is spending his birthday defending the administration's high-speed rail plan. Photo: Christian Science Monitor

It’s Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood’s birthday, and he’s spending it testifying before the House Transportation Committee. The hearing is on “Mistakes & Lessons Learned” from the high-speed rail program, but — no surprise here — LaHood and House Republicans have differing ideas about what “mistakes” have been made.

Here are some highlights.

Chair John Mica said he’s a “strong, committed advocate to high-speed rail service in the United States” but he’s been “very disappointed” in the progress so far. “We have hit an impasse,” he said.

Mica pointed to the ballooning cost estimates for HSR in California and reiterated his long-held position that it’s the wrong place to build high-speed rail. LaHood agreed that “this is an expensive project, but all of the money is going to American workers to build American infrastructure.” Mica stood firm that the Northeast Corridor, not California, is the place to build.

“We’re taking our cues from you,” LaHood said. “We’re investing in the Northeast Corridor.” Mica said they’re still waiting for the money to be awarded.

Rep. Bill Shuster, who chairs the rail subcommittee, said the president’s vision to bring high-speed rail access to 80 percent of the American people isn’t realistic. He said there’s no money for it — and no need. “I don’t hear people all around the country clamoring for high-speed rail,” he said.

When LaHood said that the HSR vision isn’t “Ray LaHood’s vision” — it comes from the states themselves — Shuster said yes, but his daughter wants a luxury SUV and he don’t have the money for it, so she’s not getting it. “I’m glad you didn’t think that about the Keystone Line,” LaHood shot back. He said Shuster asked for the money for that line and the DOT gave it. “Right,” Shuster said, I believe in rail investment “where it makes sense.” But, Shuster noted, he didn’t ask for help funding rail improvements between Harrisburg and Pittsburgh – and that line goes right through his district. But it’s not a strategic investment priority for the country.

Shuster suggested actually taking money from the California project and putting it toward the NEC — not likely to be a popular suggestion, when federal funding is already just $3.6 billion of California’s $98.5 billion total bill.

Mica mentioned that Congress has cut off funds to HSR for the coming fiscal year, and says the body is “certainly not going to give Amtrak $117 billion [for its plan to bring faster trains to the NEC] based on its current record, lack of plan, and lack of progress.”

LaHood made his usual speech about the incredible demand for high-speed rail funds: Yes, three governors have returned the money — but when Florida’s Rick Scott did so, 24 states (and DC and Amtrak) submitted requests for the money — “a testament to American enthusiasm for high-speed rail.”

LaHood also said that it was Republicans who initially laid out the first few HSR corridors and he lamented the end of bipartisan cooperation on transportation, and high-speed rail in particular.

He and Mica did battle over how fast these “fast” trains will go. Mica says “pseudo-high-speed rail projects” give HSR “a bad name” in the United States because “they will not operate at high speeds,” they’re just a “mirage.” Mica said the Chicago to St. Louis line will only go an average of 71 mph, a “snail-speed” train from Chicago to Detroit will just go an average of 64 mph, and the Portland-to-Vancouver line will go 65 mph. LaHood said those are current speeds, before the investment and the improvement. Mica said no, those numbers came from your department as the goal speeds for after the improvements. (LaHood’s estimates of 110 mph for Chicago to St. Louis and 200 mph for California are consistent with what’s been reported up until now.)

That’s the question that brought together five former U.S. Transportation Secretaries this week at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center.

Former DOT Chief James Burnley took a swipe at Transportation Enhancements and the stimulus.

James Burnley was deputy secretary and then secretary under President Reagan. He took the position that “75 percent” of the public “gives the thumbs down to paying more for transportation” because we’re giving them the wrong argument about why it matters. He took a jab at President Obama’s stimulus program:

We have to stop treating transportation infrastructure as a short-term jobs program. It didn’t work by any conventional definition of what “working” means. We all knew –those of us who have expertise in the field – it would not work in terms of short-term stimulus.

Because it takes time – it takes years for that money to actually be spent and people to be hired. We need to convince the American people that we need to invest in transportation infrastructure because we need to invest in transportation infrastructure. If we sell that idea – not as a jobs program, but because it affects the ability of our economy to grow over time, our international competitiveness and all the other things that we believe it affects, then we’ve got a fighting shot at convincing the American people that the resources that we believe ought to be devoted to transportation should be devoted to it.

That’s a legitimate point, and Streetsblog has made the same argument – that selling transportation as a jobs program undersells the true value of transportation. But there are a few problems with what Burnley is saying. First, when asked to tax themselves at the local or state level for transportation improvements, 75 percent of voters say yes. So maybe the case isn’t so hard to make after all.

And second, most Republicans – and many Democrats – fault the stimulus for not investing enough in infrastructure. Not quite seven percent of the package was devoted to infrastructure, and many critics say that’s why the stimulus didn’t do more to create jobs. Certainly, the president’s desire for “shovel-ready” projects may have been naïve, which Obama himself has publicly admitted. But Burnley may have been over-simplifying things with his statement.

Meanwhile, Sam Skinner, who served under President George H.W. Bush, argued that too many bridges to nowhere have eroded public confidence. And it’s not just transportation, he said – government mishandling of Medicare and pensions and everything else leads to overall distrust that the government can handle anything at all, despite the fact that the transportation department has proven that it “actually can complete projects under budget and on time.”

He said the reputation of the transportation program is “still suffering from the residue of a couple projects that got out of control” – most notably, Boston’s Big Dig, whose price tag grew from $3 billion to $19 billion. (The final price tag was actually $14.6 billion, or $22 billion if you account for interest.) Skinner said the government risks losing the public’s confidence again with high-speed rail: After all, the cost of California’s new rail line has gone from “$20 billion” (fact check: it was more like $43 billion) to “$90 billion” (actually $98.5 billion) – “without a single shovel being put in the ground.”

“You cannot have high-profile projects with runaway costs without undercutting American confidence in the ability of government to do it,” Skinner said.

Rodney Slater, DOT Chief under Clinton, said Enhancement projects are some of the most popular around.

Rodney Slater was President Clinton’s second-term transportation secretary. He said his job was made easier by the fact that he had “just wonderful legislation” to work with (ISTEA and TEA-21) “and the dollars as well.” But he also said it was a different time.

“I always had a wonderful time working with Republicans and Democrats,” Slater said. “I can’t think of a bad experience. Only recently that we’ve gotten to a point where that is not something that you can expect.” He did point out that the EPW committee did manage to turn around the recent trend of bitter, divided partisanship, “and you cannot have two more distinct titans than Barbara Boxer and Jim Inhofe.”

Still, he said, when he came in to office, “people were as skeptical about government as they are now.” He said getting the public sector to be a good partner to the private sector – and labor to be a good partner to management, as well as Republicans to be a good partner to Democrats – was key.

He also exhorted transportation officials to “hit the road” to explain to people in different localities how the federal transportation program can be a partner to them in realizing their projects. He said that although some people wanted to reverse some of ISTEA’s good policies when it came time to craft TEA-21, those policies had proven themselves. “Because of the good we could demonstrate, we were able to hold the line.”

And Slater put in a good word for an active transportation program the Republicans are currently determined to do away with:

During that period, not only did we raise the gasoline tax, but we also built upon ISTEA with TEA-21. We have some enhancements there – that’s a small amount of money. But I’ll tell you, if you go to see some of those projects dedicated, the crowd that’s there is the same as for those multibillion dollar projects. Those crowds are the same.

Burnley had taken a different line on these programs. “If you’re building trolley museums instead of repairing bridges, you should not be surprised if people become cynical over time,” he said.

Mary Peters, who served as USDOT chief for much of President George W. Bush’s second term, agreed with Burnley, not Slater.

What destroyed the confidence people had in the transportation system? If you ask Peters, it was a bunch of things like “bicycle trails and historic covered bridges” (read: Transportation Enhancements) that are “nice-to-do” things when you have the luxury. Right now, she said, during a time of tight budgets, we don’t have that luxury. “We have to now cut back to the very core highway and transit programs that these bills are supposed to fund,” she said. She added that she’d put high-speed passenger rail in the “nice-to-do” category.

She said there would have been no need for an urgent conversation about how to convince Americans of the need for transportation investment during the interstate era, “when there was a compelling national purpose.”

People didn’t mind “incremental raises in the gas tax” to pay for interstates, Peters said, “even though the money didn’t come from one state and go back to that state” – a common complaint among states that see themselves as “donor” states, paying more in gas taxes than they get back in federal funding.

Peters also noted the need to look at alternatives to the gas tax, which she said was being weakened more and more by improved fuel efficiency standards. “The gas tax is not sustainable, it is not reliable, and it is not going to get us into the future,” she said.

During her time in office, Peters was an advocate of privatizing transportation infrastructure, partly because of her prescient concern about the declining Highway Trust Fund.

Finally, Norm Mineta spoke. Mineta, like Ray LaHood, is a crossover, serving in an administration of the opposite party. (He was a Democrat serving in George W. Bush’s Cabinet.) His comment came less in the form of advice on how to frame the message, and more a lament about where things are.

“Transportation is something everyone takes for granted until it’s denied them,” Mineta said. “And when it’s denied them, it has a shelf life of 45 days.” He was referring to the tragic bridge collapse in Minneapolis in 2007. Two days after the collapse, Rep. Jim Oberstar (D-MN), then-chair of the House Transportation Committee, urged the passage of a five-cent emergency bridge tax. “The bridge went down Wednesday,” Mineta said. “He talked about that Friday. And by Tuesday, Jim was already backpedaling from the five-cent emergency gas tax idea, and 45 days later, USA Today had a survey about the five-cent emergency gas tax idea and 57 percent said ‘No, we don’t need it.’ So I figure the shelf life is a tragedy is 45 days.”

And yet, he said, transportation is something everything is dependent on, to move around and to get goods on the shelves.

There are a few messaging points I’d like to add that none of the five secretaries mentioned.

First, a superficial one: Surveys show that people don’t know that the gas tax has stayed the same since 1993, not indexed to inflation or the price of gas. They think the gas tax is going up every time the price of gas does. So, it could just be a matter of wording. Instead of asking about “raising” the gas tax, you could ask simply about indexing it to inflation or the price of gas. Or you could ask about ways to stop the decline of transportation funding. You could mention that it is no longer a winnable proposition to count on gas-guzzling to fund our infrastructure needs.

Second, it’s true that more money for transportation isn’t always a good thing. Skinner talked about the Big Dig and bridges to nowhere, but to that I’d add endless highway expansions with no plans for maintenance and no accommodations for alternate modes. I’d add a highway system built on sprawl and disconnected from smart land use planning. None of the secretaries mentioned that a well-functioning transportation system won’t be built on formula funding but on a strategic process of setting national and regional goals and actually building transportation infrastructure that meets those goals. Will that cost more money than we spend today? Less money? The same? It remains to be seen. But however much it costs, it might be easier to gather public support for raising that amount if the transportation spending decisions are based on projected benefits, and not just asphalt for asphalt’s sake.

Speaking at a press conference today, Mica backed off plans to privatize Amtrak service in the Northeast. He was joined by New York State Sen. Malcolm Smith and Reps. Carolyn Maloney and Jerry Nadler. Photo: Noah Kazis.

House Transportation Committee Chairman John Mica backed off his controversial plan to privatize passenger rail on the Northeast Corridor today, announcing at a press conference that reforming Amtrak would suffice.

Mica stood with New York Representatives Carolyn Maloney and Jerry Nadler at a conference held by the US High Speed Rail Association to announce further support for true high-speed rail along the Northeast Corridor. Mica has previously singled out the Boston-to-Washington corridor as the only proper location for high-speed rail (in contrast to the Obama Administration’s nationwide approach). Today, he urged that if any more high-speed rail funds are returned to the federal government, they be disbursed to the northeast. “Any further money for high-speed rail needs to go solely to the Northeast Corridor,” he said.

Mica said his goal was to see travel times as fast as in Amtrak’s ambitious proposal, but within a decade, instead of the 30-year timeline Amtrak set out.

Given Mica’s previous support for privatizing the Northeast Corridor, today’s announcement raises questions about how a revitalized push for high-speed rail along the route would be structured. Amtrak will be involved, Mica promised. “If there wasn’t an Amtrak, we’d have to create an Amtrak,” Mica said twice today. “It just needs reform.” He stated that he is no longer asking for the route to be taken away from Amtrak and that he is willing to compromise with other members of Congress and Amtrak leadership.

Even so, Mica still referred to Amtrak as a “Soviet-style train system.” It’s clear that ideological divisions linger.

Nadler, an opponent of privatization, added that there is now widespread agreement that private capital needs to be included in plans for the Northeast — Amtrak itself is seeking private investment — and also agreement that Amtrak will continue to serve the corridor. “If we all agree that Amtrak has to be the main vehicle,” said Nadler, “we have a lot of room to talk and to compromise.”

Mica did not announce or even call for additional federal funds for the Northeast Corridor, only saying he supported the reallocation of funding from any new states that return their rail money.

California is now by far the highest-profile high-speed rail project, and with the state announcing last week that the project’s estimated cost had more than doubled, Mica cast doubts about whether it would keep its funds. “I’ll give California a fighting chance, but it doesn’t look too good for the future,” he said. “If that money is going to lie dormant or just be spent, be tinkled away on a bunch of studies and not produce, I want that money here in the Northeast Corridor.” Mica added that he wasn’t trying to kill the California project, just lay out a Plan B for what would happen if it failed.

Rep. Maloney forcefully advocated for the creation of high-speed rail in the Northeast. “Our highways and airports are nearing capacity,” she said. “The Northeast Corridor contains 20 percent of the nation’s population and only two percent of the nation’s land.” There is, Maloney concluded, “no better program or project than investing in high-speed rail.”

In Mica’s keynote speech to the USHSR, he restated his pleasure that House Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor had committed to maintaining current transportation funding levels rather than reducing spending to what is available in the dwindling Highway Trust Fund. “That gives us the money to do what we need to do,” he said.

Mica said that Boehner would be responsible for determining where the additional revenue would come from and did not mention the Speaker’s recent announcement that the plan is to pay for the transportation bill with revenue from oil drilling.

Mica also urged the crowd, made up of high-speed rail advocates and representatives from large transportation firms, to work to educate Congress on the need for high-speed rail. There are 19 freshmen Republicans on the transportation committee alone, he noted. “Most of them have not been on legislative bodies before,” said Mica. “We have a lot of educating to do.”

Making this artist's rendering a reality will cost more than projected. Image: CA High-Speed Rail Authority

It’s true – the price tag has more than doubled. “The good news is the numbers are more realistic; the bad news is they may well be beyond reach,” said Democratic state senator Joe Simitian.

The new estimate for California conservatively includes $16 billion for contingencies and miscellaneous cost increases. Acquiring real estate in California is another big expense — though the authority has cut costs where it could by sharing tracks with commuter rail systems, another move bound to be attacked for its reduced efficiency.

Petra Todorovich of the Regional Plan Association says that much of the cost of building any megaproject in the U.S. is spent mitigating its impact on local communities. “Some of the rises of this project have been costs for tunneling or viaducts,” she said. “Those are expensive measures to reduce the noise and visual impact on local neighborhoods. Are they worth it? They’re certainly worth it to those communities. And they may be the price of building this project.”

Indeed, appeasing residents has been one of the many hurdles the California High-Speed Rail Authority has had to overcome. Another has been criticism of the proposed first segment from Bakersfield to Fresno – “a fast train to nowhere,” as it’s been called. They’re sticking with that plan, but the CHSRA takes pains to say that “each segment of the construction project will have its own value and independent utility.” They predicate each additional segment on the availability of funding but assert that the Central Valley line, in and of itself, would be useful.

The Authority also insists the line will pay for itself – operationally, at least. It claims that after the initial funding is laid out for infrastructure, the operations will require no public subsidies, even at the lowest ridership estimates.

Brian Merchant of Treehugger characterized the uproar about the pricetag as post-Solyndra “green-bashing.” He says the media should stop freaking out about the cost when “after the initial investment, the entire system would pay for itself and then provide a much-desired, low-carbon transportation alternative to the people of California.”

“Yes, CA high speed rail may be more expensive then originally accounted for,” Merchant wrote. “But it’s still been found to be a really sound investment — and don’t forget, there are tons of saved costs that this plan doesn’t account for. The reduced traffic congestion and the lowered health costs from less air pollution spring to mind.”

To take the full measure of the project’s worth, you also need to consider the costs of not building the line. The CHSRA claims that given projected population increases and current congestion levels, the state would have to build “an additional 2,300 lane-miles of highways, 4 runways, and 115 airline gates” if it doesn’t build the high-speed rail line – at a total cost of $171 billion.

But where will the $98 billion for HSR come from? California has received $3.6 billion in federal stimulus dollars for the line, and the prospects for additional federal funding are looking grim, as both houses of Congress are slashing spending for the rail program. Just this week, members of the Congressional high-speed rail caucus sent a letter to their colleagues urging them not to cut the tiny bit the program has left [PDF], but the program could easily get zeroed out over the next few months.

It’s often been said that the greatest weakness of President Obama’s high-speed rail initiative was the dispersed manner in which the funds were allocated, and the California example appears to underscore that. Given the enormity and complexity of the project, a contribution of four percent of the total cost hardly seems like enough incentive to jump-start a national network of fast trains. While many rail advocates hope that the California line, once operational, will lead other states to follow suit, the constant price hikes and complications could just as easily scare them off.

So the CHSRA isn’t focusing so much on the price or even the fact that the line won’t require operating subsidies. It’s plugging the job-creating potential (100,000 jobs over the next five years and a million jobs “moving forward”) and the reduction of carbon emissions by three million tons a year.

In his story on the business plan, Atlantic Cities writer Eric Jaffe compares the building of the line to the construction of Boston’s rail network at a time when other localities were still investing in canals. There were “train to nowhere”-type allegations back then too, and criticism of the high cost and long construction delays. But canals soon became obsolete, and the rail system is still a backbone of the movement of people and goods.

Many things still need to fall into place for California’s high-speed line to be built. Private investors needs to come up with 20 percent of the total funding. The state legislature, bitterly divided over the issue, would have to approve it, as would the governor. And it sure would help if the federal government would loosen the pursestrings a little bit, or if California could pull itself out of debt. It’s a tough enough slog just to complete the initial segment between Fresno and Bakersfield, but the real benefits of the line won’t come until Los Angeles and San Francisco are finally connected — and the best-case scenario for that is now 2021.

In the current political environment, the Senate probably couldn't do much more than maintain current spending levels. But it's not enough to transform our transportation system. Photo: MTSNAC

The upper chamber maintained funding for several key livability programs, teeing up a fight with the GOP-led House over spending levels. A finished 2012 budget is already a month overdue and despite the Senate passage of a “minibus” (as opposed to an “omnibus”) spending bill yesterday, no one seems to expect a completed bill anytime soon.

The Senate bill maintains current overall spending levels, which, in the current environment, is a win for advocates of transportation investment, though given that the numbers don’t account for inflation, they essentially amount to a spending cut.

Either way, these figures don’t shift the status quo very much. While funding for TIGER and transit projects gets a modest boost, high-speed rail has been sharply reduced in this bill. And, since this appropriation comes in the absence of a new reauthorization of the federal transportation program, which could set new policies, these funds come without any guarantee that the money will be spent more wisely, in the pursuit of strategic goals and keeping systems in a state of good repair.

The bill includes:

• $550 million for the TIGER program, a key element of the shift away from formula funding and toward merit-based allocations for the most innovative projects. The bill sets aside almost a quarter of that funding for projects in rural communities. This funding level would represent a $23 million jump over the actual enacted number for this year.
• $41 billion – the same as this year – for the Federal-aid Highway program. Sen. Barbara Boxer was disappointed that the Senate did the math differently this year – rather than allocating $44 billion and then rescinding $3 billion of it, this bill makes the cut upfront. While that appears to be a more straightforward way to do it, some fear that it makes the baseline funding level look lower. That means that future funding will be determined based on $41 billion, not $44 billion.

• $358 million more than this year the New Starts program for capital transit projects, bringing the total up to about $8.7 billion $1.955 billion.
• $800 million for vehicle and driver safety programs, including research into the Toyota sudden-acceleration issue and incentive grants to states that enact distracted driver laws.
• $150 million for transit safety, all of it going to the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, still reeling from a deadly red line crash in 2009.
• $90 million for the Sustainable Communities Initiative – specifically, for grants from HUD’s Community Development Fund to promote integrated housing and transportation planning at the local and regional level. USDOT and EPA are partners in this effort.
• $120 million for HUD’s Choice Neighborhoods Initiative, a near-doubling of this year’s funding for this subset of the HOPE VI program. Aside from its focus on improving public housing, it also looks to improve access to schools, transportation, jobs and other services.
• $25 million for grants to help transit agencies reduce the energy consumption or greenhouse gas emissions of their operations.
• $100 million for high-speed rail, rescued by a few die-hard senators, in the face of a body almost ready to throw in the towel on the whole program.
• $544 million for Amtrak operations and $937 million for Amtrak capital projects. Amtrak is a favorite target of free-marketeers in the House looking to privatize passenger rail service in the U.S., so if the House and Senate ever even get so far in this budget process that they argue over such things, they’ll be arguing over this.

We also asked him for his thoughts about some major themes in transportation today. 

Chairman Jim Oberstar calls transportation enhancements "the point of transformation" for transportation. Photo courtesy of Oberstar's office.

On the “dissipation” of high-speed rail funds:

We reshaped Amtrak in the 2008 authorization, designating 11 corridors and creating a mechanism by which there could be competition from private sources and from state consortia, with Amtrak, to provide the passenger rail service in a particular corridor.

At first, I didn’t like that idea, but I spent a lot of time talking to Mr. Mica about it and as we talked, I said, “You know, that’s beginning to make more sense. We ought to challenge Amtrak. That’s a good idea; let’s put this into the bill.” And then we got consensus that high-speed should be defined as 110 mph, and that was in the bill. And we got a bill that George Bush signed!

So there was a structure against which to pit [the $8.5 billion in stimulus dollars for high-speed rail]. I thought that was going to happen. Instead, it was all put up for competition for various states to come forward and put a proposal on the table.

Wisconsin, for example: to Madison, Milwaukee, Chicago. That should have been done as part of the Midwest High-Speed Rail Initiative, with Chicago as the hub, south to St. Louis, east through Detroit to Cleveland and eventually to Cincinnati, and west to Minneapolis-St. Paul. That would have been one very defensible, manageable anchor.

The Northeast Corridor could have been another important anchor. The west coast, which is already underway: a third anchor to this system. And then some other amounts in the other corridors, depending on proposals that they would have and should have submitted to DOT.

Allowing pieces to be bid or requested by states dissipated the critical mass of investment. And I’m not saying that in hindsight – that was my concern at the time.

On the attack on Transportation Enhancements in Congress:

Transportation Enhancements was the pivotal point of transformation at the end of the interstate era — an era in which travelers went where the road took them — to the era in which users of our system had a say in their quality of transportation and where that road should go in the future and how their transportation experience should be managed.

Enhancements is the breakthrough transformation of our surface transportation system in the post-interstate era. If it were eliminated, it would erode public trust and acceptance of our surface transportation programs.

On how he would pay for his 2009 bill if he were defending it in this fiscally conservative Congress:

I would still insist on a restructuring of the categorical programs, to reduce those categories from 108 to four formula programs and to require the intermodalism that is depicted in my plan. And by law, you can require that the modal administrators meet monthly. There is nothing to impede the secretary of transportation from doing that now, from convening a monthly meeting of FRA and Federal Transit Administration, Maritime Administration, and all the rest. But they haven’t done that, regardless of administration.

So do it by law! You will develop a safety plan. What can highways learn from aviation and safety? What can waterways learn? What can highways learn from waterways? All of these need to be done intermodally.

So you give the public a sense of accomplishment, of simplicity and clarity, transparency of the program. And then you have freight corridors to deal with the farm-to-market movement of goods and inter-city goods movement, which is a segment of that bill, and then the metropolitan mobility and access provision that addresses the fact that 50 percent of vehicle miles traveled in this country are in urban areas and we are wasting $110 billion a year just sitting in traffic.

And then requiring states to develop plans, and defend them, and be accountable to them. It’s doable; we did that. I had a hearing every month on the stimulus investments and made state DOTs and USDOT and the wastewater treatment agencies and the aviation authority all come and say, what did they do with their money, how did you invest it, what are the benefits from it? So you include that accountability, clarity, and performance.

And then project delivery – in the current law it’s not widely understood. But I crafted 42 pages of legislative language to expedite project delivery. The result: 47 projects – these are big ones, these are $100 million-and-above-sized projects – have had a 36 month reduction in permitting, which means you’re almost cutting in half the time it’s taking for permitting — without denigrating the environment, without denigrating historical preservation, without overriding local permitting interests and requirements.

So, you require better performance, better project delivery, and then you can ask the public. If I were still there, I’d be saying, now we go to the public and say, “We have funded our surface transportation system with the user fee, so you have a claim on the future investments, by which you pay at the pump and now you have something in which you can have confidence that it will be used effectively.” There will be much greater accountability.

Then you can appeal for an increase in the user fee or a combination of funding mechanisms, which we provided for in the metropolitan access and mobility provisions.

Rep. John Mica won't be specific about where additional transportation funding could come from. Photo: 13 News

Mica told an audience at a Washington Post-sponsored forum on transportation that passing yet another extension of the surface transportation reauthorization persuaded leadership that there would not be consensus on a long-term bill until the spending levels were raised. “There wont be a gas tax increase,” Mica said, “but our leadership has asked us to look for other sources of revenue, and we’re on that mission now.”

“Speaker Boehner has really opened the door to us to look for any responsible means” to fund the bill, Mica said, adding that a gas tax increase is still off the table. “There’s also the possibility of doing away with it; adopting something else.” He wouldn’t specify what the replacement fee could be.

Nor would he say what he thinks of a Republican proposal to fund the bill with revenues from new oil drilling except to say, “We’re looking at it. We have some scoring issues. And then we have to make sure we have the votes.”

Mica said he was confident that a long-term bill would pass in March. “Don’t let anybody talk about a two-year transportation bill; that’s criminal,” he said. His counterpart in the Senate, Barbara Boxer, has proposed a two-year bill, but could be willing to go along with a longer-term bill if funding levels were raised.

Mica also reiterated his support for state infrastructure banks, saying he prefers them to a national bank. He said the way Washington works is: “the biggest gorillas get the most bananas.” Instead of having big guys compete for big loans from a big national bank, he said, “the best way to prioritize projects is to have them evolve from local level, get local and state participation, and then assist them.”

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood also addressed the Washington Post gathering. He said he was confident that, despite current gridlock, there was enough pressure on Congress to create jobs that they’ll pass some form of transportation bill this year.

Still, he hinted that Republicans in Congress might be trying to sabotage Obama’s presidency at the expense of the unemployed. He said Congress was polling lower than it ever has among the public “because they haven’t done anything.”

“Maybe that’s deliberate,” LaHood said. “I hope it’s not.”

He said the most recent class in Congress came in, not with a mission to find solutions, but determined to obstruct movement.

Infrastructure bills used to be bipartisan and easy to pass, LaHood said, but “some people don’t want Obama to be successful.” The result? Aside from 9.1 percent official unemployment, “infrastructure is in terrible shape,” he said. “America is one big pothole right now.”

In comments to reporters after his remarks, LaHood said he believed that, despite recent attacks, transportation enhancements (the major way the federal government funds bicycle and pedestrian facilities) would remain.

“These enhancements have always been a part of the transportation program, and I anticipate that they will be in the future,” he said. As for assertions by Sens. Rand Paul and Tom Coburn that bike paths aren’t “real” transportation, he said, “That’s why we have debates in Congress,” but repeated, “I feel pretty confident that these programs will continue.”

LaHood let it slip yesterday that he was planning to leave after Obama’s first term, whether or not the president is re-elected. “My wife has plans for me to do something more monetarily pleasing to her,” he said in an attempt to answer what he might do next.

While some bicycling advocates might hope the president would nominate someone of similarly bike-friendly proclivities, LaHood made it clear that wasn’t why he was nominated. “I wouldn’t have this job if I wasn’t a Republican,” he said. “If I was anything else, I wouldn’t be here today.”

He did say he agreed with the president on transportation, including the importance of getting high-speed rail moving. He said the $10 billion the administration has invested in high-speed rail was “10 billion times more than has ever been invested before” and would make the U.S. the envy of the world again, as Asia and Europe’s rail systems are now.

He countered skepticism about the slow speed and reticence in Congress to fund the program by saying that when he was growing up in Peoria, and the interstate system was being built, “I remember seeing stretches of cement that went nowhere.” But what started as little, disconnected segments eventually came together into one nationwide network.

LaHood also put in a plug for the TIGER program, calling it was a good way to connect projects with the federal government without having to go through governors and that had very little red tape for a federal program. He also highlighted the importance of keeping roads, bridges and transit systems in a state of good repair.

Despite innumerable setbacks, progress is still being made on high-speed and intercity rail. Photo credit: Taiwan High-Speed Rail Corporation.

Meanwhile, if you look at USDOT, the well of rail funding just seems to keep on giving.

“They just keep cranking it out,” said Andy Kunz, president of the US High-Speed Rail Association. “Even when you think all the money’s all spent, they pull more money out of a hat.”

It didn’t just come out of a hat, of course. It came from the stimulus money, which is still giving, nearly three years later. Nearly the whole $8 billion allocation for high-speed rail in the stimulus has now been given out, thanks in part to USDOT’s energetic allocations these last few months – including re-allocating money returned by Florida, whose governor decided the state would be better off without high-speed rail.

Yonah Freemark writes in The Transport Politic that the Department of Transportation has been “pushing grants out of the federal government’s hands as quickly as possible so that they can not be rescinded.”

In September alone, the Federal Railroad Administration has approved hundreds of millions of dollars for intercity rail upgrades nationwide: $149 million for New York State, $116 million for New England, $49 million for Texas, $48 million for North Carolina and Virginia, $35 million for the Northeast Corridor, $31 million for Washington State, and $13 million for Oregon, among others. Earlier this summer, hundreds of millions of dollars were appropriated to California and the Northeast. Unless states turn back the money, unlikely considering that the projects have gotten so far and their pro-rail sponsors, these funds cannot be taken back by Congress.

It’s a good strategy. Big pots of money, lying unused, are tempting bait for budget-cutters in Congress — and right now there are a lot of people looking for potential cuts, from the super committee on down. But if there’s just loose change left over, it won’t make much of a dent and probably isn’t worth monkeying with — as much as Republicans would like the chance to say they’re cutting the deficit by cutting money from the high-speed rail “boondoggle.”

So money is flowing out the DOT door. Still, Freemark is skeptical about how much progress these grants really indicate:

It’s worth questioning how ready most of these states are to use these funds now that they have them, or how quickly they’ll be able to get construction started. The first high-speed rail grants were announced in January 2010; other than the project to upgrade tracks between Chicago and St. Louis, has any major construction begun?

There has been some construction on other lines that got grants that are more “intercity passenger rail” than actual “high-speed rail” — improvements that are welcome, but that won’t bring speeds into “high-speed” territory.

Ken Orski, who’s always happy to sound the death knell for high-speed rail in his Innovation Briefs newsletter, said this week that “none of the grants will help to bring true “high-speed” rail service to America.” He said the administration is “continuing its practice of scattering money far and wide rather than focusing it on one or two worthwhile projects” and that “it remains to be seen how quickly the recipient states will put these funds to work— and what kind of service improvements these grants will bring about.”

Many high-speed rail advocates have joined Orski in criticizing the administration’s strategy for disbursing the funds. Many agreed with House Transportation Committee Chair John Mica the money should have gone exclusively toward the Northeast Corridor to first build one successful model for high-speed rail, and then try to build off of that in other corridors with sufficient population densities, congestion, and other key factors.

Kunz admits that initially, he was one of those criticizing the administration.

“I was hoping it would go into two or three corridors,” said Kunz. “But the one great thing about trickling out the money in dribs and drabs all over the country is that you’ve got the whole country fired up about high-speed rail. There are 30 or so states that are all getting fired up; they’ve got people on the DOT staff planning out rail projects. In terms of launching a program, and getting lots of people in the country in on it and moving forward on it, there was no better strategy. But as far as getting a true high-speed rail system built, that’s going to have to come from the next pot of money.”

Orski predicts that there won’t be a “next pot,” at least for a while. He says it’s the beginning of the end of the administration push for HSR in the fact of “a fiscally conservative Congress, a largely indifferent public and a skeptical, risk-averse investment community.”

But not everyone sees it that way. Aside from the three high-profile governors who rejected federal rail funds, dozens more have been clamoring for federal help building a 21st century high-speed rail system and to create jobs in their states.

Not only is a “next pot of money” possible, Kunz says – it’s inevitable. The naysayers, he says, are just puppets of the oil industry. “They’re trying to kill this thing, and say it’s dead, and kill the funding and everything,” he said. “But the reality is that we don’t have any other way to move Americans in the 21st century other than electric high-speed rail. We’re not going to be finding another Saudi Arabia.”

Sure, given the setbacks in Congress and the cost-cutting atmosphere that’s taken hold right now, prospects might look dim. “Right now it all looks shaky and sketchy,” Kunz said, “but in another year or two or three, we’ll probably have five or six of these projects underway around the country. And as soon as a few of them open, it’ll snowball like crazy.”

Obama announcing the American Jobs Act. Photo: SHRM

Specifically, they lay out the numbers:

• $27 billion for rebuilding roads and bridges
• $9 billion for repairing bus and rail transit systems
• $5 billion for projects selected through a competitive grant program
• $4 billion for construction of the high-speed rail network
• $2 billion to improve airport facilities
• $1 billion for a NextGen air traffic control system

It’s encouraging to see the words “upgrading” and “rebuilding” when it comes to roads, indicating that the administration might be adhering to a fix-it-first approach to transportation spending. But, as we mentioned last week, the bridge Obama highlighted recently as a prime target for jobs-bill money isn’t actually in need of repair — transportation officials just want to widen it to allow more traffic to go through faster.

Certainly, the administration has shown a desire to attack the maintenance backlog in the country, but that doesn’t guarantee that highway expansions and sprawl projects won’t get a slice of the “rebuilding” pie.

That said, it’s good to see the plan includes $5 billion for projects funded through a competitive grant program (think TIGER). And it also hits a somewhat more equitable balance between rail/transit and roads than Congressional transportation bills generally do.

The president’s plan also includes an infrastructure bank, funded with $10 billion seed money. The administration says projects will be evaluated on the basis of how badly they’re needed and how much they would help the economy.

Some have said over the last couple of weeks that the I-bank concept is in trouble after the GOP pounced on the Solyndra loan story, in which a solar company filed for bankruptcy soon after receiving half a billion dollars in government-backed loans. Experts say the infrastructure bank proposal would vet projects well and protect taxpayers from risk.

Senator Dick Durbin, co-chair of the High-Speed Rail Caucus, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid ride a high-speed train in China. Photo from Reid's Flickr photostream

That’s still starvation wages for the program, but it’s at least a placeholder that keeps it limping along. The move was spearheaded by four Democratic senators – Dick Durbin of Illinois, Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey, Dianne Feinstein of California and Mary Landrieu of Louisiana — who introduced the successful amendment to reallocate some funds earmarked for highway and transit projects to high-speed rail.

“I offered this amendment because we can’t turn our backs on a project that will invest in the future and put Californians back to work,” Feinstein said in a statement.

“Every dollar we spend on rail produces $3 in economic output,” added Senator Durbin, a founding member of the Bi-Cameral High-Speed and Intercity Passenger Rail Caucus. “Congress has maintained a commitment to high speed and intercity rail for over a decade. This amendment will continue that commitment.”

Highway funding in the Senate bill stays at FY2011 levels, but the chamber added another $358 million for the New Starts program for transit capital investments, previously funded at $8.3 billion. The House budget would reduce New Starts to $5.3 billion.

TIGER got a little bump too, with the Senate raising the allocation from $527 million to $550 million. Of that, $120 million is reserved for rural communities. The third round of TIGER grant applications is currently underway.

The Senate-passed budget keeps $90 million for the tri-agency Partnership for Sustainable Communities (down from $100 million in 2011), a victory for livability advocates and anyone who prefers federal collaboration and efficiency over stovepipes and silos.

The bill also includes $25 million for energy efficiency improvements for transit systems to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. And the Washington metro system, always threatened with federal cuts, comes away with $150 million for capital investments, with a focus on safety.

These numbers are by no means final. They vary widely from the FY2012 budget the House passed two weeks ago. At some point, the two chambers will have to find a compromise between two significantly different funding proposals, but for now, they’re just trying to figure out an extension (or “continuing resolution”) of the current year’s budget in order to keep government programs funded past September 30. Last night’s vote in the House failed dramatically, with both Democrats and Tea Party Republican dissenting.

Both chambers are supposed to be on recess next week, but leadership might require members to stay in Washington, at least through the weekend, to hammer out a deal if they can’t work one out by the end of the this week. Congress doesn’t normally vote on Fridays, either, so many lawmakers are  hoping for progress today so they can return to their districts.

The president's "vision" for high-speed rail is getting cloudy. Image: White House

This morning, a subcommittee marked up the transportation and HUD appropriations bill, and the full committee will consider it tomorrow afternoon. Only after that will the draft bill be released.

During this morning’s subcommittee markup, though, a few senators divulged a few key points. For example, Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) said he was ” discouraged by the elimination of high-speed rail grants” in the budget. “It’s a casualty of the cuts mandated in the debt-limit deal,” he said.

Despite his strong push last winter for high-speed rail service that would reach 80 percent of the U.S. population in 25 years, President Obama has been willing to sacrifice high-speed rail funding in tense budget fights with Republicans. The Senate seems to be following suit.

However, funding for Amtrak is untouched in the Senate budget bill, foreshadowing a pitched battle once the Senate and House have to reconcile their two budget bills. The House made devastating cuts to Amtrak in its version.

And Senator Mark Pryor (D-AR) emphasized that TIGER grants are “an important part of the transportation equation” and indicated that they were still in the bill. Through other channels, we hear that TIGER is being funded at $550 million, which is slightly higher than the $527 million allocation it has now. The House 2012 budget proposal would have eliminated the program completely.

Smart Growth America sounded the alarm yesterday that the Partnership for Sustainable Communities (a collaboration among USDOT, EPA and HUD) could be on the ropes. From what we hear, there is some money for HUD grants for livable and sustainable communities.

Amendments can be offered at tomorrow’s full committee markup, so anything can change.

Jeff Davis of Transportation Weekly reports that the Senate bill maintains current funding levels for highways and transit ($41.1 billion and $8.3 billion, respectively). It also has an extra $1.5 billion in emergency relief highway funding, which is “exempt from the $55.25 billion ceiling given to the THUD bill and subject instead to a separate annual emergency ceiling under the Budget Control Act,” the deal that ended the standoff over the debt ceiling.

Amtrak CEO Joseph Boardman told senators that House plans would be devastating for passenger rail in the U.S.

“It’s not enough just to say we’re going to cut service,” Lautenberg went on. “It’s like cutting throats.”

The longtime rail champion took the opportunity to slam the House Republican plan to privatize the Northeast Corridor, and Amtrak CEO Joseph Boardman agreed that it would be disastrous. Boardman said privatization ran a huge risk of compromising safety and the environment.

More significantly, the Republican proposal is based on the assertion that Amtrak doesn’t do a good enough job of managing its own assets, and that a private company would be better suited to do so. But an audit of Amtrak shows great progress, testified Amtrak’s inspector general, Ted Alves.

“Ridership and revenue have grown steadily, and this year the company expect to exceed 30 million passengers for the first time,” Alves said. “Amtrak is also focused on improving management practices and financial performance and is finalizing a new strategic plan.”

Alves had several ideas for savings and improvement, but none of them had to do with privatizing its core asset. For example, he suggested restructuring Amtrak’s debt, which the company is working on, in conjunction with the Departments of Transporation and Treasury. Amtrak has identified 39 other leases that could be restructured to save money, but its authorization to do so has expired.

Alves also suggested improving long-distance train service, but said the key factor is reliability, and that can’t change unless the host railroads stop prioritizing freight trains over passenger rail and improve infrastructure, which they say they won’t do without more federal subsidies.

Indeed, many keys to Amtrak’s success are out of the company’s hands, as was confirmed by Mitch Behm, inspector general for rail at USDOT, who made it clear that the Federal Railroad Administration had not yet implemented all the legal provisions aimed at making the agency a more effective overseer of Amtrak. Specifically, he criticized the lack of a National Rail Plan.

Meanwhile, witnesses and senators alike criticized House plans to remove funding from “state-supported” short routes, which make up almost half of all Amtrak ridership. He said federal policy didn’t tell Amtrak to go out to the states and dictate what they would pay, but to negotiate with them based on their ability to pay. “How much more of the costs to the country, to Amtrak, do the states need to pick up?” he asked. He acknowledged that states needed to increase their contribution, but said it wasn’t going to be possible to drain “every nickel” out of the states. And Boardman went on to slam House Republicans for proposing to precipitously cut off support to the state routes:

But in their wisdom, there was a decision made that oh, by October 1, if we were to pass this, we would cut off the states entirely, without any compassion and understanding for the people who needed to get to work, or to a doctor’s office. Forty-three percent of our long distance ridership, so a significant portion of the state ridership, is the disabled population. It’s a lot easier for tem to use our trains than it is to use any other mode of transportation. And there is no other mode on the surface of the United States that connects the country together, than rail. None.

New Mexico Sen. Tom Udall wanted to know why the fast-growing intermountain West wasn’t slated for high-speed rail improvements, and Boardman emphasized that in order to get high-speed rail, the first step is just to maintain the presence of any rail service at all. And that means not letting Congress strip away existing state routes.

Boardman also put in a plug for the Gateway tunnel, the proposed replacement for the ARC tunnel under the Hudson River, which New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie nixed last year. “If we’re not going to move forward with that, we’re going to run out of capacity on Northeast Corridor relatively soon. Within less than 20 years, there will be no additional capacity. So for all those that believe that they can add more trains, either south or north of New York, they’ll not be able to, because it’ll be dictated by the bottleneck of the tunnels and the service areas in Penn Station.”

As for high-speed rail – forget about it, he said, unless they can double capacity in the tunnels. And since the Northeast Corridor helps subsidize money-losing routes around the country, failing to move forward with the Gateway Tunnel would be another blow to corridors, in New Mexico and elsewhere, that want to see service expanded, not diminished.

Building America's Future's words, not ours! Source: BAF, via USDOT.

Building America’s Future, led by former Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, has added their voice to the chorus calling for greater investment in U.S. infrastructure, lest the country fall behind its global competitors. In a new report, Falling Apart and Falling Behind, BAF recommends more focus on mass transit, a switch away from formula funding without performance requirements, and more emphasis on metropolitan areas.

A couple weeks ago, we took some heat from some of you, dear readers, about our coverage of a somewhat similar report from the American Society of Civil Engineers. Indeed, that report called for more infrastructure spending, but without specific recommendations on how to build a bettertransportation system. Charles Marohn at Strong Towns wrote a scathing critique of the report, questioning the urgent need to “spend trillions to save seconds” of commute time – especially the assertion that the U.S. should spend $2.2 trillion in order to save $1.0 trillion. Marohn went on to say:

At Strong Towns, we want our infrastructure maintained. In fact, it’s the common denominator of a Strong Town. But the reason why we can’t maintain our infrastructure is not because we lack the money or are afraid to spend it. It is because the systems we have built and the decisions we’ve made on what is a good investment are based on the kind of ridiculous math you see reflected in this ASCE report. We spend a billion here and a billion there and we get nothing but a couple minutes shaved off of our commutes, which just means we can build more roads and live further away from where we work. (Or, as we call that here in America: growth.)

Well put. And we’re glad to see that today’s contribution to the infrastructure debate goes deeper than the ASCE report in recommending concrete ways to build smarter, not just more.

Building America’s Future urges more spending, but says that to do it right, funding priorities should adhere to national strategies. And they’re not shy about spelling out what those are: more economic growth and mobility, less congestion and pollution. “Largely run on gasoline, our transportation system is environmentally, politically, and economically unsustainable,” they write.

Source: BAF via World Economic Forum.

To achieve those goals, BAF urges the federal government to redirect spending toward the 100 metropolitan areas that generate 75 percent of U.S. GDP, especially investing in their mass transit systems. BAF wants to “re-focus highway investment on projects of national economic significance,” including a fix-it-first priority that Rendell says should be built into law. BAF would invest in high-speed rail, but they join Republicans in criticizing the Obama approach of spreading the dollars too thinly around the country. Building America’s Future would focus on three key corridors: Boston to Washington, L.A. to San Francisco, and a hub-and-spoke system around Chicago.

As for how to pay for it, they unabashedly call for raising the gas tax and indexing it to inflation, pointing out that U.S. consumers spend way too little on gasoline, compared with other developed countries, with far too low of a gas tax, which can’t even begin to pay for the negative externalities of fossil fuels. “As high as gas prices in the U.S. seem today, they do not even fully account for the true cost of driving in terms of pollution and greenhouse gas emissions,” the report says. “In the interest of our own environmental sustainability and national security, we should consider the ways in which other countries’ taxes discourage overreliance on gasoline.”

BAF also seeks a shift toward longer-term solutions like a VMT fee, congestion pricing, and increased tolling, as well as establishing a national infrastructure bank, making TIGER permanent and expanding TIFIA. They emphasize the need to foster, not suppress, local innovation in the way that those programs do. Their zeal for public-private partnerships appears more tempered than some, and they call for an examination of best practices for PPPs – a recent focus among some constituencies that fear that PPPs can privatize profits while socializing risk.

All of these moves would finally yank our transportation system out of the Eisenhower age, Building America’s Future asserts. While some road-gang types wouldn’t mind staying in the Eisenhower age forever, more and more unlikely allies are popping up all over, realizing that building roads can’t cure congestion.

The report focuses on the United States’ freefall in global rankings of infrastructure, with the World Economic Forum rating us first in the world for the competitiveness of our infrastructure in 2005 and 15th today. And in his remarks to reporters, Rendell gave a good amount of airtime to the need to move metallurgical coal to ports as fast as Australia does. But the real strength of the BAF report is that it goes beyond a mere cry for more spending, as the ASCE report did. It says that without spending that money strategically, to reduce pollution, increase connectivity, maintain a state of good repair, and strengthen metropolitan areas, more spending isn’t enough.

Members of the U.S. High-Speed Rail Association on Capitol Hill with Rep. John Mica (center) on Tuesday. Photo courtesy of USHSR.

At a meeting with members of the U.S. High-Speed Rail Association Tuesday, House Transportation Committee Chair John Mica softened his stance somewhat on his plan to privatize the Northeast Corridor.

He acknowledged that the proposal is “controversial” and said that was why he framed it in a separate bill, apart from the rest of the reauthorization. He said he’s “heard the concerns” about the plan. A member of his staff said that the original plan was being portrayed as transferring Amtrak’s assets away from it, while leaving Amtrak holding the bag on the debt. “Which, when you put it that way, does sound sort of unfair,” the staffer said, indicating that issues like those are being worked out.

Andy Kunz, president and CEO of the U.S. High-Speed Rail Association, said he was glad to see Mica striking a more cooperative tone. “His initial bill and his initial hearing was a little bit ‘This is it; take it or leave it’,” Kunz said. “Now he’s recognizing there needs to be a bit more cooperative action.”

The committee isn’t easing up on everything, though. The staffer also stated that the committee was giving inter-city and passenger rail “a temporary rest” while it focuses exclusively on high-speed rail. “It does not serve the two programs well to be ‘smooshed,’ or put together and consolidated the way they have been and then have most of the projects that receive funding not be high-speed rail in any way, shape, or form.”

In response to the Congressional Research Service’s conclusion that the rail privatization scheme could run into constitutional problems, Mica’s staffer was dismissive, saying CRS merely warned that some courts could find it to be a violation, and they should be careful. (Sounds like a finding of unconstitutionality to me.)

As he often does, Mica spoke of his high-speed rail plans as a way to rescue high-speed rail from the Obama administration’s mismanagement and bungling. He often jokes about the “gift that keeps on giving”: the original $8 billion allocated for high-speed rail, some of which has been returned by gun-shy states and re-allocated.

Mica asserted that the involvement of the private sector is “non-negotiable” – which Amtrak itself would agree with, as it’s already seeking private sector partners. Mica gave Amtrak CEO Joseph Boardman credit for being on board. “Boardman sees that you cannot [upgrade the NEC to high speeds] – at least in his lifetime – under the current proposal,” Mica said. He also said Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood is “willing to negotiate.” But he cast blame on Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ), who he said are willing to give “none of the pie” to private investors.

Everyone is still trying to figure out exactly what the “pie” consists of, in any case, and Mica let the USHSR know that he had sent a letter to Joseph Boardman asking for an itemized inventory of all the assets on the NEC and their fair market value. Mica’s staffer says that “knowing what’s there and how leveraged it is and what are the encumbrances” would be a “building block of private sector financing participation.”

Kunz of the U.S. High-Speed Rail Association agreed that Amtrak “needs to show that they’re willing to bend a little bit,” if for no other reason than because “Amtrak needs funding from the federal government every year.”

In an interview with Streetsblog immediately after the Capitol Hill meetings, Kunz said, “Amtrak is just assuming they’re going to control everything and run everything, and that may not be in the interests of the whole country… it’s the country’s rail system. They need to do what’s best for the country, which may not always be what’s best for Amtrak.”

Mica is hoping that transit-oriented development will be a key source of private sector involvement, and, perhaps, revenue. He pointed to successes with TOD in Phoenix and said, “Can you imagine, in the Northeast Corridor, what you could do?”

Mica also said he’s been meeting with Democrats on the larger reauthorization package, and that so far they’ve gotten about 55 or 60 percent of the way through the bill. It’s been lamented that there haven’t been “Big Four” meetings in the House like there have been in the Senate, bringing together top members of both parties from the committee, but those meetings have now started in the various subcommittees. Mica started to say that all that consultation was the explanation for the delay in marking up the bill, but then he said, “We will continue in a slower motion fashion,” he said, “mainly because our leadership controls the floor time.”

He granted that the delay makes sense. “Given the intensity of the current drama on the budget deficit, they probably calculated right,” he said. “To get this to the floor before next Friday seems highly unlikely. But we have a commitment to do it as soon as we get back [from recess]. So you’ll see everything go from slow motion into fast motion as soon as we get back.”

The U.S. High-Speed Rail Association is trying to drum up interest in its new “Republicans 4 Rail” program. They’re trying to get members of Congress, governors, state and local officials, and even some rank-and-file members of the Republican party to sign on.

For now, the pickings are still somewhat slim. Mica counts, although many Democrats see his Northeast Corridor proposal as the “death knell” of passenger rail in the U.S. So does Sen. Mark Kirk (R-IL), one of few Republican senators representing urban or industrial states. In trying to brainstorm other Senate Republicans who might be interested in joining R4R, Kirk’s staffer and the USHSR came up with a short list indeed: maybe Rob Portman from Ohio; maybe Scott Brown of Massachusetts if he weren’t running for reelection.

The rail lobbyists met with Kirk’s office after the meeting with Mica, but Kirk himself was not able to show up. His staffer talked about the Lincoln Legacy Infrastructure Development Act, also designed to draw private investment to public infrastructure projects.

He also alluded to the House/Senate split around the duration of a reauthorization. He said the constituent calls he gets on the subject are about split, 50-50, on the issue of whether to lock in low spending levels for six years, a la the House bill, or go with a two-year bill at higher spending levels, but offering less ability to plan long-term projects.