Streetsblog Capitol Hill

Of the 46 recently-announced TIGER grant recipients, 18 projects had at least a “substantial freight component,” according to the Coalition for America’s Gateways and Trade Corridors. Over $232 million — 45 percent — of this latest round of the popular transportation funding program will go to freight projects. That’s a very impressive share, considering that traditional federal funding mechanisms tend to neglect freight.

Pan Am Railways' Merrimack River Bridge in Haverhill, MA, received a TIGER III grant. Photo: Railpicture.net

“This type of competitive grant program can fulfill a need in transportation funding and planning that isn’t being met by other types of approaches — like straight-up formula programs,” said CAGTC Executive Director Leslie Blakey. “These projects won’t qualify on a typical Title 23 formula fund, partly because of their multimodal nature and partly because they are cross-jurisdictional.”

Sure enough, CAGTC has pointed out that freight projects fared well in the first two rounds of the program as well. Over $1.3 billion – 49 percent of TIGER I and 53 percent of TIGER II — has gone to freight projects.

However, even though freight and rail both fared well in TIGER III, freight rail didn’t exactly win the day, netting only about a quarter of freight dollars, while the rest went to road, bridge, and port improvements.

That’s too bad, especially since plenty of experts — including the Government Accountability Office and NAFTA’s Commission for Environmental Cooperation — have gone on the record as saying that in order to reduce congestion, improve air quality, and protect the environment, a lot more freight should be moving by rail.

TIGER is not the only pot of money with the potential to dramatically improve freight rail, but it may be the most successful to date. Other rail-specific programs like Railroad Rehabilitation and Improvement Financing (RRIF) loans are still comparatively underutilized, while the TIGER program has had to turn applicants away. “They keep wanting more, clamoring for more,” said Blakey. “This is the way to meet certain kinds of needs that are hard to meet in the traditional format.”

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All eyes are on Texas Gov. Rick Perry these days, the faraway frontrunner in the Republican race. But as the primary goes on (and on and on) more Republicans might take note of the fact that in a matchup with President Obama, only one candidate stands a chance of winning: former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.

As governor of Massachusetts, Romney had a mixed record on transit and smart growth. Photo: Daily Caller

According to the most recent polling data, Obama trounces Gov. Perry. He makes mincemeat of Bachmann and Gingrich. Only one poll shows a winning Republican candidate, and that’s Romney, with a two percent edge over the president in a recent USA Today poll.

We took a hard look at Rick Perry’s approach to transportation last fall, when he was running for re-election. As Texas governor, Perry championed a mega-highway plan that would make the Road Gang blush. He blocked metrorail extensions and vulnerable users legislation.

But what about Romney? His record as a red governor of the blue state of Massachusetts is a little more complex, and worth exploring.

In a recent Boston Globe story comparing current Democratic Governor Deval Patrick with his predecessor, Romney emerges as the more inspired candidate when it comes to smart growth. (It doesn’t help that Patrick was caught driving around in an SUV last week while telling his constituents to observe car-free week.)

According to the Globe, Patrick has done away with a program originated under Romney to encourage “mixed-use, walkable, downtown-centered, transit-oriented growth” and counter sprawl.

Under the Romney program, communities got credit for green building, saving energy, preserving open space, and zoning reform, among many other categories. Those that scored highest went to the front of the line to receive about $500 million per year in grants and revolving loan funds for infrastructure including water and sewer projects. The idea was to put state funding to municipalities through a filter, and reward innovation in sustainability at the local level; previously the money was just doled out.

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In about an hour, Congressional appropriators will vote on how much money to allocate for transportation in the next fiscal year. It won’t be pretty.

This smiling man (THUD Chair Tom Latham) is getting ready to take the axe to prized livability programs. Photo: Iowa Independent

The House Appropriations Subcommittee on Transportation, Housing and Urban Development (THUD) is planning deep cuts to many programs, some reminiscent of House Budget Committee Chair Paul Ryan’s notorious budget proposal, which wanted to slash transportation spending by about a third.

The subcommittee is led by Iowa Republican Tom Latham, whom we profiled when he took the gavel. At the time, we were worried he would end up cutting important livability programs, and here he is, doing exactly that.

At least transit and highway spending share the pain, both getting cut the same 34 percent. Highway funding goes from about $41 billion to $27 billion; transit funding (excluding New Starts) goes from $8.3 billion to $5.3 billion.

Bizarrely, the bill regresses to a pre-cooperation era and returns to the age of agency silos. One great accomplishment of the Obama administration has been the Sustainable Communities Partnership which joined USDOT, HUD and the EPA to work together on common development programs, planning inexorably linked programs of housing and transportation in conjunction with each other, and in consultation with the environmental regulator. But the appropriations bill prohibits HUD from using any funding for anything related to the Partnership.

In his excellent analysis of the dismal news, Transportation for America’s Stephen Lee Davis also delivers this blow: the innovative TIGER grants, TIGGER grants and high-speed rail programs are cut entirely. And more, Davis writes:
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We’re pleased to welcome Stephen Smith as a new contributor to Streetsblog Capitol Hill. We’ll be running Stephen’s work on a regular basis, and you can catch more of his writing at his home blog, Market Urbanism.

Amtrak’s annual ridership may inch over 30 million for the first time this year, but the assault on its funding by House Republicans hasn’t abated. Rep. John Mica (R-FL), chair of the House Transportation Committee, recently proposed slashing Amtrak’s federal subsidies by 25 percent over the next two years. While it’s tough to say how much deficit hawks will actually succeed in cutting, it’s looking increasingly unlikely that Amtrak – and indeed public transportation in general – will get the cash that advocates would like. Given the political climate, Amtrak faces, realistically, two choices: do more with less, or cut service and raise fares.

Amtrak is paying a big premium for these locomotives compared to similar purchases made by European rail companies.

Unfortunately, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood’s recent announcement of a $562.9 million loan to Amtrak to buy new locomotives for the Northeast Corridor suggests that they will not be doing more with less. The money will go to buy 70 electric locomotives, which, as Alon Levy at Pedestrian Observations explains, are far more expensive than comparable European and Japanese models, and will lock us into outdated technology for decades to come.

Europe and Asia have realized the benefits of lighter and more nimble trains – cost, speed, and energy consumption among them – but Amtrak’s planned purchase is further proof that the U.S. is not quite there yet. One easy cost-saving move would be to wait two years for Positive Train Control, an anti-crash safety technology, to be fully installed along the Northeast Corridor. By 2015, Amtrak will no longer have to comply with the Federal Railroad Administration’s requirement that trains be able to withstand crashes with enormous freight trains. Free to buy lighter off-the-shelf foreign designs, Amtrak could then save 35-50 percent off the cost of the locomotives, as Alon notes.

An even more radical modernizing and cost-cutting measure (at least in the long run) would be to transition the Northeast Corridor Regional fleet from locomotive-hauled trains to electrical multiple units, or EMUs, in line with best practices in Europe and Asia. EMUs are, like subways in the US, individually-powered carriages, and standard models can be as cheap as the inflated price that Amtrak pays for its unpowered passenger railcars. The locomotive purchase locks Amtrak into buying more of these unpowered carriages in the future, making Amtrak’s decision to go with locomotives all the more important.

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On Monday, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood will travel to Orlando for the ground-breaking of the SunRail commuter rail project in central Florida. We reported with some pleasure two weeks ago that Gov. Rick Scott had approved the project. But what we didn’t mention was that there’s significant opposition to the project, and it’s not all from the usual suspects of Tea Partiers and deficit hawks and transit haters.

Critics of Florida's new commuter rail program say CSX is the real winner in the deal -- not the taxpayer. Photo by #http://members.cox.net/dbdavies/csx/csx.htm

Many rail supporters say Scott should have approved high-speed rail and killed SunRail, not the other way around. “Governor Scott used all the right arguments to green light the wrong rail project,” said Florida Senate Democratic Leader Pro Tem Arthenia Joyner. “His support had nothing to do with good policy, good logic, or the good of Floridians.”

“Inconsistency, thy name is Rick,” editorialized The Ledger. The Lakeland-area paper speculates that the decision was a raw political calculation designed to broaden his base of support — a strategy that appears to have backfired.

The project is among the least cost-effective that the federal government have approved recently, costing an estimated $24,000 per rider, according to the Transport Politic. Daily ridership estimates all the way out to 2030 are only 7,400.

Many deride the project as corporate welfare for the freight company CSX, whose profits grew by 35 percent last year. Of the $1.2 billion total cost of the SunRail line, $432 million will go directly to CSX. The money will pay for the purchase of the track that the commuter trains will run on, but also for many unrelated CSX projects, like track improvements, overpasses and transfer stations on completely separate lines that have nothing to do with SunRail.

Besides, the state isn’t really buying the track at all – CSX will still have exclusive use of it on weekends and at night. SunRail service is only projected to run during the day, Monday through Friday, every 30 minutes at rush hour – and every two hours the rest of the day.

Why the huge giveaway to CSX? Speculation has centered around the close relationship between the freight rail giant and Rep. John Mica (R-FL), the chair of the House Transportation Committee, who has been advocating for this line to be built since 1992. CSX is the number 12 lifetime contributor to Mica’s campaigns and causes. The New York Times reports that other SunRail beneficiaries have paid their dues too:
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The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service has examined the question of whether the GOP plan to privatize Amtrak’s most valuable corridor is constitutional – and it’s determined that it is not.

Warning: this is about to get a little wonky. But I figure if Streetsblog readers can get all nerdy on transit, you can probably geek out on legalese every once in a while too.

CRS looked at two constitutional provisions and found that the GOP plan violates them both.

First: the Takings Clause [PDF]. The government is allowed to take private property for public use, as long as the owner is justly compensated. The bill proposes to transfer the corridor and rolling stock from Amtrak to the USDOT.

According to CRS, this poses three constitutional questions:

• Is Amtrak an entity outside the government? (It’s not a “taking” if property is transferred to different agencies within the government.) On this question, CRS says that the federal statute creating Amtrak unequivocally stated that it “is not a department, agency, or instrumentality of the United States Government.” The courts have upheld this definition.
• Do the assets to be transferred constitute “property” under the Takings Clause? CRS says they are “classic, well-established forms of Taking Clause property.”
• Is the transfer of assets from Amtrak to USDOT a taking? Indeed, it’s a “paradigmatic” taking, according to CRS. The only way for the term not to apply is if the transfer were somehow deemed non-coercive, since the draft bill contains no mechanism for enforcement. Still, CRS concludes that the “not-truly-coercive argument seems unlikely to succeed.”

OK, so it’s a taking. That’s fine – as we said, the constitution allows takings – as long as they’re justly compensated and for the public use. Whatever you think of the plan to privatize Amtrak, apparently just about anything Congress decides to do satisfies the “public use” clause. But the question of compensation is thornier.

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Florida Transportation Secretary Ananth Prasad has announced that Gov. Rick Scott’s administration will support the development of SunRail commuter rail.

Gov. Rick Scott has given the OK for FDOT to sign the Full Funding Grant Agreement for SunRail. Photo: Joe Burbank, Orlando Sentinel

Acknowledging the strong support of Florida Republican John Mica, chair of the House Transportation Committee, Prasad said that his recent conversations with citizens and stakeholders convinced him that the project was worthwhile and that the state’s financial interests would be protected. The state of Florida is paying to buy the tracks from CSX, but Scott had feared that the state would also be left holding the bag for cost overruns.

“The partners told me they still support the commuter rail system, and they clearly understand that the local governments will participate in covering any cost overruns,” Prasad said in his prepared remarks for today’s press conference [PDF]. “I listened to all sides of this debate, and I must tell you that the overwhelming majority of opinion expressed in each of the meetings I attended was in favor of moving forward.”

Source: Orlando Sentinel

Scott had put the project on hold in January, while he was still in the process of letting the ax fall on plans to build high-speed rail in the state. He froze $235 million worth of SunRail contracts in January without setting a timeline for making a final decision.

There was some question as to whether Gov. Scott even had the legal authority to pull the plug on the project, since the state legislature had approved it overwhelmingly in 2009 under Gov. Charlie Crist. The federal government has approved $357 million to support the project, which rail supporters had pressed the governor to accept, using the argument that Florida is a donor state, getting back only 89 to 90 cents per dollar of gas tax receipts. Private investors including CSX, Tupperware and Disneyland have also pledged their own investments in the rail line.

The 31-mile first phase of SunRail will serve 12 stations, linking DeBary to Orlando. Phase II will serve five additional stations, north to DeLand and south to Poinciana. Service is expected to begin service in late 2013 or early 2014, growing to a projected 61 miles of track.

According to the Orlando Sentinel, “The approval ends the region’s 30-year quest to devise a transportation alternative to cars and buses. Previous attempts ranging from magnetically levitated trains to light rail options have failed.”

Supporters hail the go-ahead as a solution to congestion on Interstate 4 that costs six times less than what it would take to expand I-4 by just one lane in each direction.

The Economist’s blog on business travel, Gulliver, has a short post this morning about Rep. John Mica’s proposal to privatize the Northeast Corridor. Blogger “N.B.” has a healthy dose of skepticism for arguments on either side but does significantly more damage to Mica’s argument that that of his opponents. Gulliver strikes a blow at the very idea that private companies can accomplish what Mica hopes they will:

Photo: The Economist

Surely the congressman is aware that most high-speed systems elsewhere in the first world were built with enormous investments of government money (not to mention exercises of government power, including eminent domain seizures to find land for new routes).

Major infrastructure projects, be they airports, highways, or railroads, are more often than not undertaken with significant government support. Privatisation of established rail lines has been successful before and can be again. But Americans shouldn’t trick themselves into thinking that private investors will willingly foot the bill for massively upgrading the nation’s high-speed rail infrastructure.

The post also questions the anti-privatization argument that the proposal would leave less profitable routes without an important source of funding. “Economics, not nostalgia or politics, should determine where Amtrak operates,” N.B. writes. “Right now, it’s often the opposite. Is it really necessary that Amtrak service Dodge City, Kansas (pop. 27,340)?”

Of course, the blog also says the obvious: this proposal isn’t going anywhere. House members can argue about it all they want, but the Senate isn’t having it, and neither is the president. It was wise of Mica to introduce the bill separately from the rest of the reauthorization, to avoid the risk of letting this controversial idea sink the rest of the bill.

Privatization of Amtrak service could disrupt commuter rail lines that run on its tracks. Source: GAO

House Transportation Committee Chair John Mica (R-FL) is moving forward with his plan to hand over the Northeast Corridor to private companies, despite (or because of) the fact that such a move could write Amtrak’s obituary.

Is privatizing the corridor a good move? Mica and Rep. Bill Shuster (R-PA) say that with the participation of private companies, they can build “real high-speed rail on NEC – less than two hours between WDC and NYC” and they can “double total intercity rail traffic on NEC.” They claim they can do all that for far less than Amtrak’s proposed price tag of $117 billion.

Commuter Rail

But some say that’s “not a rational plan.” One Hill staffer working on transportation issues said that Mica’s idea “just doesn’t work.” After all, she says, as long as commuter rail shares the track with intercity rail, there’s no way to double intercity service and run it at 120-mph speeds while still accommodating local train service. She says unless their plan is to raise fares exponentially to gather funds to build a whole new parallel track, it’s impossible to meet Mica’s goals under the terms he’s setting.

A 2006 GAO report [PDF], foreseeing the GOP attack on Amtrak, found that an “abrupt Amtrak cessation” would be severely disruptive to transit agencies up and down the corridor. “Seven of the nine commuter rail agencies in the Northeast operate over Amtrak-owned portions of the Northeast Corridor,” the GAO found. “According to officials from these agencies, access to Amtrak’s infrastructure is essential to their services.”

Even if services kept running but the management switched to a private company, the GAO warned that the transition “would take months, not weeks” and would involve complex labor and liability issues. “So we’re just putting everyone through all this upheaval to essentially put in the exact same thing, just under a different name,” said the staffer.

All We Are Saying is Give Amtrak a Chance

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Senators in Appropriations have to ask, Who rides the train cross-country anymore? Photo: Pignouf

The idyllic cross-country train trips that many Americans still take could get derailed by today’s “slash and burn” federal budget policies. Meanwhile, fears for the safety of rail passengers in the post-bin Laden era are drumming up political support for costly security measures and raising, once again, questions about why the federal government funds rail routes without any promise of profitability.

At this morning’s Senate Appropriations hearing on budget requests for the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) and Amtrak, the three senators in attendance were unified in their support for funding rail transportation. They’re working on the funding request for the FRA for 2012, not the rail piece of the overall transportation reauthorization. Still, with huge disagreements over spending levels in Congress still raging and a showdown looming over cuts as a quid-pro-quo for raising the debt ceiling, next year’s funding is a significant question.

So the three senators present wanted to know how they could be expected to defend rail funding without more transparency in the budget allocation process. They also asked pointed questions about what the administrators of the FRA and Amtrak were doing to keep riders safe from the terrorist attacks threatened by Al-Qaeda.

The FRA has taken on a greater role in the allocation of funding for rail projects over the last several years and senators appeared frustrated over a lack of clear information as to where the funding would come from. Indeed, some security projects appear in the FY2012 budget request but the FRA is also requesting a USDOT loan to for the same thing.

Transportation Appropriations Subcommittee Chair Patty Murray (D-WA) was quick to commend FRA Administrator Joseph Szabo for his efforts, but called him out for not improving transparency about how, when, where and why projects are funded.  “I support investments,” she made clear. “Now is the time to address critics head on. We must communicate with the people.”

Murray and Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) presented a grim future for surface transportation if funding does not keep up pace with booming population growth. The only other senator to speak, ranking Republican Susan Collins of Maine, agreed and reminded her colleagues that the ambitious national rail plan proposed by the FRA, including high-speed rail, has yet to be followed up with any cost estimates, for construction or operations.

Szabo, for his part, could only promise that studies to be released within “the next couple of months” would present the “broader business case” for funding both high-speed rail and individual projects across the country. Szabo, the first union railman to hold his position, was proud of what his agency was doing to keep hazardous freight secure – but admitted that there are still unimplemented security measures that date back to 9/11.  He pointed out that for every $50 spent on aviation security, only $1 went to surface transportation.

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