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.”

The $51 million in TIGER III freight rail grants will go to a dozen projects, varying from large port upgrades in Los Angeles and New Orleans to the rehabilitation of a rural freight line in Kansas, saving it from abandonment. Most of the projects would target the sort of “freight bottlenecks” identified by a 2008 Association of American Railroads study [PDF]. Without targeting specific bottlenecks, the logic goes, railroads will be unable to meet rising demand for rail transportation.

America’s freight rail system resides primarily in private hands — a fact that Republicans in Congress often mention in support of the system’s superiority over passenger rail. But railroad companies have been receiving plenty of federal funds as part of TIGER, and not just the largest railroads, either. Three Class II regional railroads — the Pan Am in Massachusetts, the Kyle in Kansas, and the Paducah & Louisville in Kentucky — will be TIGER III beneficiaries as well.

This is a good sign, since every time a small railroad disappears, local customers are forced to either truck their cargo to the nearest rail depot or all the way to its eventual destination. With these TIGER grants, smaller railroads won’t face that threat, meaning less traffic congestion, lower road maintenance costs lower, and cleaner air.

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.

Romney also pioneered an interagency partnership in Massachusetts not unlike the Obama administration initiative that brought together HUD, USDOT and EPA. Romney’s Office for Commonwealth Development brought together state agencies on transportation, environment, housing, and energy — a collaboration which has served as a model for other states. To head it, he hired Doug Foy, the head of the Conservation Law Foundation and “arguably New England’s most important environmentalist,” according to ModeShift.

Romney’s administration encouraged brownfield, instead of greenfield, development and created a bond program to encourage transit-oriented development. And ModeShift says he was “for RGGI (the Northeast regional greenhouse gas emissions compact) before he was against it.”

That highlights one fundamental truth about Mitt Romney, which is that it’s sometimes hard to know what is the fundamental truth about Mitt Romney. The man who brought health care reform to Massachusetts is not the same animal currently fighting for the right-wing-extremist vote in the Republican primary.

Romney is “neutral” on the idea that human pollution is a significant cause of global warming and opposes international climate treaties like the Kyoto Protocol. He’s pro-nuclear and pro-drilling (including in protected areas in Alaska). And as governor, Romney “used approximately $45,000 in the state’s parks and conservation money to stage a pre-Super Bowl send-off rally for the New England Patriots football team on January 30,” according to the Boston Globe.

Indeed, according to a story printed by the Massachusetts Audubon Society, Romney “viewed land protection as a barrier to his top campaign pledge to double housing production.” Romney shelved the Statewide Open Space Plan soon after entering office, according to the story.

Gov. Romney also gets a lot of blame for reneging on promises made by his predecessors to build transit to offset some of the environmental damage done by the Big Dig road project. According to an editorial in the Harvard Crimson:

As part of the 1990 legal agreement to begin the Big Dig highway project, Massachusetts promised to fund a number of desperately needed public transportation projects in order to ameliorate the increased pollution and traffic that the new highway would generate. But the Romney administration has consistently downsized, delayed, or outright terminated most of the projects that were included in the 1990 agreement, choosing instead to divert transportation funds to other expensive highway projects and mass transit extensions that would primarily benefit the Commonwealth’s more affluent residents.

Many of the transit projects, like a green line extension to Somerville and Medford, and orange line service in Jamaica Plain, are still in limbo.

But given that Boston has the oldest transit system in the country, with badly deteriorating infrastructure, the restraint when it comes to new construction may not be a bad thing.

“I think it’s admirable that these guys [Patrick and Romney] have taken safety and maintenance as their prime goals, and capital projects have to take a back seat,” said Ted Brown, a former city transportation official and writer of the Boston-based Radials blog. “I think that’s a pretty good judge of what people want.”

Romney did have a significant hand in improving the transportation bureaucracy in his state. There was no Massachusetts Department of Transportation until two years ago. Seven different entities had some hand in transportation planning and building, according to Brown, with the Turnpike Authority being the biggest and most powerful. The authority was independent until this year. Romney got the ball rolling on unification of the transportation work in the state and the creation of the department.

Meanwhile, the commuter rail system was privatized under Romney, but perhaps not of his own choosing: After a series of disagreements with the T, Amtrak declined to bid on the commuter rail service contract in 2003. The Massachusetts Bay Commuter Railroad Company (MBCR) now runs the rail system, and according to Brown, privatization was “not the worst thing in the world.”

Romney invested in the improvement of certain lines as part of the privatization process. Some saw the improvements, performed before handing over operations, as a donation of sorts to a private company, but Brown said it had the important effect of improving the stations and making commuter rail a more viable service. Besides, he said, for riders, “it’s the same deal.” He said the switch was seamless, and few noticed a change.

Soon after the 2008 election was sewn up, Romney came out opposing the auto bailout, saying it would encourage Detroit automakers to “stay the course — the suicidal course of declining market shares, insurmountable labor and retiree burdens, technology atrophy, product inferiority and never-ending job losses.”

His opposition certainly had nothing to do with a principled stand against car subsidies or promotion of clean-fuel vehicles. Indeed, during the 2008 campaign, he told a Michigan audience that he would help “build a brighter, prosperous future” by championing the auto industry, and he attacked opponent John McCain for backing fuel economy standards, calling them “anvils around the neck of the domestic auto manufacturers.”

We’ll take a look at other candidates’ transportation records as the primary season unfolds.

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:

The New Starts transit program, which essentially funds all new transit system construction, gets cut to $1.55 billion down from $2 billion in FY10. In addition, a policy tweak is made that requires state or local funds to make up more than 50 percent of any new grant agreements. Or put another way, the feds will no longer cover more than half of any New Starts transit project, exacerbating an existing gap between the share the government will pay for transit vs. highway projects. (Highway projects get around 80 percent of their funds from the federal government.)

Existing passenger rail service faces deep cuts of its own. Amtrak’s capital budget (new rolling stock, new lines, equipment, etc.) is cut by $24 million (from $922 million to $898 million; down from $1 billion in 2010), but the operations budget is where Amtrak takes a big hit, going from $563 million to $227 million. On top of that, an important policy change will prevent Amtrak from using any of their operating funds on state-supported lines — lines where a state has partnered with Amtrak to increase passenger rail service and ridership. To put that change in perspective, in 2010 9 million rides were taken on state-supported routes.

Amtrak State-Supported routes, from the T&I Committee report

The bill also prohibits any new RRIF loans or loan guarantees. RRIF is a loan program, like TIFIA for rail projects, which has received significant attention over the last year. Cumbersome rules and application processes have resulted in the program being seriously undersubscribed, spending just $1 billion of the $35 billion it has at its disposal. Republicans have held hearings to work on improving the program, but now it appears they’d rather just leave it for dead.

There is a silver lining to this disastrous bill, Davis says, and it’s that the incompetence and intransigence that we’ve seen lately in Congress will keep it from becoming law — for a long time, at least. Remember, the fiscal year ends September 30 — the red-letter day when the current SAFETEA-LU extension and the gas tax also expire — and Congress is nowhere near ready to pass a consensus 2012 budget out of both houses.

That means that we can look forward to another budget extension, and possibly a whole string of extensions. That doesn’t necessarily mean it will be a clean extension — lately, Republicans have been flexing their muscle to demand spending cuts, even on extensions. But we won’t see this bill enacted for quite a while, if ever.

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.

Taxpayers and transit-riders may be getting hosed by Amtrak’s lackadaisical attitude towards spending, but the vendors building the trains and supplying its parts probably don’t mind. Siemens may walk away with the lion’s share of the cost differential, spending much of it redesigning the locomotives to FRA standards. Thanks to Buy America domestic sourcing rules, American workers and suppliers will get the rest, with Siemens hiring 250 workers for the contract and knock-on effects for other American suppliers. Amtrak’s aversion to change and Congress’s ambivalence about public transportation started the problem, and these vested interests now have a stake in perpetuating it.

Unfortunately for transit advocates, neither the Democrats nor the Republicans are making a serious effort to cajole Amtrak – or any federally-funded programs, really – into spending money more wisely. Mica has put forward two transportation bills recently – a six-year general reauthorization, and a bill focused exclusively on privatizing Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor. Neither, however, would address crash safety standards or Buy America protectionist policy. His “major streamlining of the federal review process” might make transit projects move along a bit more quickly, but it won’t do anything to bring down high costs.

And while Mica hasn’t made any real effort to spend transit money more effectively, the Obama administration has gone a step further and actually increased costs by strengthening the protectionist stipulations attached to federal transit dollars. Back in February, Federal Transit Administration chief Peter Rogoff issued a memorandum stating that they will no longer consider “public interest” waivers for the Buy America program, which are normally issued when compliance with the rules for sourcing and manufacture would be a burden on transit agencies. This was perhaps inevitable with stimulus dollars, but the administration made clear in the memo that it affects all federal spending, not just stimulus funds.

With high unemployment numbers and an election coming up, the issue of jobs clearly looms large for Obama and the Democrats. Transit is for them as much a jobs program as it is an enhancer of mobility and cities. The risk here, as Tanya discussed a few weeks ago, is that projects will be chosen based on their ability to produce jobs, rather than their effectiveness as transportation.

Transit in the U.S. may be underfunded, but there’s no doubt that it’s also burdened by a considerable amount of waste. Beyond pricey rolling stock, American rail construction costs are astronomical, and labor productivity is rather low. With lean times ahead for the feds and many states, it’s time to get serious about transit spending. This should appeal to liberals because it means more transit, and to conservatives and libertarians because it means less waste and government spending.

But Democrats are still more interesting in ribbon-cuttings than details, and Republicans are still culturally allergic to understanding passenger rail. That means it’s up to urbanists to explain to both sides why getting passenger rail costs under control should be a shared goal.

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:

Campaign finance records show that many of the contractors that worked on the [SunRail] project, including an engineering firm, Parsons Brinckerhoff, have been major contributors to Mr. Mica’s re-election campaigns. So have businesses and individuals who could benefit from the project, including ICI Homes, a real estate developer that owns several sites close to a proposed SunRail station, and Florida Hospital in Orlando, whose $250 million expansion plan is contingent on getting a station on its property.

Executives at ICI Homes, or their relatives, have contributed nearly $70,000 to Mr. Mica over the last decade. An additional $35,000 in donations have come from staff members and lawyers at GrayRobinson, a Florida law firm lobbying for the project.

The Times reports that Mica used earmarks to buy the first railcars for the project a decade before any trains would run and that he helped eliminate cost-effectiveness criteria for federally financed rail projects in order to help SunRail. For a Congressman who just slashed transportation spending by 33 percent and insists that the transportation sector “do more with less,” his commitment to inefficiency in the case of SunRail is truly puzzling.

In any case, what do Mica’s ties to SunRail have to do with Scott’s decision to approve the project? Mica leaned hard on Scott to give it the green light. He even hinted – strongly – that Scott’s decision on SunRail could influence Mica’s decision on whether or not to approve $75 million to dredge the Port of Miami – one of Scott’s top infrastructure priorities.

Scott’s critics are particularly frustrated at his approval of SunRail since he rejected $2.4 billion in federal high-speed rail funds, saying he was concerned with cost overruns. Private companies had pledged to provide the $300 million needed to complete the high-speed rail project. But it’s the Florida taxpayer that’s holding the bag for SunRail – $651.6 million worth.

The high-speed rail link, many argue, was more urgent and would have drawn greater ridership, providing needed connectivity between the Orlando airport and Disney World. SunRail, although it goes through Orlando, does not stop at those locations.

The criticism has been scorching. The day Scott approved SunRail, Republican state Sen. Paula Dockery of Lakeland, a vocal opponent of the SunRail project (and high-speed rail supporter) said in a statement, “This decision has completed the governor’s transformation from businessman to political insider.”

“It is unclear if, when making the decision, the governor had a change of heart, if he simply succumbed to the desires of the big money special interests, or if he has a severe case of amnesia and thought that he was supposed to be representing CSX instead of Florida’s taxpayers,” Dockery went on.

Another major supporter of high-speed rail that has slammed the SunRail project is the Florida AFL-CIO. The labor group objects to the corporate giveaway to CSX – especially the fact that the agreement would let CSX escape its labor liability by making all rail employees independent contractors. By making them contractors, and not employees, the workers would no longer be protected by a whole host of federal laws including the Railway Labor Act, the Federal Employees Liability Act, the Railroad Retirement Act, and the Interstate Commerce Commission Termination Act.

The change in status, and accompanying loss of rights, would apply not just to new workers but to existing CSX employees – “those that weren’t laid off,” says Rich Templin of the Florida AFL-CIO. “We procured a list of names of people to be fired. They were all union members.”

Railroad worker rights don’t just protect the worker, Templin said. Trained rail workers know the safety procedures and know when they’re being broken. A non-unionized contract worker who brings a complaint about safety-noncompliance can be terminated more easily than a company employee represented by a union, Templin said.

Even worse, Templin said, the way that the legislation was crafted makes the changes permanent.

The federal government is providing $178 million to help fund the first phase of SunRail. There has been some speculation that the $72 million that has not yet been paid out could be in jeopardy if the FTA’s New Starts transit program is cut.

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.

Under the bill, the compensation Amtrak will be awarded consists of “all but one share of the preferred stock of Amtrak held by the Secretary” (USDOT holds all of Amtrak’s preferred stock) and relief of all debts to USDOT. CRS doesn’t make a determination on what the value of that compensation is, but Amtrak’s common stock, at least, is virtually worthless.

Either way, CRS says, it’s not so much the amount of the compensation as its form that is troubling. State courts have consistently found that “money is the only legally adequate compensation.”

Moving on now to the Appointments Clause [PDF]. Paradoxically, the reasoning behind CRS’s conclusion that the rail plan violates the Appointments Clause contradicts the reasoning behind its conclusion that it violates the Takings Clause.

The Appointments Clause protects the separation and balance of powers by vesting the president with the power to appoint high-level officials only with the advice and consent of the Senate. The rail privatization proposal would create a Northeast Corridor Committee that essentially takes over the powers of Amtrak, with broad authority over the acquisition and improvement of rail facilities. CRS finds that the powers given to the members of that committee are significant enough to warrant presidential appointment with Senate approval, under the Appointments Clause.

Here’s the rub: in order to determine this, CRS found that Amtrak is enough of a federal entity to warrant constitutional appointments, as to any other key federal post. In so doing, it cites a Supreme Court case that decided that Amtrak was enough of a federal entity that it had to abide by governmental free-speech mandates.

In discussing the Takings Clause, CRS found this case to be somewhat of an outlier in a case history that generally defined Amtrak as independent. But in discussing the Appointments Clause, CRS quotes the Justice Department as saying “we can conceive of no principled basis for distinguishing between the status of a federal entity vis-à-vis constitutional obligations relating to individual rights and vis-à-vis the structural obligations that the Constitution imposes on federal entities.” Which is to say, either Amtrak is a federal entity or it isn’t. And in this case, they found that it is.

The way that the House had proposed to appoint the five members of the executive committee was a little more haphazard than what the Appointments Clause mandates. The committee, under the plan, would consist of (A) The Secretary of Transportation,  (B) one member representing the states of the Northeast Corridor, appointed by the governors (and DC’s mayor), (C) one member appointed by the Speaker of the House of Representatives and one member appointed by the majority leader of the Senate, and (D) one member, selected by a majority of the voting members of the Northeast Corridor Infrastructure and Operations Advisory Commission.

The House Transportation Committee can try to argue with the contradictions behind the CRS results, but it most likely cannot escape the fact that the rail plan, as currently written, violates at least one constitutional amendment.

Top committee Democrat Nick Rahall of West Virginia couldn’t be more pleased. “The ideals enshrined in the Constitution by our Founding Fathers have guided our Nation for centuries and Republicans should not railroad these principles in their flawed rush to privatize Amtrak,” he said in a statement. “This ideological assault on Amtrak is nothing more than a Transcontinental Tragedy that will result in a Constitutional Catastrophe.”

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.

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

Meanwhile, PRIIA, the law that reauthorized Amtrak in 2008 [PDF], is still in its infancy. It re-invested in the state of good repair of Amtrak’s infrastructure and sought to resolve its debts. Some say it’s too early in that process to bury Amtrak now. Besides, Amtrak itself is inviting the private sector to collaborate with them on upgrading the NEC. Proposals were just due two weeks ago. Again, to many, it’s premature to interrupt this process.

Federal Assets

More reasons to oppose the privatization scheme are coming out of the woodwork each day. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) just introduced a bill, the Protecting Taxpayers in Transportation Asset Transfers Act, which draws attention to another problem with the plan: that privatization squanders federal investments in public infrastructure.

Durbin’s bill would help ameliorate that issue by requiring repayment to the federal government, as well as mandating the consideration of factors such as the environment, public health, commerce and national security. It also introduces new accountability measures to ensure sound maintenance and the disclosure of anticipated effects on wages and employment.

“The last transportation bill alone provided states with an average of $48 billion per year for upgrades to roads, bridges and mass transit systems,” said Durbin. “Any deal to sell or lease these assets should be closely examined and include a return on the federal taxpayer investment.”

Bailouts

If that weren’t enough reason for liberals and conservatives alike to flee, screaming, from any plan to sell off our most valuable transportation asset, consider this: Reconnecting America says, “Globally, rail privatization has led to costly government bailouts of private companies that have acquired too much risk.”

“Investors have an implicit assumption that taxpayers will provide a backstop for companies that make risky choices to maximize profits,” Reconnecting America continues. “This approach will require an unknown amount of taxpayer funds in an effort to attract private investors to upgrade, maintain and operate the NEC.”

British Government support to the rail system, 1985-present. Source: Reconnecting America/Office of the Rail Regulator, UK DIT

Republicans constantly point to Virgin Rail in the UK as a great privatization success story, but in fact, the company that took over the rail infrastructure went bankrupt just five years after assuming ownership and the government had to take over the company, with the net effect that the taxpayer portion of passenger rail funding increased after privatization. Virgin, the operator, stayed afloat – but according to Darnell Grisby of Reconnecting America, “If Virgin had to cover its own maintenance and capital needs, its balance sheet would be bleeding as well.” This is the model Mica and Shuster are looking to for guidance on the NEC.

Add to all of these pitfalls the fact that by taking the profitable NEC off Amtrak’s books, the lucrative Acela line can no longer help pay for long-distance rail service in the rest of the country. If the GOP thinks per-passenger federal subsidies on those money-losing lines are high now, just wait until Amtrak has no ability of its own to help cover those services.

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.

Mr. Szabo’s predecessor and the current president and CEO of Amtrak, Joseph Boardman, was noticeably more willing to get into details. He agreed that a disproportionate number of Amtrak employees received overtime in the last few years, particularly during ARRA-funded projects, but said that it would have actually cost more to bring on new employees with Amtrak’s full benefits packages (54 percent of the salary-related cost) and train them for the required 24-30 month period, only to lay them off as soon as projects were completed. He said that Amtrak was already addressing overtime, as well as other operational overhead, wherever it could be reduced, but it was clear he did not see these among the biggest budget problems.

Sen. Collins presented Boardman with a pointed question: “How, given that you are serving more passengers than ever before, each and every month, are you losing more money than last year?” His answer began with a awkward nod to rail advocates.

The pro-rail folks always shudder and get concerned when I talk like this, but you are not going to be able to cut costs enough on long distance trains to make them profitable. It becomes more a question of policy of whether we are going to have border-to-border, coast-to-coast connectivity.

Despite record increases in ridership, Amtrak continues to rely on federal funding to keep all of its trains running. Collins wanted to know what Boardman thought of former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell’s ideas for severing the budgetary ties between Northeast railways and the rest of the country. As he has said before, Boardman believes this would only decrease ridership by disconnecting what should remain a unified transportation system.

He was also quick to remind Collins that long-distance routes are, for many rural Americans, their only connection to regional and local transit systems. Congress mandates that Amtrak operate those routes, which no private carrier would, as a public service although they do lose money. Boardman warned that while cutting those routes may seem like low-hanging fruit, it would be painful to those who most need transportation options — and would inevitably yield negative affects on ridership elsewhere.

Texas Republican Pete Sessions introduced an amendment to cut $447 million from Amtrak's budget. Photo: AP

• Eliminate the entire high-speed rail program.
• Cut $430 million of the $2 billion allocated for the Federal Transit Administration’s New Starts program, the federal government’s primary means of support for transit capital investments.
• Eliminate TIGER, which provided more than $2 billion to innovative state and local transportation programs around the country last year, and rescind all unspent funds from last year.
• Cancel federal payments to the Washington, D.C. metro system.

As for the amendments:

• Republican Pete Sessions of Texas failed to cut $447 million out of Amtrak’s budget.
• Democrat Jared Polis of Colorado tried to keep the government from rescinding unused TIFIA and TIGER grant money from the stimulus. Polis’ amendment failed.
• Democrat Gerry Connolly of Virginia tried to restore funding to the DC Metro. Since House rules require that a member take money from somewhere else in order to put any funding back into the bill, he proposed cutting $200 million from the Department of Agriculture’s food safety program. The amendment was discarded on a point of order. He then tried to take the money out of the Agricultural Credit Insurance Fund. That amendment does not appear to have been considered yet.
• Louisiana Republican Steve Scalise successfully introduced an amendment to cut the salaries of several White House “czars” including the “Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate Change” and the White House Director of Urban Affairs (both of which are already vacant positions).

And  New York Democrat Jerrold Nadler’s valiant attempt to add back all transportation funding gets its very own bullet list. His amendment #511 would have restored funding for:

• Federal Transit Administration Capital Investment Grants (New Starts)
• Capital Assistance for High Speed Rail
• Rail Line Relocation and Improvement Program
• Amtrak Capital and Debt Service Grants
• DOT National Infrastructure Investments
• Railroad Safety Technology Program
• Capital Assistance to States for Intercity Passenger Rail Service
• DOT Grants for Energy Efficiency and Greenhouse Gas Reductions
• The Federal Aviation Administration for Facilities and Equipment
• FAA Research, Engineering, and Development

Iowa Republican Tom Latham, chair of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Transportation, raised a point of order, killing Nadler’s amendment.

Artist's rendering of Denver Union Station, one of only two projects to get RRIF loans in 2010. Image: Denver Union Station Project Authority

1. It must be in China or Europe, not here.
2. I’m about to tell you that Republicans just cut it from the budget.
3. It’s over-subscribed, like TIGER, with 30 dollars of applications for every dollar available.

Wrong, wrong, and wrong! (Though all good guesses.) The Railroad Rehabilitation & Improvement Financing Program (RRIF) was first authorized (here in the USA) in 1976 and the program in its current form has been around since 1998. House Republicans spent several hours yesterday trying to figure out how to improve it (not kill it). And unlike other federal infrastructure financing programs, it’s vastly under-subscribed. Of the $35 billion it has at its disposal, it’s spent just $1 billion since 1998.

With the Republican assault on high-speed rail funding (which the House is trying to strip, down to the last penny, out of the FY2011 budget), RRIF could be a GOP-friendly funding mechanism for rail improvements, including for high-speed rail.

So why isn’t it being used to its full potential? That’s what the House Subcommittee on Railroads spent yesterday trying to figure out.

Bill Callison of the Wheeling & Lake Erie Railway Company gave the committee a sense of where RRIF could be improved.

The story of our RRIF loans can be fairly described as the good, the bad and the ugly. The “good” is the results of those loans. We have a $25 million RRIF track rehabilitation loan that allowed us to take approximately 120 miles of track from 25 miles per hour (with numerous 10 mile-per-hour “slow orders”) to 40 miles per hour… We also have a $14 million loan which allowed us to purchase 150 open top hopper cars during a tight equipment market… The “bad” was the length of time it took to secure those loans… The “ugly” was what took place at the end of the process for the second loan.

Though RRIF loans are supposed to be processed within 90 days, Callison’s experience is far from unique. His loans took 18 and 10 months start to finish, respectively, creating “ugly” problems such as interest incurred from a bridge loan made necessary by the delays, as well as damaged relationships with suppliers and customers.

RRIF is attractive to rail companies because of its low interest rates and long repayment periods – sometimes as long as 35 years. It’s also unique for recognizing track, rights-of-way and transportation facilities as collateral. And it makes loans available to help railroads refinance existing debt, although the FRA de-prioritized refinance loans last September, a move some experts criticize, since refinancing helps railroads pay for their own infrastructure improvements, rather than debt service.

All the witnesses told the committee that RRIF has to do a better job enforcing the mandated 90-day turnaround time for loan decisions. Some witnesses also asked the Federal Railroad Administration, which administers RRIF, to stop adding criteria to its guidance that isn’t in the original mandate.

Richard Timmons of the American Short Line and Regional Railroad Association also criticized RRIF’s establishment of “politically correct” priorities like noise reduction, reduction of highway freight traffic, “development of interconnected livable communities,” and expanded access for people with disabilities. Timmons said these goals “have nothing to do with short line railroads that are preserving light density rail lines in rural and small town America.”

Other witnesses suggested that the FRA help the applicants bear the risk of default, as TIFIA does. RRIF recipients now bear the risk alone through payment of a credit risk premium. Tom Loftus of the High Speed Rail Alliance suggested that RRIF loans be more flexible and open to modifications like deferred debt payments and subsidized interest rates.

Gabe Roth, left, and Bill Lind battle out the bus vs. rail question at yesterday's roundtable. Photo courtesy of the Mobility Choice Coalition

A roundtable discussion yesterday sponsored by the Mobility Choice Coalition on ways to make public transportation align with principles of fiscal conservatism quickly morphed into an all-out brawl over buses vs. rail.

Lind is a rail guy. “Most Americans will not ride a bus if they can drive,” he said. “Buses carry primarily transit dependents.”

When others tried to “defend the honor” of buses, Lind stepped up his rhetoric, first declaring, “buses have no honor!” and then this stunner: “Live like a roach, ride a motorcoach.”

That was more than enough to raise the hackles of Daniel Hoff: “The American Bus Association represents those roaches.” He said bus riders in the Northeast Corridor make over $60,000 a year. And modern intercity bus service is clean and comfortable and has wi-fi.

Lind acknowledges that it’s the urban transit buses, not the intercity coaches, that he’s calling “rolling torture racks.” But still, he says, middle class people want to ride trains and streetcars, not buses. “Basic fact of life,” Lind said. “You can call it rational or irrational – it’s a mixture of both – but it’s a basic fact of life.” He said the user experience of buses just isn’t pleasurable enough to encourage people to leave their cars at home.

He chalks it up to “the stink factor.”

“Somebody gets on who hasn’t bathed for three months,” Lind said. “If this happens on the train, you can get up and move to another car. On the bus, you’re breathing it for three hours.”

Train travel, Lind said, is travel. Buses make you feel like you’re being packaged and shipped.

“Why should we subsidize snobbery?” asked Ed Braddy of the American Dream Coalition, who earlier had made it clear that he thinks cars are next to godliness. “If people are too good to take a bus, why should we subsidize that?”

In a conversation about how to make transit less dependent on public subsidies, intercity buses come out head and shoulders above rail. Much of the intercity bus market is entirely private, requiring no public money at all (except, of course, for the massive public subsidies that go to the construction of the highways they ride on.)

“Fine, lets go to ox-carts,” Lind said. “They’re even cheaper than buses.” And he contends that urban buses aren’t as easy on the public purse as their intercity counterparts. The average urban rail transit system covers just over 50 percent of their operating costs from user fees – “same as highways,” Lind said. But urban bus fares cover only 25 percent of their operating costs, on average.

Plus, Lind said, “Rail transit, but not buses, has a tremendous effect on development.” That’s a large factor in the appeal of streetcars: permanent, fixed lines reassure businesses that transit will be there for a while, whereas a bus route can change overnight, leaving that commercial corridor unserved.

Lind met his match in the form of Gabe Roth, a conservative transportation economist from the Independent Institute.

“We love train travel but not the costs,” Roth said. The cheapest Amtrak fare from Washington, D.C. to New York that he could find on a given day was $76 one way; $139 for a higher-speed Acela. But there are multiple bus companies competing to give you a seat for under $20 – and without a public subsidy.

Part of the problem, Roth contends, is that there’s not enough competition in rail. Railroads don’t carry competing rail companies’ trains, whereas highways don’t pick favorites among bus carriers.

But more importantly, Roth said, rail requires its own dedicated right of way and can’t be packed as full as a freeway. “A high-speed train requires miles of empty track in front of it because a steel wheel on a steel rail cannot stop quickly,” he said. “But you can have buses every 10 seconds on the road and you would not think that road is over-crowded.”

Even Lind acknowledges that “high-speed rail is killing us.” It’s “icing without a cake,” he said. “What we need is a much denser network of intercity buses and passenger trains so you can go from anywhere in America to anywhere else in America without flying, without driving, where the buses feed the trains.”

“Buses have to be more than just a feeder network to a rail vision that’s 20 to 50 years and hundreds of billions of dollars away,” said Hoff of the ABA.

Anne Canby of the Surface Transportation Policy Partnership took some of the heatedness out of the debate with these words of wisdom: “There are very different markets. I have a grandchild who takes the bus wherever she goes. I take the train.”

Both/and, not either/or. Now, people, was that so hard?

Mica speaks at the ribbon cutting ceremony for the Auto Train terminal in Sanford. Photo courtesy of John Mica's office.

We mentioned the Journal’s report the other day that Mica has tried to reassure transportation supporters that new House rules won’t starve the highway trust fund.

Now the Journal is reporting that Mica is eager to shift more freight transportation to rail in order to “ease pressure on federal road and bridge spending out of the Highway Trust Fund, by reducing the pace of wear and tear.”

“My goal would be to get more trucks off of the highway, and more cars off of the highway,” Mica said.

Mica also refered to the vastly undersubscribed Railroad Rehabilitation and Improvement Financing loan program, which hasn’t shared the popularity of other federal funding programs like TIGER and TIFIA. He told the Journal would not try to use RRIF money for road projects, “but I can free that up for rail infrastructure … (and) enhancement of rail takes pressure off of my highways, if it’s properly applied, too.”

The Journal continued:

He also wants to take private the Amtrak Auto Train service that runs from central Florida nearly to Washington, D.C., in which drivers load their automobiles on the train and ride inside train cars for the 855-mile trip. Mica said that could be sharply expanded and perhaps broadened to include commercial trucks, as in Europe.

Such efforts, he said, save energy and “save the infrastructure, because four out of every five dollars for transportation now goes just for maintaining infrastructure. So I look at ways to take that asset, not only stop sitting on the (highway) asset, but stop wrecking the asset.”

The Journal is also reporting that Mica is planning to start a series of field hearings on the transportation reauthorization in the middle of next month. “The first thing I plan to do,” he told the Journal, “is a series of hearings around the country, and listening sessions, and we’re going to start that probably about the 18th of February.”

The current extension of the transportation bill expires March 4. It’s the sixth extension since SAFETEA-LU expired October 1, 2009.

Rail workers would have an easier path to unionizing under the new rule. (Photo: TreeHugger)

The rule, approved on a 2-1 vote by the National Mediation Board (NMB), would end a decades-old practice of counting employees who abstain or do not vote in union elections as "no" votes, thus making the process of organizing workers more difficult.

The Senate labor committee's chairman, Tom Harkin (D-IA), hailed the unionizing shift in a statement. “NMB’s long overdue rule change ensures that all American workers will have a voice in the workplace and a right to fair wages and work conditions," said Harkin, who had joined more than three dozen fellow senators in endorsing the new rule in December.

In practice, the NMB's move is more likely to affect airlines than railroads, where the majority of workers are already represented by labor unions. Indeed, the Air Transport Association -- which represents the interests of leading domestic airlines -- is already moving ahead with a legal challenge to the new rule, the Associated Press reported today.

Nonetheless, surface transportation labor interests joined Harkin in welcoming the NMB announcement, published in today's Federal Register. James Little, president of the Transport Workers Union (TWU), said in a statement that "today's decision was long overdue" and would spur his group to new organizing drives.

"TWU lost elections in the past because many supposed voters were on leave or in the hospital or unreachable – every non-vote was counted against our union," Little said.

The senior Democratic and Republican senators in charge of setting annual transportation spending levels today urged the leader of the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) to develop a more comprehensive plan for using the White House's high-speed rail program to spur the development of viable U.S. train networks.

FRA chief Joseph Szabo (l.) and Amtrak CEO Joseph Boardman (r.) both testified today. (Photo: Getty)

The chairman of the Senate appropriations committee's transport panel, Patty Murray (D-WA), hailed the Obama administration for breaking from its predecessor by strongly supporting rail investments.

But she also questioned the absence of an FRA budget request for implementing the anti-crash technology known as positive train control, and she advised rail chief Joseph Szabo to provide more of a long-term vision for leveraging the $10.5 billion Congress has approved since last year to develop high-speed and intercity rail.

"This committee is a strong supporter of infrastructure spending, but we have to set strong priorities and make sure that the money's going to be consistently there," Murray told Szabo. "To get a request this year to fund it but not [be] sure what's going to happen next year, I don't think that's going to be enough."

Her GOP counterpart on the panel, Kit Bond (MO), was considerably more harsh in assessing the FRA's lack of a full-scale national rail plan. The agency has released an initial document outlining its priorities, but a final version is not expected until later this year.

Until that more detailed rail development proposal is released, Bond told Szabo, "it would be irresponsible for the committee to give the [administration's] high-speed rail plan any additional funds. ... Rail supporters have to know there are limits to these [budget] requests even in the best of times."

The FRA and Amtrak submitted separate budget requests for the fiscal year that begins in October. While the former sought $1.6 billion for Amtrak, the government-supported train company itself asked Congress for $2.2 billion. Szabo assured Murray that the administration's smaller request would not force any service cuts on Amtrak, which is poised to set a ridership record this year.

Still, Murray appeared skeptical of the level of detail included in the budget document, warning Szabo that infrastructure firms "really have to believe Amtrak is going to be a reliable source of funding" in order to make federal spending on inter-city rail modernization  a driver of domestic manufacturing expansion.

On the positive train control (PTC) front, Szabo indicated that the FRA expects freight and passenger railroads to bear most of the cost burden of its recently adopted requirement for installing the new systems. Congress approved $50 million in grants to help expedite PTC upgrades, but some freight companies are openly challenging the economic value of the new FRA mandate.

As of last year, D.C.'s Metro had less than one full-time employee working on its safety panel. (Photo: VisitingDC.com)

"[W]e engaged in at least helping the transit industry develop voluntary [safety] standards," Rogoff told the House oversight committee. "As a federal agency, I feel it's our obligation to identify what the safe practices [are]. The only way we can ensure there will be safe practices is to have mandatory standards."

The Obama administration's transit safety proposal [PDF] would seek to impose such mandatory standards for transit safety, requiring local agencies to meet a minimum threshold of compliance or be subject to federal monitoring. The president's budget for fiscal year 2011 would set aside about $30 million to help transit agencies pay for any safety upgrades required by the new federal oversight.

"It is not our goal to replicate the voluminous [Federal Rail Administration] rulebook for transit systems," Rogoff told lawmakers. The FRA's slate of safety standards have required Amtrak's Acela trains to stop short of maximum speeds and Caltrain commuter rail to delay introduction of lighter-weight cars, coming under fire from rail advocates.

But lawmakers' openness to debating the White House safety plan does not mean the FTA can count on passage this year. Leaders of the House transportation committee have indicated they do not aim to take up the transit safety bill as a free-standing measure, instead leaving the issue to the next six-year federal infrastructure bill -- which may not come to a final vote until next spring at the earliest.

The transport panel's senior Republican, Rep. John Mica (FL), is opposed to creating a new federal system to monitor safety but said at today's hearing -- Mica also sits on the oversight committee -- that "I don't mind spending our resources on safety." Rather than ask transit agencies to submit their safety work for FTA approval, Mica said, the Obama administration should spend more money on upgrading older, decaying transit infrastructure.

The challenge of ensuring passenger safety during an era of transit budget crises is particularly acute at D.C.'s Metro, which lacks a dedicated source of revenue other than contributions from its three participating governments (D.C., Virginia, and Maryland) and Congress. Transit officials in the capital are mulling a package of fare hikes and service cuts, as well as a possible gas tax hike, to close a $180 million-plus budget gap for next year.

"I think the safety problems we are seeing now at Metro are symptomatic of a larger problem, particularly on the rail system: years of deferred maintenance and management problems are taking their toll," Rep. Edolphus Towns (D-NY), chairman of the oversight committee, said in his opening statement.

Yet only a few lawmakers questioned Rogoff on the federal government's role in ensuring transit agencies would receive more money for maintenance of their existing systems. Among them was Rep. Gerry Connolly (D), whose Northern Virginia constituents are frequent users of the D.C. Metro.

"The federal government has to be at the table with operational dollars" if Congress agrees to impose new safety standards, he said, adding that "long before Mr. Rogoff [joined the FTA], the federal government has been retreating from its responsibilities to transit," particularly Metro.

Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) painted a bleak picture, asking Rogoff to outline the likely result if Congress cannot sign off on the safety proposal.

"It seems like the right hand doesn't know what the head or the left hand is doing," he said.

A police officer monitors New York City subway commuters last month, part of stepped-up security after the Moscow attack. (Photo: AP/CSM)

The MTI's latest report on its database analyzed more than 1,600 terrorist attacks on or threats to surface transportation -- only 15 of which occurred in North America. Of those, four were directed at public buses, three at bridges, and eight at trains.

Transit's lack of prevalence as a terrorist target in the United States, according to the MTI, is due in part to the more widespread public use of rail and buses in Asia, Latin America, and Europe. From the report:

Most of the attacks take place in countries in which train or bus transportation is either
the primary means of public transportation (e.g., in Israel) or, along with trains, a large
part of it, and in rural areas, the only public transportation.

This is far from the situation in the United States, where aviation is the primary method of long-haul transportation, and with the exception of high-density urban centers such as New York, Boston, and San Francisco, the automobile is the primary method of local transportation. Where train or bus transportation is extremely important, it becomes an obvious terrorist target. Conversely, where it is not so important, it may be a less likely target.

Even so, the MTI noted that transit remains in the sights of terrorist groups seeking "soft targets," buildings or elements of infrastructure that may not be as tightly guarded as government property but would carry a risk of significant casualties. Recent attacks on transit in London, Madrid, and Mumbai "were considered major terrorist successes," the report's authors warned. "Past success makes future attempts more likely."

Amtrak's Acela line carried 13.5 percent more riders last month than in March 2009. (Photo: Flickr/pgengler)

Every one of Amtrak's lines recorded an increase last month relative to 2009 figures, with the northeastern Acela line recording a 13.5 percent uptick. Acela is often referred to as the closest thing to high-speed rail on offer in America, thanks to its top achievable speed of 150 miles per hour.

During the past six months -- Amtrak measures performance in fiscal years, which typically begin in October -- five short-haul lines recorded double-digit ridership increases, including the northwestern Cascades route and the Lincoln, which connects St. Louis and Chicago.

Amtrak recently made a pitch for $446 million in new funding from Congress, including aid to help replace its older fleet of locomotives with more fuel-efficient models. If lawmakers agree to the rail network's request, General Electric's transport division stands to benefit from new business for its diesel-electric rail cars, thanks to a coordinated lobbying effort by the company and its main labor union.

In a statement hailing the record ridership, Amtrak President Joseph Boardman ascribed the increase in part to "a slowly improving economy and continued high fuel prices." The fuel-efficient fleet upgrade, he added, remains the system's "most urgent unfunded need."

Fixing a disputed provision in the jobs bill that President Obama signed into law yesterday -- as Senate Democratic leaders promised House transportation committee chairman Jim Oberstar (D-MN) following complaints by several members of his panel -- would involve the redistribution of $932 million in funding for two major federal road and rail programs.

The end result of the transfers would leave California with $192 million less than it had in the Senate-passed version of the jobs measure, while Texas would gain the most with an influx of more than $76 million, according to data released by Oberstar's committee earlier this week.

The $932 million in grants became an issue last month after the jobs bill, which extends the 2005 transportation law until 2011, cleared the Senate with language that also extended 2009-level earmarks for the two programs, known as Projects of Regional and National Significance (PRNS) and the National Corridor Infrastructure Improvement (NCIIP).

That extension of previous earmarks would result in 58 percent of the $932 million going to four states: Illinois, Louisiana, California, and Washington. After lawmakers from other states raised alarms about the distribution, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) vowed to Oberstar [PDF] that if the House would approve the jobs bill without changing the provision, the Senate would move as quickly as possible on a fix.

"Although my preference would be to amend this [jobs bill] to reflect these compromises today, any further delays in enacting a surface transportation extension are unacceptable," Oberstar said two weeks ago, urging colleagues to take the upper chamber at its word.

The House passed legislation earlier this week that would redirect the $932 million to all 50 states based on existing road-funding formulas. It is that shift that would take PRNS and NCIIP money from California, Illinois ($119 million), Louisiana ($43 million), and Washington ($39 million), as well as Oregon ($29 million) and Virginia ($12 million).

States that would gain under the fix include Texas, Ohio ($25 million), Florida ($47 million), Georgia ($31 million), and New York ($16 million). It remains unclear when the Senate will act on the change.