Streetsblog Capitol Hill

The House Ways and Means committee has just passed a bill that would kick transit out of the highway trust fund, casting aside a 30-year history of providing a dedicated funding source for federal transit programs. Transit instead would be funded by a transfer from the general fund, which would have to be offset by cuts elsewhere to avoid raising the deficit. As US PIRG’s Dan Smith said yesterday, this is like saying that transit funding will come from the Tooth Fairy.

House Ways & Means' Dave Camp (R-MI) and Sander Levin (D-MI) do not see eye to eye on funding transit. Photo: Zimbio

The attack on transit has drawn opposition from an unprecedentedly broad coalition of over 600 groups, including many that do not often find themselves on the same side of an issue. Opponents of the bill include noted transit advocates APTA and T4America, and traditionally pro-highway groups such as AASHTO and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

The conservative Club for Growth has even gone so far as to make the entire House transportation package a key vote, meaning members will be rewarded for opposing the bill. Rep. John Campbell has already said he has changed his position on the package, and Rep. Jim McDermott (D-WA) laughed at the prospect of getting a positive rating from Club for Growth for “the first time in a while.”

An amendment proposed by Rep. Earl Blumenauer, which would have removed the provision altering transit’s revenue source, was defeated along party lines during mark up this morning. However, two Republicans — Erik Paulsen of Minnesota and Vern Buchanan of Florida — broke ranks with their party and voted against the underlying bill. The bill passed anyway by a vote of 20-17.

Despite repeated attempts by Republicans to present the bill as placing transit funding on surer footing, the bill drew vocal opposition from Democrats such as ranking member Sander Levin, who said it “undermines the very structure of the Highway Trust Fund.” Blumenauer said the bill relied on “fantasy accounting” to justify a $40 billion transfer from the general fund to cover transit, and McDermott bemoaned the lack of long-term thinking behind the bill.

Rep. Charlie Rangel of New York even asked Chairman Dave Camp if there was a precedent for the Ways and Means committee to demand a complete restart of transportation authorization efforts. When informed that there was not, Rangel responded, “Well, you can be a leader, then.”

The letter from coalition members opposing the Ways and Means bill is after the jump.

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While their colleagues in the House were debating more than 80 amendments to a transportation bill, members of the Senate Banking Committee were quietly passing their two-year transit bill with — get this — unanimous bipartisan support. The bill includes some reforms — such as allowing federal funds to be spent on transit operations — that transit advocates have been pushing for.

Senate Banking Committee Chair Tim Johnson (D-SD) has joined Barbara Boxer in passing a bipartisan transportation bill. Image: ABC News

The Senate has so far reached bipartisan agreement on two out of three portions of their two-year bill. The only remaining title to be approved, the Finance Committee’s portion, will be taken up shortly. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid intends to take the entire transportation package to the Senate floor on February 13.

The Senate bill’s progress draws a stark contrast with the legislative efforts underway in the House. The House bill has also moved forward at an aggressive pace, but it has looked worse and worse at every step. The most recent revelation, that the bill’s financing component would potentially eviscerate dedicated funding for transit, is only the latest in a long line of attacks on walking, biking, and transit. U.S. Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood told Politico earlier today, “It’s the worst transportation bill I’ve ever seen during 35 years of public service.” LaHood also gave credit to the Senate Environment & Public Works committee for legislating in good faith:

They get it. They passed a bipartisan bill with no dissenting votes in their committee. Because they worked together, and they really tried to put together a bill that reflects the transportation values of the senators… That’s not what happened in the House. Look, this is obviously a one-man show in the House.

LaHood was singling out John Mica, chairman of the House Transportation Committee, but the real star of the show may be Speaker John Boehner. With each successive piece of legislation, Boehner has forced his party and his chamber farther and farther away from the long-standing precedent of bipartisan transportation bills. With a highway-centric, drilling-heavy, transit-averse, anti-bike/ped, Keystone-pipeline-linked bill all but doomed to fail in the Senate, Boehner has reduced the reauthorization debate to a crude political tool.

“I used to rail against the Senate,” said Rep. Corrine Brown at today’s House markup (which, at the time of this writing, has just entered its second recess of the day). “But now I thank God for the Senate.”

In a move that should dispel any remaining thoughts that the House transportation bill [PDF] will ever be signed into law, the Ways and Means Committee announced today that they will try to forbid gas tax revenue from funding transit.

House Ways and Means chair Dave Camp (R-MI) and Speaker John Boehner. Photo: Talking Points Memo

The Ways & Means bill [PDF] would funnel all gas tax revenue toward road programs, redirecting billions of dollars per year away from transit, which for decades has received about 20 percent of fuel tax receipts. Instead, the House GOP wants transit funding to come entirely from the general fund, pitting transit against all other government spending. To offset that spending, $40 billion would have to be cut from the rest of the federal budget.

Essentially, the House GOP is holding transit hostage to achieve budget cuts elsewhere — and they don’t seem to care if the hostage dies. They will also be tossing aside a precedent set during the Reagan administration, one that has enjoyed bipartisan support through several transportation bills, including the 2005 law, known as SAFETEA-LU, which was passed by a Republican president and Republican Congress.

Dan Smith of USPIRG put it like this:

The House Ways and Means Bill stops just short of defunding America’s public transit system. Instead it says that the real money with a funding source will all go to highways, while the tooth fairy will pay for transit. For Big Oil and the highway lobby, this is a dream, but it’s a nightmare for America’s transportation future.

In keeping with the secretive nature of the current House’s transportation reauthorization process, the announcement comes just one day before Ways and Means will mark up the bill. There is even less time to protect transit funding in the House bill than there was to protect bike/ped programs in today’s T&I markup.

All eyes are on the House side of Capitol Hill today in anticipation of the Republicans’ grand unveiling of their American Energy & Infrastructure Jobs Act at 3:00 p.m. But last night, some enduring questions about the Senate’s transportation bill finally got some answers. Senators Tim Johnson and Richard Shelby, respectively the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Banking Committee, released a summary of the Federal Public Transportation Act of 2012, providing a preliminary guide to how the Senate will treat transit [PDF].

Banking Committee Chair Tim Johnson (D-SD) and Ranking Member Richard Shelby (R-AL). Photo: LAT

Johnson and Shelby’s bill will serve as the transit component of the Senate’s two-year reauthorization bill, MAP-21, which passed the Environment and Public Works Committee with bipartisan support last month.

In one significant policy shift, the bill would enable transit authorities to use federal funds to pay for some of their operating expenses during “periods of high unemployment.” Generally, use of federal transit funds is restricted exclusively to system expansion and maintenance, but transit agencies across the country are slashing service, raising fares and laying off workers due to the effects of the economic downturn. This bill would offer them some much-needed relief.

The bill reauthorizes close to $21 billion in transit funding over two years, protecting many popular programs and expanding new ones. The reception so far has been generally positive. Jesse Prentice-Dunn of the Sierra Club told Streetsblog that he is “encouraged” and that “the Banking Committee title appears to be a step forward for transit.”

Among the more encouraging points listed in the summary, the new bill:

• Protects funding to the Job Access and Reverse Commute (JARC) program, which has been a priority since Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign.
• Creates a new pilot program to support transit-oriented development with planning grants.
• Streamlines the New Starts program, eliminating duplicative steps and allowing smaller projects ($100 million or less) to complete an expedited review process.
• Expands the Rail Modernization program to include “high-intensity bus” networks, renaming it the State of Good Repair Grant program.

One aspect of the State of Good Repair program would reduce the incentive for states to overbuild carpool lanes. When calculating the size of a high-intensity bus network, “the new proposal no longer recognizes highway high occupancy vehicle lanes as eligible… if they are not reserved for the sole use of public transportation vehicles.” This does not forbid SOGR grants from being used on HOV lanes, but it keeps HOV-heavy bus systems from looking larger on paper than they are in real life, and thereby grabbing a disproportionate share of transit funds for what is essentially a highway project.

The bill is also light on the program consolidation that had been so prevalent in the House and Senate’s highway bills. Two programs aimed at improving mobility for senior citizens and the disabled will be merged, but it does not appear that there will be a corresponding cut to the programs’ funding.

The bill will be marked up in committee on Thursday at 10 a.m.

As Congress prepares to reconvene and take up the payroll tax cut extension yet again, a movement is forming to restore the transit commuter tax benefit to 2011 levels.

Commuters in New York's Hudson Valley could lose out on $1400 in annual pre-tax benefits if the transit tax break stays at its current level. Photo: railpictures.net

Transit advocates across America were disheartened when Congress failed to maintain parity between the transit and parking pre-tax commuting benefits last month. On New Year’s Day, the maximum monthly pretax benefit fell from $230 to $125 for transit commuters, while motorists actually saw a slight increase in their parking benefits, from $230 to $240. (As The Sierra Club pointed out today, things used to be even more lopsided.) But members of the House and Senate have now indicated that a restoration is more than just possible, it could even be probable.

Rep. Richard Neal told Politico on Tuesday that a retroactive extension of 2011 tax policies is “likely,” and a staffer said today that “Nearly as often as extenders have been taken up in a calendar year, they have also been taken up retroactively.”

They won’t have to wait long for their first opportunity to prove it. In 54 days, the payroll tax cut extension expires, and Senator Charles Schumer and others intend to reinsert the commuter tax break at its 2011 level once it is reopened for debate. Speaking today in Staten Island, Sen. Schumer said he hoped to make the tax break permanent, and defended its inclusion in a tax cut extender bill, saying “it fits in the theme of a middle-class tax break.”

Schumer also said he hoped to make the tax break retroactive to January 1, but that could be difficult. It is true that precedents exist for retroactive tax cuts — there were plenty of retroactive cuts passed in 2010, including extensions of the Bush cuts to biofuel, payroll, and estate taxes – but it’s hard to un-buy a transit pass you’ve already purchased for January and started using.

“You can’t make it retroactive, but you can make it proactive,” explains Cathy Connor, Manager of Government Relations at Parsons Brinckerhoff. “January’s gone, and unless Congress passes the extender the day they come back, they can’t do February either. But it could still be good for March through December,” if not longer.

As for the benefit’s odds of being pro-rated for 2012 at all, Connor told Streetsblog, that depends on whether or not it becomes a “victim of the vehicle,” as it was in December. “There seems to be a lot of support in congress for it. If they decide to do a tax extender bill with just the payroll tax and unemployment, then that’s that. But if they open it up and start making it a more robust bill, this is a very meritorious provision that there’s a lot of support for.”

Before the Iowa caucuses, we wrote briefly about the candidates’ positions on transportation, but we’d missed this tidbit. (Thanks to an anonymous reader for bringing it to our attention.)

In this video from 2009, Ron Paul responds to a supporter’s angst about light rail – he wants to oppose anything that was built with government money but it’s just so darn useful! Paul’s response is nuanced and quite refreshing (if also detached from political reality).

After declaring that he’s never been on the DC metro and doesn’t plan to ever use it, Paul muses about what would have happened if there had never been “government interference” in transportation:

First, if you didn’t have government subsidized highways, at least at the federal level – and have all these wonderful superhighways sailing from city to city and downtown – there would have been a greater incentive for the market to develop transits, trains going back and forth. Before the government got involved, before Penn Central and these other railroads were destroyed by regulations and union wages and featherbedding, we did have private transportation. By subsidizing highways and destroying mass transit, we ended up with this monstrosity.

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Yesterday, we started our year-end 2011 round-up. We lamented transit cuts in places where transit is more important than ever, cheered the successful ballot initiatives that will fund transportation lifelines, took a moment to explore the nuances of some difficult issues, and called out Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin for some hare-brained ideas about the best way to spend money.

Now we continue with the second installment: What cities shone a little brighter and what cities lost their luster?

Let’s start with the good.

Cities That Led the Way: Bike-share caught on in 2011 like never before. New York City announced a system to dwarf all others, complete with 10,000 bikes. Boston had a great first season. DC and Arlington expanded Capital Bikeshare. Chicago got a TIGER grant to go full-tilt on its system. And bike-share is popping up in places you wouldn’t necessarily expect it – most recently, in Chattanooga, Tennessee. All those cities deserve credit for investing in active transportation options for their residents.

Minneapolis took the Greenway to a more sustainable future. Photo: Micah Taylor / Flickr

Meanwhile, in the DC area, suburban retrofits in White Flint and Tysons Corner started transforming these into urban, transit-rich communities with vibrant daytime and nighttime populations.

And Salt Lake City showed the country how to solve some of the most vexing geographic, political, cultural, and ecological challenges of urbanism. The city got behind a set of growth principles that champion walkability, density, transit options, and land conservation. The city’s new, sustainable developments are wildly popular and incredibly successful at encouraging active transportation.

But it was Minneapolis that stole our hearts this year. The city rocketed to the top of the Bike-Friendliness charts with its Nice Ride bike-share system and its beloved Midtown Greenway, which transformed an old industrial railroad trench into a major cyclist thoroughfare connecting key parts of the city. And that’s not all – Minneapolis has gone through the whole complete streets shopping list, from road diets to bike parking to improved crossings to bike boulevards.

Perhaps even more significantly, the Twin Cities aren’t just tacking some nice cycling amenities onto an otherwise roads-heavy transportation program. They’re actually divesting from road infrastructure, tabling 14 planned highway expansions and improving transit options instead. They’re maximizing existing highways by adding bus lanes and priced shoulder lanes, and they’re investing in transit-oriented development. As one city transportation planner said, “We couldn’t keep going on acting as if we were going to get money to build our way out of congestion.”

Cities That Lagged Behind: We at Streetsblog aren’t shy about calling out state leaders who make bad decisions in favor of sprawl and against smart transportation options. We talked about some of those yesterday (we’re looking at you, Scott Walker). But sometimes it’s not the state but the cities themselves that have a special knack for making bad decisions. And this was a big year for it.

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The Senate has voted to extend the payroll tax cuts – for two months – but didn’t act on a measure to maintain parity between the commuter parking and transit benefits. This means transit riders will get their pre-tax benefits cut in half come January 1st, while those who drive to work will see a small jump in how much the government subsidizes their parking expenses. As Steve Davis of Transportation For America puts it (emphasis his):

The transit benefits train has left the station. Photo: i35south

With this inaction in both chambers of Congress, the federal government is sending a message loud and clear to commuters: they’d like you to start driving to work.

This is disappointing news to many of us, no doubt.

Many in Congress don’t seem to understand what it’s like to be a daily commuter trying to get from A to B each day without breaking the bank. Transportation is the second largest household expense for many households, eating up an even larger proportional share of income for the poorest Americans. The millions who depend on transit to get to work each day shouldn’t have to pay more, and certainly not for something that also saves us energy, reduces congestion and emissions, and uses less oil.

T4America does remind us that there is still hope that the benefits will be increased within the first few months of 2012. But, for now, it’s a disheartening moment for transit users. And those who need transit the most are sure to be the ones who suffer the most as a result.

The Senate bill also requires President Obama’s decision on the Keystone XL Pipeline within 60 days. The House will vote very soon on whether they’ll go along with the Senate’s version or drag this political theater out a little longer. (Our bets are on political theater.)

In October, Reps. Russ Carnahan (D-MO) and Steve LaTourette (R-OH) introduced a bill to allow transit agencies to use federal money to hire bus drivers and pay other operating expenses.

Without federal help, more buses could go out of service -- and the ones still circulating could charge more. Photo: Gothamist

Last week, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), along with Sens. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) introduced a Senate companion to the bill [PDF]. Like the House version, it conditions the assistance on the size of a metro area and the robustness of its transit service. Smaller metros would be able to use half their federal funds for operating costs, but that proportion drops to 45 percent for communities of 500,000 to a million people, and 40 percent for populations over a million.

The bill also pegs the relief to the severity of the economic crisis in any given community. If the unemployment rate dips or the price of gas holds steady, it’s bye-bye federal operating help. At least one of these conditions need to be met for the assistance to be available: The metro area’s unemployment rate has to be at or above 7 percent or the national average price of gas has to have increased by more than 10 percent over the same quarter the previous year.

Conditioning the transit assistance on high gas prices isn’t just about helping drivers temporarily shift modes to save money (only to shift back when gas prices are back down). High gas prices present an enormous cost burden to transit agencies.

“The fuel price trigger was really the original rationale for this emergency assistance,” said Sarah Kline of Reconnecting America. “This concept of crisis assistance arose first in the 2007-2008 timeframe, before the economy collapsed. The reason is because fuel prices went crazy, and when fuel goes up, transit agencies’ costs go up.”

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Last summer, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey raised EZPass tolls from $8 to cross a bridge into the city during peak hours to $9.50, with planned increases to $12.50 in a few years (cash tolls are increasing somewhat more). Tolls for five-axle trucks will rise as high as $125.

Photo: Office of Senator Frank Lautenberg

The hikes marked the first time the Port Authority had raised tolls since 2008, and the only the third since 2001. Nevertheless, congressional representatives from the area are making noise. Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) and Rep. Michael Grimm (R-NY) teamed up today to announce a bill to increase federal oversight of road tolls.

The “Commuter Protection Act” would restore U.S. DOT’s power to determine whether tolls on interstate bridges and tunnels are “just and reasonable” and set lower maximum tolls if they deem it necessary. The agency had that power until 1987, when it was revoked during an era of deregulation. The bill would also require the Government Accountability Office to produce a report on the “transparency and accountability” of how toll rates are set.

“When it costs $12 to drive your car across a bridge in America [the rate for cash tolls], something is wrong,” Lautenberg said in a statement. “Commuters are suffering.”

Lautenberg has a strong pro-transit record, but in this case he may end up hurting transit by taking up the cause of constituents who drive into the city. For one thing, the tolls have led to a four percent drop in traffic across the Port Authority crossings, which is good news for bus speeds. Meanwhile, ridership on PATH trains has risen 3.7 percent.

It’s still an open question whether the final draft of the bill will consider transit a “just and reasonable” purpose for tolling funds. There is currently no legal definition of “just and reasonable.” Even if transit is covered, however, the bill could still do damage.

If the U.S. DOT were to actually intervene with the Port Authority, for instance, there would probably be less funding available for transit. Already, the Port Authority scrapped plans to build a much-needed new bus depot in Manhattan because Governors Chris Christie and Andrew Cuomo scaled back the latest round of toll hikes.

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