Streetsblog Capitol Hill

In 1962, President John F. Kennedy called for a federal transit funding plan. Two years later, President Lyndon B. Johnson took baby steps toward starting that program, but Johnson’s true transportation legacy was signing the bill that created the Department of Transportation, bringing all modes under one roof.

Nixon oversaw the creation of Amtrak. Ford had a strong, personal role in rail restructuring when all the railroads were going bankrupt. Carter did deregulation and the first multi-modal surface transportation act. Reagan passed a gas tax increase. George H.W. Bush helped get IS-TEA passed and Clinton signed TEA-21, the biggest transportation bill in history (even adjusted for inflation).

What about George W. Bush? What about Obama? Presidents haven’t been as active in setting and guiding transportation policy in recent years. Neither our current president nor our most recent ex-president really made his mark on transportation at all. The University of Virginia’s Miller Center set out yesterday to figure out whether presidents still wield any power whatsoever in transportation policy discussions. To do so, the Center held a series of panel discussions of its own.

Obama has gone out on a limb in promoting several big transportation ideas, from high-speed rail to an infrastructure bank to a $50 billion job-creating infrastructure program — but none have come to fruition. Why is that?

There’s been a disconnect lately between Congress and the White House, said Emil Frankel of the Bipartisan Policy Center, a high-ranking DOT official under George W. Bush. President Obama has broken with tradition by refusing to submit a draft transportation bill to Congress. He just lays out his ideas and says, “There you are; go write a bill.”

Maybe that’s for the best, though. “If Obama were to lay something out, there’s a certain segment of the House that would just be against it,” said Marcia Hale, the president of Building America’s Future and a veteran of Democratic Party politics. Others agreed: Putting Obama’s name on an initiative is the best way to kill it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Since 1970, the National Environmental Protection Act has required federal agencies to consider the impacts of their projects on air, water, and soil pollution — but not on climate change.

Until recently, carbon dioxide, which causes global warning, wasn’t classified as a pollutant and so couldn’t be regulated under environmental laws. The EPA in 2009 asserted its power to regulate carbon emissions but hasn’t applied it to NEPA analyses for infrastructure – until now.

President Obama hasn’t made the announcement yet, but Bloomberg reported Friday that he “is preparing to tell all federal agencies for the first time that they should consider the impact on global warming before approving major projects, from pipelines to highways.”

There’s more – projects could also be evaluated according to resiliency in the face of climate change. Would the new infrastructure be destroyed if faced with flooding, drought, or other severe weather? Bloomberg reports that the White House is also “looking at” requiring these climate adaptability and resiliency reports for projects “with 25,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions or more per year, the equivalent of burning about 100 rail cars of coal.”

Does this mean no more highways?

The conservative National Review’s headline about the changes was, “Did Obama Just Block Keystone?” Columnist Stanley Kurtz speculated that Obama could publicly approve the Keystone XL pipeline and then let the new environmental review process rule it out.

Could the same go for highway projects?

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It has a nice ring to it: using oil and gas revenue to shift transportation off oil and gas dependence. President Obama announced a plan to do just that on Friday — but the details of his plan are disappointing if you want to see the conversation on clean transportation go beyond cars.

The Energy Security Trust would be funded with $2 billion in oil and gas revenues, in what the Washington Post called a “jujitsu” move – using oil and gas money to hasten the elimination of oil and gas as a transportation fuel.

This handy infographic from the Energy Department about what the money will fund shows just how narrowly defined the trust is. Light fuel tanks for natural gas, advanced vehicle batteries, cleaner biofuels, hydrogen fuel-cell technology. But as David Burwell of the Carnegie Endowment’s Climate Program notes, “it has the distinct sound — to use a Zen Buddhist metaphor — of one hand clapping.”

“Certainly, electric vehicles and advanced biofuels are a key tool in drastically reducing the 70 percent of total U.S. oil consumption devoted to transportation,” Burwell said. “However, it misses at least two additional key elements of any oil-back-out scheme — (1) more trip choices and (2) reducing the need to travel.”

Obama has shown an impressive resolve to reduce vehicle emissions but not much desire to reduce vehicle trips. While his transportation budgets have enabled some progress on rail and transit, and his infrastructure initiatives focus on maintenance instead of road expansion, his signature program – the increase in CAFE standards to 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025 – would do nothing to reduce traffic, create more transportation choices, or encourage walkable development.

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Did you notice the big white beard and jolly red cheeks on President Obama at the State of the Union the other night? He’s the new Santa Claus, giving out gifts the government can’t afford to greedy little kids everywhere.

That’s how House Speaker John Boehner sees the president’s latest proposal for infrastructure investment — $40 billion for maintenance, under a strict “fix it first” ethic, with no revenue stream attached to it.

“Trying to find a funding source to repair the nation’s infrastructure is still a big goal of mine,” Boehner told reporters yesterday. “And the president talked about infrastructure, but he didn’t talk about how to pay for it. It’s easy to go out there and be Santa Claus and talk about all these things you want to give away, but at some point, somebody’s got to pay the bill.”

This is exactly what happened on Valentine’s Day two years ago, when President Obama rolled out his six-year transportation budget proposal. The spending side of the ledger was enthusiastically filled in — but the revenue side? Crickets.

As we said at the time, bold and innovative infrastructure proposals are great but it doesn’t really help anything, in these lean times, to promise the moon and then offer nothing in the way of realistic funding.

Now, Boehner’s not blameless in all this. He says he’s looking for a funding source, but only if it rhymes with “soil shilling.” Foil filling? Oil drilling. That’s right. Otherwise, he’s only too happy to cut transportation spending by a third — and next time around, it’ll be an even bigger cut than that. It’s certainly disappointing that Congressional Democrats and the White House have been afraid to come out in favor of a gas tax hike, but it’s not as if Boehner’s been pushing for sensible revenue measures either.

Forty billion dollars for transportation maintenance is a worthy goal. It could hold at bay the calls for highway expansion and help the country get more out of the infrastructure we have, while saving ourselves bigger expenditures on replacement when poorly maintained infrastructure finally needs to go. It could even have big benefits for bicycling.

If we can’t find the money to pay for this, what will we find the money for? U.S. DOT’s plan for 3,000 new miles of highway?

In last night’s State of the Union address, President Obama launched a “Fix-It-First” program to repair aging infrastructure and put people to work.

The president even took an indirect jab at officials who would rather build new than fix existing infrastructure, saying, “I know you want these job-creating projects in your district; I’ve seen all those ribbon-cuttings.”

So, tonight, I propose a “Fix-It-First” program to put people to work as soon as possible on our most urgent repairs, like the nearly 70,000 structurally deficient bridges across the country.

Obama has proposed infrastructure investment many times before, and always with a heavy tilt toward repair and maintenance, but never such an explicit mandate to “fix it first.” By keeping existing transportation infrastructure in good condition, officials can save the public from the expense of unnecessary road expansion projects.

However, he did give a nod to some new infrastructure he’d like to see: notably, high-speed rail.

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If the U.S. federal bureaucracy includes Cabinet-level agencies dedicated to agriculture and “the interior,” why shouldn’t it have one dedicated to cities, which do so much of the heavy lifting for America’s economic productivity and innovation?

This is what urbanist Richard Florida proposed in an op-ed Sunday for the New York Daily News. He wants President Obama to create a new Cabinet-level Department of Cities.

It’s a nice idea, though I doubt Florida is doing himself any favors by minimizing the importance of the administration’s stated priorities for this term: immigration, gun control and climate change, all of which have enormous implications for cities.

Florida says a Department of Cities would weave together pieces of HUD and the Departments of Energy, Transportation, Education, Commerce and Interior. The concept is not unlike the inter-agency collaboration that HUD, DOT and EPA have been doing for the past several years, though it would be a quantum leap to go from being an unfunded program to being a Cabinet department.

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Barack Obama has been as supportive of transit, biking, and walking as any president, but one of his most transformative actions may not have been any law or funding measure so much as simply getting elected. There’s a compelling case to be made that Obama’s election in 2008 led to significant changes in how people commute in the greater D.C. area.

Since around the time Obama replaced George W. Bush in the White House, metro D.C. has seen a notable shift in car ownership. From 2005 to 2009, the District’s population grew by 15,862 people. Meanwhile, vehicle registrations fell by nearly 15,000. According to the Intelligent Cities Initiative [PDF], that results in about $127 million retained in the local economy each year.

In his book Walkable City, planner Jeff Speck hypothesizes that this change was a direct result of the Obama Administration arriving with a new staff who brought a new set of attitudes about cities and transit. “By my estimate, this all occurred on January 20, 2009 when 15,000 Bushies were replaced by 30,000 Obamans,” Speck wrote. “Many Bush staffers, as a point of pride, lived ‘beyond the beltway’ in red-state Virginia.”

The change in Washington since Obama’s election has been dramatic enough that last week the New York Times took note of “a trendy turn in Obama’s town.” Reporter Rachel A. Swarns bounces around some the hottest joints in the city, from H Street’s Boundary Road to the U Street Music Hall — all of which hosted inaugural celebration parties — and notes, “None of these places existed before 2008.”

She acknowledges, “The city’s population boom and heightened hipness quotient cannot be directly attributed to Mr. Obama’s appeal among younger voters,” but certainly the people who have moved to the D.C. area to work in his administration are a different breed than those who came to work under Bush. They live and move differently, and they appear to have made a mark on the city’s urban character — more urban, less car-bound.

That would help explain why urban homes in the Washington area have retained their values much better than those in the distant suburbs.

We can only wonder what D.C. would look like today if John McCain had won instead.

The networks were busy tripping over themselves trying to point out all the “firsts” during yesterday’s inauguration ceremonies. But when Barack and Michelle Obama stepped out of the presidential motorcade to greet well wishers on Pennsylvania Avenue, they missed a huge one: Obama is now the first U.S. president to walk down a bike lane during his inauguration.

The center-median, two-way bicycle lane down Pennsylvania was implemented by DDOT back in summer 2010, so this is the first inauguration to feature the new look. Check out this clip from ABC News that shows the president stepping out of his limo and almost right on top of a bike stencil…

We’ve done some Streetfilms featuring some great bicycling from the capital.  Check out this Streetfilm on DC’s Capital BikeShare and this one from the 2011 National Bike Summit, which features many scenes of the Pennsylvania Ave bike lane in action.

President Obama is pressing for infrastructure investment again as part of the fiscal cliff negotiations. The president kicked off talks calling for an end to the debt ceiling, the extension of middle-class tax cuts, and $50 billion in infrastructure spending — a proposal that first arose last year as part of his ultimately unsuccessful American Jobs Act.

The Wall Street Journal called the President’s proposals “a particularly expansive version of the White House’s wish list” and “a potential starting point for negotiations.”

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) was predictably opposed to the spending package, but the White House has held firm so far. National Economic Council Director Gene Sperling defended the seriousness of the proposal on a political talk show, Bloomberg News reports. “Those type of measures need to be part of” a deal, he said.

The Christian Science Monitor wrote that the stimulus spending was likely meant to counteract whatever economy-depressing effects might result from the most contentious portion of the deal: the President’s plans to let Bush-era tax breaks expire for those making more than $250,000 annually.

It’s not clear how the funding in the President’s proposal would be divvied up, but when Obama last proposed a $50 billion infrastructure package, it included $9 billion for transit and $4 billion for high-speed rail, as well as funding for the TIGER program. More than half would have gone to roads.

Then as now, it was difficult to tell whether the road funding would fuel sprawl. While the White House said the funding would have gone to existing infrastructure that receives a “D” grade for disrepair from the American Society of Civil Engineers, Obama touted the proposal by visiting the site of a road-widening mega-project, Cincinnati’s Brent Spence Bridge.