Congress Likely To Delay Transportation Bill To 2011

The US Congress is getting a reputation as the place where good ideas go to die. Although currently held by the Democratic Party, the real power lies with center-right Democrats who are generally skittish about significant change, and certainly wary of either spending money, finding new revenues for programs, or both.

We can see this in the health care and the climate change bill - but we can also see it in the discussion of the reauthorization of the Transportation Bill, due in 2009. In the House, Jim Oberstar has been pushing to produce a bill that would better fund public transit and shift the government's priorities away from roads and sprawl. Transportation for America has an analysis of his efforts here - it's a mixed bag so far.

But the most contentious aspect of all is the matter of how to fund the federal government's transportation obligations. The US highway trust fund has been on the verge of insolvency for a while now, dating back to the early Bush Administration. When then-Secretary of Transportation Norm Mineta proposed a gas tax increase to fix the problem, President George W. Bush said no, as Mineta recounted earlier this month:

In 2001, knowing the next highway reauthorization was set for 2003, we developed a six-year funding mechanism that called for a 2-cent-a-gallon gas tax increase in the first year, a 2-cent-a-gallon increase in the third year, and another 2-cent-a-gallon increase in the fifth year. As I recall, that would have been a $330 billion proposal and left us with a $7 billion unobligated trust fund balance after six years. We went to the Oval Office, and after we went through the entire presentation, President Bush takes a marker, circles the gas tax increases, and says, "Norm, I don't want any of those tax increases. Get those out."

So we went back and put a CPI inflator on the gas tax in the fifth year. Keep in mind that the gas tax had not been raised since 1993. We returned to the Oval Office, went through the presentation, and afterward President Bush said, "Norm, that's a tax increase. Get that out."

Bush may be gone, but his attitude now dominates a Democratic Congress. As Yonah Freemark noted over at The Transport Politic, there is no consensus on how to fund transportation, and Barbara Boxer suggests the most likely outcome is an 18-month extension of the existing transportation bill, which would push the issue out to beyond the 2010 midterm elections. To Freemark, the problem is that Congress isn't willing to face up to the revenue problem:

More importantly, no one in Congress is being frank about raising revenues to support transportation. Mr. Oberstar’s bill left the funding sections blank, and Mr. LaHood has been openly lobbying against any increase in the gas tax. Ms. Boxer’s comments today reaffirmed her opposition to the same and expressed her unwillingness to support a VMT system, which she called “too intrusive.” No one on the invited panel at the hearing provided serious alternatives to those two funding sources, nor did any senator, though everyone seems convinced that a major program expansion is necessary. Funds from the climate change bill, which might incorporate a carbon cap-and-trade system, may come into play, but those dollars are far off and uncommitted for now.

Mr. Oberstar has been adamant in his desire to push forward the next transportation bill now, but this hearing made clear that the Senate is not going to play along. Ms. Boxer is chair of the Committee on Environment and Public Works, and her position will effectively block Mr. Oberstar’s bill even if that legislation passes in the House. Without the support of the White House, Mr. Oberstar is loosing ground. His inability to pinpoint a stable funding source is similarly problematic.

What hasn’t been suggested, but that which I will continue to bring up, is a simple abandonment of the idea that transportation must be sponsored by its “users.” We are all beneficiaries of a strong transportation network, and filling the Trust Fund mostly with general fund sources is a viable and long-term solution that would require none of the shenanigans that currently deteriorate efforts to raise the gas tax or impose a VMT. Whether now or in 18 months, we’re going to need something better than today’s non-proposals from Ms. Boxer.

I wholly agree with these statements, and it is certainly time to provide general fund support for transportation projects. Infrastructure, especially mass transit infrastructure including high speed rail, is at the center of this nation's economic recovery effort and our 21st century prosperity. Unfortunately, Congress seems to have totally abandoned any interest in economic recovery or long-term planning, and is instead dominated by obsolete 20th century concerns about the politics of taxes and user fees.

Barbara Boxer's reluctance to propose revenue solutions, and her desire to kick the can down the curb, is part of a growing trend in her approach to policymaking that is much more risk-averse and centrist than we are used to seeing from the more liberal of our two senators. Facing re-election in 2010, Boxer appears to have concluded that she needs to play to an assumed political center, seeking bipartisanship (with James Inhofe? ha!) and avoiding anything resembling a tax increase for fear of how it would play with California voters.

These concerns are misplaced. Californians have shown they will support raising revenue for sustainable transportation solutions, as the November 2008 election made clear. Not just in the passage of Prop 1A, which after all was a bond, but in the passage of outright sales tax increases in Los Angeles, Santa Clara, Marin and Sonoma counties. Those counties have nearly 15 million residents, and over 67% of voters in those counties supported the concept Yonah Freemark described above, of asking everyone to subsidize mass transit, not just those who use it.

Boxer's unwillingness to lead is sadly being matched by President Barack Obama. Over the first six months of the Obama Administration a disturbing trend has made itself clear. Obama likes to talk a big game, and will make public statements promising a new era, broad reform, and an embrace of policy change. He then leaves all the details up to Congress, refusing to get involved in the nitty gritty of the negotiations. As a result Congress's natural tendency to either do nothing or do the wrong thing is asserted, and we get outcomes like an 18-month postponement.

How this affects HSR is unclear. High speed rail will be a part of the new Transportation Bill. How it will be funded remains totally unclear. Obama wants to see a long-term HSR program come out of Congress, but as with so many other aspects of his agenda, Obama is going to have to learn that if he wants Congress to do something, he is going to have to force the issue and make it happen himself.

Until Obama does, the US Congress will remain a graveyard for common sense and smart, proven, effective policy.

The Next Federal Surface Transportation Program

Rep. James Oberstar (D-MN) Rep. John Mica (R-FL) Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR) Rep. John Duncan Jr. (R-TN)

On Friday, chairman Rep. James Oberstar (D-MN) and ranking member Rep. John Mica (R-FL) of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure issued a press release and held a news conference on their blueprint for the next federal surface transportation program, described in a new committee report. They were joined by chairman Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR) and ranking member John Duncan Jr. (R-TN) of the subcommittee on Highways and Transit. The event represents the kick-off for drafting the next iteration of the surface transportation bill, which typically sets priorities and secures funding for public works projects for a period of 5-6 years. Traditionally, it has also been a vehicle for members of Congress to "bring home the bacon" to their districts. This time, Oberstar and his colleagues want to use the opportunity to move away from prescribing specific projects (aka earmark pork) and toward a meritocratic system in which USDOT is instructed to evaluate competing grant applications. Those will have to be integrated into six-year strategic plans developed by the department and its counterparts at the state level, with annual performance metrics for each major project or program of smaller ones. It remains to be seen if members of the full House and Senate will be prepared to support this new philosophy. In the hope that they will, the report details substantial reorganization objectives for USDOT such that it can execute evaluate programs and award grants according to legally binding procedures. For example, it calls for a new infrastructure bank within USDOT endowed with at least $50 billion for the six-year period that the new bill is supposed to cover. This money would be used to support strategic, sustainable investments in transportation systems, specifically High Speed Rail and (connecting) local transit. This would segregate public transportation funding from that reserved for highways, at least at the federal level. This new mechanism could essentially solve the federal component of funding California's HSR project. In addition, there would be a new Office of Project Expediting and also an Office of Livability, presumably charged with enforcing appropriate environmental mitigation for affected residents. Secr. of Transportation Ray LaHood would like to focus his department on executing oversight of stimulus-related projects. He therefore asked Rep. Oberstar to extend current arrangements for 18 months by plugging a growing hole of at least $13 billion in the Highway Trust fund. However, Oberstar and his colleagues are unwilling to wait because they have concluded that the current system is broken.

The report's authors claim that over the past 30 years, many states simply haven't stepped up to the plate to fund their 20% of highway projects, never mind the 50% required until recently for rail and transit projects. As a result, available federal funds were not fully utilized. Perhaps the unspoken fear is that with the 2010 midterms approaching and the 2012 presidential election after that, any delay would make it even more difficult to pass legislation for a root-and-branch reorganization of USDOT. Of course, much the same is true of health care reform, financial re-regulation etc. The President's domestic agenda is already full, yet transportation infrastructure is a high priority in Congress. The committee report calls for a total spending volume of $500 billion through 2015, of which 10% would go into the aforementioned infrastructure bank. Federal and state governments combined currently spend around $85 billion a year on transportation infrastructure, a sum the committee says is too small to maintain and expand the nation's aging systems and structures. It would like to see the number ramped up to $225 billion and then held at that level for the next 50 years. To fund the federal portion of this substantial expansion, the report calls for both federal and state gas taxes to be roughly doubled. Republicans in particular will presumably resist legislative efforts to implement that, though they may soon face a filibuster-proof Democratic majority in the US Senate. Note that raising gas taxes to help fund rail and transit infrastructure construction is reasonable in that it reduces the pressure to keep adding lane-miles highways which are more expensive per passenger-mile of capacity, require far more land and lock in the country's arguably excessive dependence on oil.

by Rafael

Obama's HSR Plan (Mostly) Lauded - But How To Pay For It?

Thursday's announcement by President Barack Obama of the HSR Strategic Plan got a lot of attention in the media and on the blogs - which is just what California's project needs at this time. Obama's high-profile leadership for HSR should help focus our state, especially those involved in the contentious debates over how to build the trains along the planned corridor, on the big picture and the need to move forward quickly and effectively in building the high speed trains that are so essential to our nation's future.

Yonah Freemark at The Transport Politic offered this assessment of the plan:

But I think the report’s basic outlines of the kinds of projects the federal government wants to fund with rail money are demonstrative of the administration’s seriousness in undertaking this project. By arguing that high-speed rail is most applicable for corridors between 100 and 600 miles in areas of moderate to high density, we can be assured that the government won’t be funding just any project with the limited funds available for rail. It’s good to know, in other words, that a line between El Paso and Phoenix isn’t going to get money over the connection between San Francisco and Los Angeles.

He also noted that a new National Rail Plan will be prepared and published in October. That plan may revise the list of HSR corridors, last updated in 2001:



This map includes such outdated concepts as an HSR corridor along the Coast Route from San Jose to LA via Salinas and SLO (not that I'd personally mind such a corridor, but it was rejected in the CHSRA's 2002 plan and isn't being considered for anything other than some upgrades to enable the Coast Daylight to operate) or defining Dallas to Tulsa as a vital HSR corridor but not Dallas-Houston.

One of the most common responses to Obama's announcement was the all important question of "how will we pay for it?" That's the question the LA Times tackled in yesterday's editorial:

High-speed rail networks might very well be the "smart transportation system" of the 21st century, as President Obama declared Thursday. The trouble is, we're using a very 20th century method to pay for them....

"Now, all of you know this is not some fanciful, pie-in-the-sky vision of the future. ... It's been happening for decades. The problem is, it's been happening elsewhere, not here," Obama said, referring to countries such as France, Japan, Spain and China that have impressive bullet-train networks. But there was something he failed to mention: With the exception of China, whose government can spend any way it likes, all of these countries impose steep taxes on gasoline. The taxes have the dual purpose of providing the funding to build public transit and encouraging people to ride it because they make driving prohibitively expensive. Gas taxes in the United States are minuscule in comparison.

Instead of raising the money to pay for his vision, Obama proposes to fund it with debt. So does the state of California, where voters last November approved nearly $10 billion in bonds for the San Diego-to-Sacramento train Obama aims to support. That's all well and good, except that the California train alone is expected to cost in excess of $40 billion. Obama's $13 billion over five years won't go far in building a national network that would cost hundreds of billions. So where's the rest of the money going to come from?

The LA Times is basically calling for a higher gas tax to be part of the upcoming transportation bill, and to fund passenger rail - including HSR - through that mechanism.

I strongly support that concept. I don't oppose using debt to build trains - long-term infrastructure projects are the best use of debt there is, and it's hard to make a case against spending $50 billion or so on a national HSR network when over $1 trillion has been spent to bail out well-connected Wall Street bankers - but we DO need a higher gas tax, and it ought to be used solely for improving mass transit, with passenger rail at the center.

A higher gas tax would also help provide long-term stable funding for high speed rail, just as the federal gas tax provided the funds to build out the Interstate Highway System (which took nearly 40 years to complete), instead of making HSR projects dependent on a highly unstable annual funding appropriation from the Congress. The moment Republicans take control of Congress or the White House back from the Democrats, which is a distinct possibility over the next 10 years, HSR funding would be in serious jeopardy.

President Obama is likely to tread very carefully and cautiously here. Despite the cries of "socialist!" from his right-wing opponents, Obama is a moderate Democrat who has tried hard to avoid alienating swing voters. His tax policies are designed to cut taxes for the lower and middle-class while raising them for the upper class. That's the right move for income taxes, but the moment he proposes a gas tax increase, he risks the possibility of giving fuel to the right-wing attacks and pissing off swing voters.

A higher gas tax is a very smart and necessary policy for this country. But it's also a political decision that the president is going to weigh with an eye to the 2012 election. I'm far from convinced Obama will support it, but it's something he ought to do.

Arnold Schwarzenegger on HSR; and an Unusual Poll

So, I don't quite know what to make of this poll, but I'll pass it along anyway. The San Francisco Examiner is reporting on a poll done by BW Research Partners. The poll is about HSR, but takes what I would consider something of an odd tack - asking if Californians would support HSR even if it meant limiting air travel to do so:

Would you support limiting flights to cities in California and having passengers use a high-speed-rail system to get to destinations in Central and Southern California?

Support: 56%
Oppose: 17%
Not Sure: 26%
No answer: 1%

Would you still support limiting flights if you knew that the high-speed rail would cost about the same as air travel, but would take 2½ hours to get to Southern California?

Yes: 79%
No: 8%
Not sure: 12%
No answer: 1%

The survey by BW Research Partnership, a public-opinion research firm, asked as many as 2,000 registered voters questions about how they would envision the future of the major airports in San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose.

Umm...OK. I'm not quite sure that the issue is "limiting flights", since the experience of HSR on major corridors (Madrid-Barcelona, or London-Paris) is that the travel market shifts and flights decline as a response to changing ridership patterns and not to legislative mandates. I'm not aware of any efforts to officially limit flights in order to help build HSR, so I really don't know what generated this poll. Nor do I know who paid for it.

It is worth noting that HSR will be integrated with air travel in California - at SFO, SJC, potentially PMD (Palmdale) ONT and SAN. SFO's administrators welcome high speed trains, and we're seeing similar support emerge among San Diego airport planners.

Still, the poll does show that at least in the SF Bay Area, Californians strongly support HSR even if it were to be framed as undermining air travel.

Public support as shown in this poll (for whatever it's worth) is bolstered by support from leading American politicians, including Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, as expressed on Meet the Press yesterday morning:

Schwarzenegger was joined on the Sunday morning show by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Pennsylvania Gov. Edward G. Rendell, who are part of a bipartisan coalition of elected officials pushing for increased infrastructure investment.

"Look, everyone gets stuck in traffic. There is no reason why we should get stuck in traffic," Schwarzenegger said on the show.

More than once during the interview, the three elected officials spoke of high-speed rail.

"This country desperately needs to build a high-speed rail passenger system," Rendell said, adding that other infrastructure projects also were of vital importance.

You can see some of Arnold's remarks on this, including his desire to use public-private partnerships to fund this (but also willing to consider a higher gas tax), here:



Of course, Arnold tends to play a governor on TV but not off screen. He is notorious for playing up his leadership when the cameras roll, but for not being willing to assert leadership within government for important projects or bills. If Arnold wants HSR to be built, he could for example ensure that the CHSRA gets the $29.1 million it needs to continue operations, or help produce a solution to the Transbay Terminal mess, or help resolve the dispute on the Peninsula. That's more valuable at this point for the HSR project than going on Meet the Press yet again to show how awesome he us.

Obama's Budget Plan and HSR

President Barack Obama has released the basic outline of his FY 2010 budget plan (which would actually go into effect on October 1, 2009) and it includes $5 billion for HSR over 5 years - or, $1 billion a year. Obviously that's not going to be enough to build any HSR projects around the country, but would maybe possibly provide a few drops in the bucket. As Yonah at the Transport Politic notes, the proposal "doesn’t appear to mark sea change in vision for U.S. mobility" but is subject to change in Congress.

The budget fight may well resemble the stimulus battle in some key respects, as moderate Democrats and the small handful of sort-of-moderate Republicans could unite to try and pare back some of the more ambitious moves Obama is proposing, including the attack on 30 years of neoliberal economic policy signaled by Obama's plans to start going after wealth through taxation.

A key issue is whether the budget requires 50 votes or 60 votes to pass - the absurd and undemocratic filibuster rule was what caused the weakening of the stimulus plan (despite the $8 billion for HSR), and if the budget is subject to the same 60 vote requirement, then the end product is likely to be significantly weaker than what Obama is proposing here.

Ultimately the real transportation policy battle may come when the transportation bill comes up for reauthorization later this year. A Congressional commission is calling for a higher gas tax and ultimately a vehicle miles traveled (VMT) tax, and while the Obama Administration backed off Ray LaHood's suggestions along those lines earlier this week, I suspect that may have been because they weren't yet ready to go there. We will see what happens later in the year.

Finally, it's great to have seen a lot of pushback against Republican HSR lies this week. It helped that Bobby Jindal made himself look ridiculous with his "Disneyland ride" comments - what he's actually wound up doing is inoculating HSR against that kind of criticism by implying HSR deniers think like Jindal does. Sort of a Sarah Palin "I can see Russia from my house!" moment. With Obama's approval ratings through the roof, and his administration finally showing signs of wanting to chart a truly new course in American politics, that creates the conditions to both grow and consolidate public support for high speed rail. There's a lot of opportunity here, but we'll have to push it through.

Note: I usually don't mind thread drift in the comments, but for now I'd ask folks who want to discuss the Peninsula HSR plan to keep it in yesterday's post for the time being, until I post again on the topic, which will likely be this weekend.

LaHood: Expect More HSR Funds; MTC Funding Debate

UPDATE: As reported by the Transbay Blog the MTC is planning to apply for the Transbay Terminal train box funding to come out of the $8 billion HSR stimulus and not from the general transit stimulus funds. Debate continues over funding the BART to OAK - in addition to the Transbay Blog article (which opposes funding BART to OAK out of stimulus money) see more at Living in the O, TransForm, and the Calitics version of this post. The original post begins here:

Some great news out of the US Department of Transportation:

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood today emphasized the administration's long-term commitment to expanding high-speed rail service in "five or six regions" of the country, not just with the $8 billion provided in the economic stimulus package President Obama signed into law last week, but also "in subsequent years a very substantial effort." Meeting with reporters earlier today, LaHood said that for Obama building high-speed rail networks is, "if not his No. 1 priority, certainly at the top of his list. What the president is saying with the $8 billion is this is the start to help begin high-speed rail projects." He added that the administration "is committed to finding the dollars to not only get them started but to finishing them in at least five parts of the country," although he declined to elaborate on where these projects might ultimately be built.

One of my lingering concerns about the Obama Administration has been that they might be tempted to claim victory with the $8 billion in HSR funding added to the stimulus and not follow up on that money, which as we know merely pays for some initial costs. But what Ray LaHood is saying is that in fact, the $8 billion in HSR stimulus really is intended as a signal to America that Obama is truly serious about building HSR.

This couldn't be better news for us in California, where we have long known that at least $15 billion in federal aid, spread out over 10 years, will be needed to build the SF-LA line. Unfortunately the news is tempered by the fact that the Obama Administration's support for HSR did not extend to mass transit as a whole. Here in California the state has decided to zero out the State Transit Assistance account, costing local agencies over $500 million in funding. The federal stimulus isn't nearly enough to make up the difference. And as the San Jose Mercury News reports, that's setting up a situation where HSR may be pit against local transit agencies:

The MTC meeting Wednesday in Oakland could turn contentious, as the current plan calls for allocating $75 million to help build the Transbay Terminal in San Francisco, which would serve as the final stopping point for a high-speed rail line and Caltrain, [NOTE: in fact the MTC now plans to get the train box money from the $8 billion HSR stimulus - see update at top of the post] and $70 million to build a BART spur to Oakland International Airport. Those two projects alone would take 43 percent of the $340 million headed to the area in stimulus funds for local transit.

Some want money for those new two projects scrapped or reduced — and redirected to cover the cost of paying for day-to-day transit needs.

But MTC officials counter that building the Transbay Terminal now will save millions of dollars in later costs, and combined with the $8 billion in stimulus funds set aside for high-speed rail could accelerate that program. California is a leading candidate to capture much of that money because voters in the fall approved a $10 billion bond measure to begin work on the line, which will someday extend from San Diego to San Francisco and Sacramento.

"Given that California is the only state to pass a bond to build a new high-speed line, we think we might be able to do some double-dipping there," said MTC executive director Steve Heminger. "We are going to spend the stimulus money fast. I can guarantee that."

I support using that money for the Transbay Terminal, although I'm less certain about whether BART to OAK is all that necessary; the AirBART buses work pretty well (I used them on numerous occasions when I was an undergrad at UC Berkeley, although that was 10 years ago).

But I really hate it when HSR pitted against other forms of transit. I have said it before and I will say it again - HSR and other mass transit need each other to be successful. It should not and must not be an either/or choice. I don't blame the MTC for being stuck in this position - that blame lies in Sacramento and Washington DC. But we transit advocates need to not fall out along modal lines.

I'd like to propose a solution, one that I don't even know is possible under state law but makes a ton of sense to me. The nine-county SF Bay Area region should implement its own gas tax, which will solely be used to fund public transit. I haven't penciled out the numbers so I don't know exactly what the tax amount should be, but it should be indexed to the price of gas, and not a fixed cent number.

This money would initially be used to backfill the loss of STA funds, and allow the federal stimulus money to go to new transit infrastructure such as Transbay Terminal or BART to OAK. Ultimately the STA funds must be restored by a statewide gas tax increase, but it is much more politically possible to implement a gas tax in the Bay Area first than to try and get the Central Valley and the Southern California exurbs to buy into this (they can be brought on board later, once the 2/3 rule is eliminated).

It's very difficult for folks living in the nine counties to evade the tax, with the possible exception of Gilroy residents who might drive to Hollister to fill up. Most folks will simply pay the increase rather than drive far out of their way to get a cheaper gallon of gas.

I'm not sure if this option has been explored by the MTC and the member counties, but it ought to be. It's a sensible solution that would not only help spare transit agencies from "Armageddon" but would itself be a long overdue policy shift that would give a real boost to transit efforts in the SF Bay Area.