Streetsblog New York City

The answer to that question is: Probably not. Reps. Daniel Lipinski, a Democrat from Chicago, and Michael Grimm, a Republican representing Staten Island and a little slice of Brooklyn, announced their new transit-focused Congressional caucus just last week, and this week the House has been in recess.

Rep. Lipinski, pictured here between Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood and Illinois DOT Secretary Gary Hannig on a Metra train, has formed a Public Transportation Caucus in the House. Photo: CREATE

But according to Lipinski spokesperson Guy Tridgell, there has been interest from other lawmakers, and Lipinski and Grimm will be reaching out to colleagues in the coming weeks to recruit more membership.

Rep. Lipinski is well-known for his support for transit and complete streets. He fought hard against the GOP effort to strip transit out of the Highway Trust Fund in 2012 and has been pushing hard to get more frequent service on the Metra commuter line that runs through his district. Lipinski is also a big believer in federal support for bike and pedestrian projects like Safe Routes to School.

Lipinski is a member of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee but doesn’t serve on the Highways and Transit Subcommittee, serving instead on both Railroads and Aviation.

Congressional caucuses don’t have any formal duties, but Tridgell said the Public Transportation Caucus will be an active one. Aside from engaging on any issue that arises in the House, Tridgell said it will focus on state of good repair for transit systems. Though caucuses don’t hold hearings like committees do, Tridgell said the Public Transportation Caucus would gather input from stakeholders, including riders, employers, transit operators, business community.

Rep. Grimm is one of a small handful of Republicans to publicly support transit. He represents the only borough of New York not connected to the city’s subway system. By New York standards, Staten Island is fairly car-dependent, but by the standards of most of the country’s Republican districts, it’s a transit paradise.

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MAP-21 pushed U.S. DOT to get serious about freight: In recent months, the agency has announced the creation of a national freight policy, a National Freight Advisory Committee, and a Freight Policy Council, as mandated by the bill.

Will the new House panel on freight focus on rail or just highways? Photo: Emotional Intelligence

Now the House Transportation Committee is getting in on the action. The committee announced today that Rep. John Duncan (R-TN), vice-chair of the full committee, and Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) will lead a new “Panel on 21st Century Freight Transportation.” The panel, being multi-modal in scope, will bring together representatives who serve on the various modal subcommittees.

“In the past, the conversation about freight transportation and goods movement has focused only on one specific mode of transportation or another,” said Rep. Duncan in a statement.  “But freight doesn’t move just by ship, or by rail car, or by truck. Chances are the goods you buy at the store got on the shelves thanks to all those methods of transportation. Bottlenecks during any leg of that journey from the manufacturer to the market drive up costs. That’s why improving the flow of freight across all modes of transportation is so critical to a healthy economy.”

“The movement of freight is one of the most critical transportation questions for the 21st century,” added Rep. Nadler. “How we prioritize, invest, and develop freight infrastructure will have considerable bearing on how our economy grows, how we compete on the world stage, and how we create a sustainable and environmentally clean future at home.”

A focus on multi-modalism and environmental sustainability would be a welcome addition to the conversation. Though a national conversation about freight movement is long overdue, it’s gotten a bumpy start: Advocates are nervous that the new freight councils and committees could repeat the errors of the past and focus too much on highways. It didn’t help when Sec. Ray LaHood suggested building 3,000 miles of new roads as part of the freight plan.

The House panel will serve for six months, beginning with its first hearing on April 24.

Yes, traffic fatalities have been (mostly) going down, but as long as cyclist and pedestrian fatalities keep going up, we can’t truly say our streets and roads are getting safer. That’s the message from 68 members of Congress to one pretty receptive audience: Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood.

Lawmakers say states should be making sure their streets are safe for everyone. Photo: Tiffany Robinson, Ped-Bike Images

In their letter to LaHood, sent on Saturday, the 68 lawmakers – including nine Republicans — note that between 2010 and 2011, driving got safer: Roadway fatalities dropped 2 percent overall; 4.6 percent for occupants of cars and light trucks. But bicyclist fatalists went up 9 percent and pedestrian deaths rose 3 percent in the same time period.

LaHood announced last month that U.S. DOT would be holding two bike safety summits this year. But the lawmakers want the agency to go further. And they didn’t just ask in vague terms for increased attention to safety. They got specific: U.S. DOT should create “separate performance measures for non-motorized and motorized users.”

If it sounds like they might have gotten some ideas from people deep inside the bike advocacy world, well, you got that right. Hundreds of Bike Summit participants made this their key “ask” earlier this month when they visited their representatives on Capitol Hill. Apparently their representatives listened.

SAFETEA-LU, passed in 2005, required states to set goals for reducing overall fatalities but included no specific reporting requirements for biking and walking. Without state attention, vulnerable road users have become even more vulnerable, with fatalities increasing both in real numbers and as a percentage of roadway fatalities, according to Caron Whitaker of the League of American Bicyclists.

One-third of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee signed on to the letter, giving DOT a good sense how the committee wants them to interpret MAP-21. “When Congress set performance measures areas, they were saying, ‘These are the things we are going to judge you on,’” Whitaker said in an email. “If bicyclists and pedestrians aren’t included in the performance measures, we risk being left behind.”

“In over half of all states, more than 10 percent of roadway fatalities are bicyclists and pedestrians but yet only seven states report investing in any bicycling and walking safety projects,” she added.

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The Republican co-chair of the Congressional Bicycling Caucus is getting a leadership position with some real gravitas. Rep. Tom Petri (R-WI) was just named the new chair of the Highways and Transit Subcommittee in the House — the epicenter of the chamber’s surface transportation legislation.

Tom Petri received the Wisconsin Bike Federation's Hero Award last year. Photo: Wendy Soucie/Lodi Valley News

The list of Republicans who support active transportation is pretty short these days, and Petri is at the top of it. He’s a frequent speaker at the National Bike Summit and similar gatherings. I first encountered him at a workshop of Dutch cycling experts who were advising DC and other U.S. cities on how to improve their infrastructure. At that meeting, Petri declared “a bipartisan war against couch potatoes here in the United States.”

Last month, I wrote about Republicans who might reach across the aisle to co-sponsor legislation that benefits transit and safer streets, and everyone I spoke to mentioned Petri’s name — but some were cynical. Sure, Petri’s great, the thinking went, but he’s ignored by his party. You can get his name on a good bill but it won’t carry much weight with the GOP.

That could change now that he’s subcommittee chair.

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Who will be looking out for the interests of transit riders in the 113th Congress? It’s easy to figure it out, said Cap’n Transit over the weekend: Just check whether they have an R or a D next to their names.

The photo on the main page of the website of Rep. Sam Graves -- the T&I Committee Republican with the most urban transportation profile -- shows him in a field of beans on a Missouri farm.

The Cap’n ranked House Transportation Committee members, from both parties, by the percentage of car-free households in their district and the percentage of people who primarily commute by transit, according to Census numbers. His results weren’t shocking, given what we know about the differences between urban and rural voting patterns. But they were eye-opening all the same.

The committee Republican with the highest proportion of car-free and transit-using constituents was Sam Graves of Missouri. His district comprises the entire northern section of the state, including some suburbs of Kansas City and then north and east into the hinterlands. That is the T&I Republican district with the most urban transportation profile.

Compare that with New York City Democrat Jerrold Nadler: 64 percent of his constituents are car-free, with 54 percent of them riding transit. My non-voting delegate here in DC, Eleanor Holmes Norton, presides over a city where 26 percent of residents don’t have a car and 38 percent ride transit.

Sure, there are plenty of rural and suburban Democrats, and those numbers aren’t a clear indicator of how someone will vote. Peter DeFazio of Oregon is a strong voice for transit, and 97 percent of his constituents have a car, with just 2 percent commuting primarily by transit.

The five T&I Committee Republicans with the most car-free and transit-using constituents.

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Perhaps Rep. John Mica’s most remarkable legacy as chair of the House Transportation Committee is the single-minded focus he gave to attacking Amtrak. Under the guise of wanting it to succeed, Mica has repeatedly excoriated it as a “Soviet-style monopoly” and a waste of taxpayer dollars. He’s tried to sell off its only profitable line, the Northeast Corridor, and made a mockery of every aspect of its operations, right down to food service. If there’s anything he got more glee out of criticizing, it was the Transportation Security Administration.

Last year, Mica took a field trip to McDonalds to berate Amtrak for losing money on food service. Photo: WUSA

Mica’s no longer chair of the Transportation Committee. But as of this morning, he’s got a new post from which he can take shots at these agencies.

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, where Mica was already a senior member, is consolidating two subcommittees into a new Subcommittee on Government Operations. That new subcommittee will oversee the TSA and Amtrak. And Mica will be the chair.

In other committee news, 10 new Republicans and 10 new Democrats are joining the T&I committee. Democrats gained one seat on the 60-member committee. New Chair Bill Shuster has a track record of taking new members under his wing to bring them up to speed on the intricacies of transportation policy. No doubt, many lobbyists will take it upon themselves to do the same.

In the Senate, Maryland Democrat Barbara Mikulski will take over the chair of the powerful Appropriations Committee. Media reports about her leadership of that committee center around her gender — she’ll be the first woman to chair it — but more notable to transportation reformers is the fact that she’s a vocal supporter of transit. She’s fought for federal funding of all the transit systems under her jurisdiction as well as Amtrak. After the red line Metro crash in 2009, she sponsored legislation to bring federal safety oversight to local systems, a provision that was included in MAP-21. She also favors parity between commuter tax benefits for drivers and transit riders, which was included in the fiscal cliff deal that was approved late on New Years Day.

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Happy New Year, transit riders! Thanks to some shrewd maneuvering on the part of some U.S. Senators, transit commuters will be able to claim as much in tax benefits as car commuters do in 2013.

Transit commuters could have a little extra change in their pockets in 2013, thanks to the fiscal cliff deal. Photo: Treehugger

Slipped into the fiscal cliff deal approved by the House of Representatives last night was a provision to boost the tax incentive to commute by transit. The commuting costs that straphangers could claim as tax-deductible had been reduced to a maximum of $125 per month last year, well below the $240 that car commuters could claim monthly to offset parking costs.

With transit and parking benefits again equal, there will be one less pernicious financial incentive to drive to work alone, as David Alpert at Greater Greater Washington noted:

In approving this extension, [Congress was] able to give many American workers a tax cut along with helping our cities function more effectively and ending one small example of the many ways government “picks winners and losers” among transportation modes.

The equalized tax incentive for transit was extended only though the end of the year, though, so electeds will again have to act to put transit on equal footing with driving.

Politico said the provision is expected to provide up to $190 million a year in incentives for transit riders. Good to see some smart policy came out of that messy, messy budget ordeal, which will continue to play out over the next few months, with plenty of implications for how Americans get around.

First Rep. Tim Johnson of Illinois announced his retirement. Then Ohio’s Rep. Steve LaTourette said he couldn’t take the petty gridlock anymore and followed suit.

They belonged to a disappearing class: moderate Republicans in the House of Representatives. And they were both known for recognizing the value of investments in transit, biking, and walking.

Johnson, a member of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, split with his party in supporting dedicated bike/ped funding and funding flexibility for transit agencies. And LaTourette, who left T&I to be vice-chair on the Transportation and HUD Appropriations Subcommittee, was a loud voice against the GOP plan to eliminate federal transit funding.

They’ll be missed for many reasons, but chief among them is this: In a Republican-controlled body, legislation needs at least one Republican co-sponsor to go anywhere. Any bill that benefits transit, biking, or walking can usually count on some Democratic support, but if it’s not at least nominally bipartisan, it will be essentially dead on arrival. These two lawmakers were often brave enough to reach across the aisle and co-sponsor those bills.

Who will do that in the next Congress? Streetsblog set out to identify the moderate Republicans in the House who might forge some solid, bipartisan transportation legislation, or at least keep bad ideas from getting too much momentum. After all, it was Republicans who helped torpedo the worst parts of the House transportation bill this year. These representatives could still make an impact in a chamber where the leadership remains hostile to transportation reform.

Photo: Tom Petri poses with the Wisconsin Bike Federation's Hero Award. Photo: Wendy Soucie/Lodi Valley News

Tom Petri. The T&I member from Oshkosh, Wisconsin, is one of the most outspoken bicycling supporters in the House from either party. He co-chairs Earl Blumenauer’s Congressional Bike Caucus. I once heard him tell a group of bike advocates, “We are engaged in a bipartisan war against couch potatoes here in the United States.” If that war really is bipartisan, it’s mostly because of Tom Petri.

Petri introduced an amendment [PDF] to protect funding for bicycling and walking in the trainwreck that was the House transportation bill, H.R. 7. The amendment failed and Petri ended up being the only Republican to vote against H.R. 7 in committee (which was as far as it got), though he says he voted against it “primarily because it slashed highway funding for Wisconsin.” Petri also ensured that metro areas with small transit systems would continue to have the flexibility to allocate federal transit funds to operating costs.

On the other hand, Petri hasn’t taken a strong stance against Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s decision to send high-speed rail funds back to the federal government and, in fact, co-sponsored legislation that would have directed those returned funds toward deficit reduction, not other rail projects.

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This is the second of two posts examining Rep. Bill Shuster’s candidacy for the chairmanship of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. Yesterday, we took a look at Shuster’s positions on rail and his leadership style. Here we delve into his record on active transportation and the always-thorny topic of funding.

Legendary wheeler-dealer Bud Shuster got emotional when his son, Bill, took his seat in Congress. The younger Shuster now stands to take his father's old place at the helm of the House Transportation Committee. Photo: Gary Baranec/Altoona Mirror

While you might not agree with him that privatization is the best medicine for a struggling passenger rail program, by most accounts Rep. Bill Shuster (R-PA) has a genuine interest in the future of rail in America. It’s hard to make the case that he cares nearly as much about making streets safe for walking and biking.

Bike Paths Kill!

Indeed, perhaps the most alarming aspect of a Bill Shuster chairmanship is what it would mean for progress on street safety. Shuster is no friend of the movement to make American cities and towns more bikeable and walkable.

He fell in line with the Republican army against Transportation Enhancements, a program that mostly funded bike/ped projects under the previous transportation law. “Not everybody uses a bike path,” Shuster said at the time. He chafed at what others in his party called “set-asides,” saying, “That’s for [the] community to decide, not for our federal government to sit up here in Washington and decide.” He claimed that eliminating TE was “fundamental to the reforms that we are trying to include in this bill.”

Indeed, Shuster’s conviction that transportation is a federal responsibility ends at the interstate. “When you start getting into the inner city, the federal government has less of a role to play,” he told an audience at the Transportation Research Board’s annual conference in January, ignoring the fact that much interstate spending is used to provide capacity for local car trips on highways. “It’s up to the local community and state to decide [their transportation priorities].”

His position that federal transportation dollars should be “focused like a laser [yes, one of his favorite phrases] on the national highway system” alarmed the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy, which issued an action alert to Pennsylvania voters when Shuster was appointed to the conference committee negotiating the final surface transportation bill. RTC noted that during his official conference statement, Shuster “regrettably… call[ed] out ‘bike paths’ as wasteful, even dangerous.”

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Rep. Bill Shuster (R-PA) could be the next chair of the House Transportation Committee. Photo courtesy of the office of Rep. Bill Shuster

This is the first of two posts examining Rep. Bill Shuster’s candidacy for the chairmanship of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. We’ll post the second one, focused on his positions on bike/ped programs and funding issues, tomorrow.

Over the next few weeks, we could see a shake-up on the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee in the House. Current Chair John Mica (R-FL) has been the top Republican on the committee for six years, and according to GOP rules, that’s the limit. While Mica is asking leadership for a little wiggle room, his deputy is making the case for his own candidacy. Rep. Bill Shuster (R-PA) announced late last week that he would seek the chairmanship.

If that name rings a bell, it may be because his father was a legend on Capitol Hill. Evoke Bud Shuster’s name in Washington and you’ll hear story after story of the deal-making he pulled off when he chaired the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure from 1995 to 2001. He brought home more bacon to his district in rural Pennsylvania than it could even handle, according to a profile that ran in the National Journal as his Congressional career came to an end.

Bill Shuster took over his father’s seat in Congress in 2001, and soon joined the committee his father presided over. Now he could take over his dad’s gavel, too, when the new Congress is seated in January.

Mica is meeting with Republican leaders this week to discuss the possibility of getting a waiver to the six-year rule. Rep. Paul Ryan is expected to receive such a waiver, so that he can go on serving at the helm of the Budget Committee. But does Ryan’s exception mean Mica will get one too? Unlikely. Last spring, rumors circulated that Republican leaders were fed up with Mica’s inability to pass a transportation bill and were looking to Shuster to step in. Those rumors were somewhat overblown, but may indicate that leaders aren’t looking for two more years of John Mica at the gavel of T&I.

Shuster, meanwhile, has excellent relationships with House GOP honchos. And as chair of the Subcommittee on Railroads, Pipelines, and Hazardous Materials, he put his own stamp on the reauthorization process. He, with Mica, inserted a highly contentious “red meat” provision (later dropped) to privatize Amtrak’s profitable Northeast Corridor service, and he supported the inclusion of automatic approval for the controversial Keystone XL pipeline.

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