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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:

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When the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee unanimously passed a two-year transportation reauthorization bill last month, it quickly became clear that bipartisan support was coming at a price. First, we learned that the Transportation Enhancements bike/ped programs would lose their dedicated funding. Now, we learn that Transportation Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act (TIFIA) loans will no longer hold applicants to as high an environmental standard — or any standard, really.

California's Highway 91 applied for a TIFIA loan. Will the T in TIFIA stand for "toll road?" Photo: Greater Riverside Chamber

TIFIA is a popular program, receiving $14 billion in loan requests despite only being able to loan about $1 billion in total this year. And under current law, the extent to which the project “helps maintain or protect the environment” makes up 20 percent of a project’s evaluation. In the EPW bill, the program is expanded by a factor of nine, but most evaluation criteria — including environmental protection — are omitted.

As Matt Sledge wrote in the Huffington Post:

Phineas Baxandall, a senior analyst at U.S. PIRG, said he thinks [EPW Chair Senator Barbara] Boxer may have cut a bad deal. He argues that doing away with TIFIA’s selection criteria means the U.S. Department of Transportation will be forced to give money to any transportation project that meets bare-bones financial eligibility requirements [...] Toll roads, backed by private investors looking to make a buck off of “public-private partnerships,” will be first in line, he argued, since they have plans that are “just ready to go off the shelf.” [...]

Los Angeles hopes it will get some of that TIFIA money. Not so fast, Baxandall said. “Places like Atlanta and L.A. are hoping that the new bounty of TIFIA will allow them to finance public transit expansions, but they are likely to find the money already claimed by private toll road projects in places like Florida and Texas.”

It’s hard not to see this as a huge step backwards, despite the funding increase. It wasn’t long ago that transit advocates were celebrating an end to the Bush-era’s “cost-effectiveness-above-all-else” rule in the Federal Transit Authority’s New Starts program. Now, Baxandall says, “at a time when the nation’s transportation system is starved for funds and there is a consensus that dollars need to be spent more wisely, it is outrageous that the one program that would be massively increased would no longer try to deliver the best bang for each buck.”

The good(-ish) news is that there’s still time to make changes to the bill. The Senate Banking Committee still has to work on a transit portion, the Senate Finance Committee still has to figure out how to come up with another $12 billion, the whole Senate still has to debate it all, and the House still has to do… anything.

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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The EPW Committee passed the highway portion of the transportation bill last month. The Banking Committee will tackle transit on Friday. And today, transportation reformers applauded as the Commerce Committee passed its bill dealing with the rail and safety component, including the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Think complete streets policies are just for urban areas? The complete streets movement's new hero is Sen. Mark Begich -- of Alaska. Photo courtesy of Sen. Begich's office.

Deron Lovaas of NRDC said in his blog post about the bill that certain improvements to the legislation made it a standard-bearer for how transportation bills should be written:

Senators Lautenberg, Cantwell and Begich played key roles in improving the title by including a version of the FREIGHT (an acronym sparing us the mouthful of “Focusing Resources, Economic Investment, and Guidance to Help Transportation”) Act as well as a “complete streets” policy to accommodate bicyclists and pedestrians. This means that the title now has actual performance objectives, allows for funding to be used for rail as well as highway investments to improve goods movement, and that there would be an office at DOT tasked with implementing an actual national plan for freight investments.

Jesse Prentice-Dunn of the Sierra Club adds that the freight provisions “treat our movement of freight as a multi-modal system, not just a web of highways.”

The street safety (or “complete streets”) amendment [PDF] introduced into the Commerce bill by Sen. Mark Begich (D-AK) deserves attention for its special focus on non-motorized modes. The amendment says the Secretary of Transportation “shall establish standards to ensure that the design of Federal surface transportation projects provides for the safe and adequate accommodation, in all phases of project planning, development, and operation, of all users of the transportation network, including motorized and non-motorized users.”

States with their own complete streets policies would get a waiver from the federal policy, as long as their policies are in compliance.

A federal law — as opposed to individual city or state ordinances — is important because “streets don’t end at the borders of their jurisdictions,” according to Barbara McCann, director of the National Complete Streets Coalition. “We’ve had many jurisdictions that have complete streets policies say that they need and want that consistency.”

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Congress has already delayed their holiday recess by a week, and members are hoping another delay won’t be necessary. Among the yet-unfinished business: an extension of the payroll tax cut. House Speaker John Boehner plans to hold a vote today on his bill, which marries an extension of the payroll tax cut to the controversial Keystone XL pipeline. While expected to sail through the House, such a partisan bill is unlikely to pass the Senate. Enter Senators Claire McCaskill (D-MO) and Susan Collins (R-ME).

Senators Collins, left, and McCaskill at their press conference. Image: STLtoday

Last week, McCaskill and Collins introduced the ambitiously-named Bipartisan Jobs Creation Act. The bill begins with the payroll tax cut and wraps it in additional tax cuts, deregulation measures, and a $35.8 billion infrastructure investment program. The whole thing would be paid for by eliminating some subsidies for oil companies and by instituting a surtax on millionaires’ income—though exceptions will be made for small business owner-operator “job creators.”

The two senators are generally touting this bill as a tax relief bill first, and a pay-your-fair-share bill second—infrastructure gets third-stringed at best, but the provisions are still worth looking into.

The McCaskill-Collins infrastructure plan [PDF] includes $10 billion to capitalize state infrastructure banks and $25 billion for highways and bridges—just highways and bridges. Out of $25 billion—about half an average year’s transportation spending by the federal government—not a dime goes to transit.

By promoting state infrastructure banks, McCaskill and Collins are throwing their weight behind the Republican vision for infrastructure spending and against President Obama’s. The President and a number of other prominent figures have advocated to no avail for the creation of a National Infrastructure Bank, and Politico reports that they’ll try again next year—to the familiar tune of $10 billion. Meanwhile, House Transportation Committee Chair John Mica has included support for state infrastructure banks—not a national one—in his reauthorization bill. The senators opted for state I-banks in this case because they are an existing program that could be expanded, while “there is no consensus yet on how to address a National Infrastructure Bank,” according to Senator McCaskill’s press secretary, John LaBombard.

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These numbers, from the Office of Management and Budget, indicate that the Highway Account of the Highway Trust fund is in better fiscal shape than previously thought. So why are senators still chasing after $12 billion? Source: OMB

Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) and his Finance Committee have been looking high and low for a $12 billion patch to fund the transportation reauthorization bill that passed the Senate EPW Committee a few weeks ago. According to Politico’s transportation reporters, the top Republican on the Finance Committee, Sen. Orrin Hatch, has already rejected several of Baucus’s ideas.

But the question is not only, “How will we get the money?” It’s also, “How much money do we need?” The dollar amount the Senate is seeking could lavish more money than necessary on roads while leaving transit out in the cold.

The EPW Committee wants to hold transportation spending at current levels (plus inflation), which they estimate at $109 billion over two years. Receipts into the Highway Trust Fund (from gas taxes and other vehicle fees) aren’t expected to be sufficient to pay that bill. The Congressional Budget Office told the committee that the HTF is $12 billion short of the amount needed to fully fund the bill. That amount is destined just for highways, based on projections that the Mass Transit Account will be solvent through the end of 2013 – in fact, ending that year with a $1.5 billion balance.

But last month, the two top members of the Senate Banking Committee, which has jurisdiction over transit, asked FTA Administrator Peter Rogoff for confirmation of those numbers [PDF]. Rogoff replied that he, in fact, found another set of numbers to be more accurate [PDF].

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Though the House Republicans are stealing the show these days with their endeavor to tie infrastructure funding to oil drilling, let’s not forget there’s a serious, bipartisan transportation reauthorization bill out there that actually has a chance of passage: the Senate’s MAP-21. On its path toward a full Senate vote, that two-year bill is paused at its latest checkpoint: the Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee. The committee is now busy tackling the transit title of the “MAP-21” legislation, following unanimous approval of the “highway” portion two weeks ago by the EPW Committee. (Quick reminder: the funding in the highway title can be spent on many things that are not highways, like transit systems and bike lanes.)

Federal funding for new buses is nice, but it's even better if the new bill allows some money to be used to pay people to drive those buses. Photo: PBA

With a markup anticipated in early December, the Banking Committee is keeping mum on what changes may be in store for transit, but Streetsblog has managed to glean a few indicators.

One basic funding detail that seems already locked down is that the longstanding 80/20 division between highway and transit funds will be maintained. The EPW highway bill lays out $109 billion in total spending over two years, with $85 billion allotted toward highways – meaning transit should expect to see most of the remaining $24 billion, minus whatever is shaved off to fund programs that make motor vehicles safer for passengers.

Some transit and environmental advocates had been hoping that a reauthorization bill would finally give transit a larger slice of the pie, especially after President Obama announced in February that he’d like to see something closer to a 74/26 split.

“In an ideal world, yes – the share should be increased to a quarter or a third if not more,” said Deron Lovaas, federal transportation policy director for NRDC. But right now, he said, “it’s pretty clear that’s not going to be the case.”

Phineas Baxandall of U.S. PIRG views this as a “disappointment,” noting that current transit funding is “inadequate” and lamenting that the EPW “has not made room for greater transit investment.”

“America needs to invest in more and better public transportation to meet the rising demand for ridership and reduce our nation’s dependence on oil,” Baxandall said.

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In Indiana, the state DOT wants to build a 142-mile extension of Interstate 69, but the Bloomington metropolitan planning organization won’t allow it – the group had written the road out of its three-year transportation plan and members are standing firm, refusing to write it back in. The MPO in Charlottesville, Virginia, similarly, is fighting the construction of a $245 million, six-mile bypass the state is planning to build to accommodate freight traffic.

The proposed I-69 route through Indiana. Since it represents just 92,000 people, the Bloomington MPO fighting the highway segment through their region could face elimination under the Senate bill.

These local MPOs often (though not always) see the importance of things like urban transit and active transportation where states too often focus on big road-building projects. MPOs can provide a buffer between communities and state transportation bureaucracies, re-orienting priorities back to the local level.

There are 384 MPOs in the country. Two-thirds of them represent communities of less than 200,000 people. And there’s an existential threat to all of those MPOs in the new Senate transportation bill.

The bill states that the “continuing designation” of an MPO representing an urbanized area of under 200,000 people “shall be terminated” unless it meets “the minimum requirements established by the regulation,” to be determined by the Secretary of Transportation. Those “minimum requirements” have not yet been spelled out, and the Association of Metropolitan Planning Organizations (AMPO) is nervous about such vague wording.

AMPO Director Delania Hardy said that right now, no one knows what it means, exactly, to demonstrate “technical capacity,” as required in the Senate draft. “It’s a very fuzzy term that doesn’t have a lot of explanation in their text,” she said. She went on:

If we wound up with somebody who’s a pretty hardcore “let’s cut-cut-cut,” they could put together a stack of things that are almost impossible for the sake of killing off these MPOs. It could go that way.

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Last Friday, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee released its draft transportation reauthorization bill. With the GOP-controlled House contemplating a national transportation policy designed for maximum fossil fuel consumption, the best opportunities for reform reside in the Senate.

Senate EPW Chair Barbara Boxer said this summer that bike-ped programs would be preserved in the transportation bill, but they have been severely weakened.

While the 600-page draft that came out of Senator Barbara Boxer’s committee includes some key reforms and increases funding for the TIFIA loan program, it also eviscerates successful and popular programs to make biking and walking safer.

Called “Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century” (MAP-21), the bill would streamline the existing eco-system of federal transportation programs. In addition, earmarks — set-asides for Congress members’ pet projects that have included famously wasteful items like the Bridge to Nowhere — would be eliminated once and for all.

But among the casualties are three key bike-ped programs: Transportation Enhancements, Safe Routes to School, and Recreational Trails. Those programs would be consolidated and listed as “eligible uses” under an $833 million subset of the Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality Program (CMAQ). That would represent a sharp drop from the $1.15 billion devoted to those programs in 2010. That year, Transportation Enhancements was funded at $878 million, Safe Routes to School at $183 million, and Recreational Trails as $85 million.

States could also divert their share of the $833 million to projects that add traffic lanes or don’t involve bike and pedestrian infrastructure at all. The bike-ped sub-category of CMAQ spending would be broadened to allow new road construction as an eligible use if the project “enhances connectivity and includes public transportation, pedestrian walkways or bicycle infrastructure.” Advocates are also concerned about a provision of the bill that allows states to opt out of using federal bike-ped funds altogether. The bill enables states that don’t use their bike-ped funding to spend it on other CMAQ projects instead.

The weakening of bike-ped programs is especially incongruous given the way Transportation Enhancements have withstood repeated GOP attacks this session. But EPW Chair Boxer has always made it a point to garner GOP support for this bill, and her counterpart on the committee, Oklahoma Republican James Inhofe, has been equally steadfast in opposing dedicated bike and pedestrian funding. Boxer had reassured advocates this summer that bike-ped programs would remain in the bill, but it seems they have been neutered in negotiations with Inhofe.

Meanwhile, MAP-21 does include some strong reform language in other areas. Earmarks would be eliminated by law — a tougher ban than the anti-earmark rule that currently exists. The bill also includes some measures intended to reduce bureaucratic hurdles and speed project delivery.

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Two competing versions of a transportation-related job creation bill went down yesterday in the Senate. The first, the Rebuild America Jobs Act (S.1769), was a Democratic proposal, modeled on President Obama’s job creation bill, to invest $50 billion for infrastructure and another $10 billion as seed money to create a new national infrastructure bank.

Bills to put unemployed construction workers back on the job keep going down in Congress.

Given Republican opposition to what they consider a repeat of a failed stimulus — and to an infrastructure bank they say is unnecessary at best and politicized at worst — the failure of the bill is no surprise. The bill garnered a slim majority — 51-49 — but not enough to overcome the threat of a GOP filibuster.

Meanwhile, the Republican proposal would have pushed back many health, safety, and environmental regulations that corporations consider onerous. Defeated in a 47-53 vote, the bill also would have extended SAFETEA-LU for two more years — nearly matching the length and spending levels in the bipartisan EPW proposal — without funding the shortfall such spending would cause to the Highway Trust Fund. The bill wouldn’t have been a “clean” extension of current law, though, since it eliminated the “set-aside” for bike and pedestrian infrastructure, making it the fourth attempt in less than two months by Senate Republicans to eliminate or weaken TE — and the fourth failure.